In my experience, kids want to be in classes that move at their pace, including the low-level kids. Continue reading
At the beginning of the year, I choose a number between 0 and 1000 to two decimal places and write it on a piece of paper. I offer 100% on the first test to any student in the room who correctly guesses the number. Of course no one has ever yet guessed correctly, and the students always grumble about it being practically impossible. I respond that when I give two versions of a test, if someone claims that he “guessed randomly and happened to pick the number that was the answer to the other version”, this is equally unlikely, and will result in a zero on the test.
As we approach the end of the school year, I find myself getting more and more frustrated about my students’ struggles with high-level thinking. Every year, it seems like they’re less and less able to figure out how to solve problems that are different from the ones they’ve seen before. Each year, I lose a little more ground.
In a post on the ChemEd-L email discussion list, Harry Pence wrote:
There is a common assumption that if students can do the calculations, they understand what the calculations mean. I didn’t always find this to be true.
This is exactly my problem with the way schools are responding to the assessment requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2000. The tacit assumption is that if the student can reliably get the correct answer, then the student has a deep understanding of the concepts involved.
I always make my students a promise: that I’ll never give them “busy work”—that I’ll only give as much homework as I think it takes to master a particular skill. Of course, I point out that this means that any question they don’t attempt risks that they won’t master the relevant skill.
With that promise in mind, I do give summer homework, but it’s not just a review of Chem I. My goal for summer work is to start the process of getting them to think on a higher level.
There’s a Murphy’s Law-style saying that goes, “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.” When it comes to teaching a high school lab science course, I would say that the opposite is true: “There’s always time to do it right, but there’s never time to do it over.” If you don’t succeed the first time, the teacher tells you what was supposed to happen and you move on to the next topic. (To be fair, the Mass. frameworks have so much that we have to cover that this approach is pretty much necessary in first-year chem classes.)
Some day, one of my students will write a book entitled, Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Math I learned in Chemistry Class.
Somehow, in The Emperor’s New Frameworks the post MCAS world, being able to read a graph and extract data from it is important enough to still be taught, but being able to create a graph by hand to represent your own data is not.
One of my students from last year came in this afternoon to ask a couple of questions about topics she was a little confused about from her freshman general chemistry class at BU. After we talked about her questions, we talked about college in general and how she was doing. Continue reading
Last night in my adolescent psychology class, one of the other teachers was describing how he prepared his students for an upcoming test. His review covered two full class days, and it basically amounted to him giving his students all of the test questions beforehand. The only uncertainty was that he gave them four essay questions to study, with the intention of choosing two by drawing cards from a deck on test day.
This morning, while I was waiting for the copy machine, one of the other teachers was copying a review assignment for a test. She proudly told me, “What they don’t realize is that these questions are going to be the actual test questions.”
Einstein once said Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.
