I’ve been buying Kleenex Anti-Viral tissues for my classroom lately. I have no data on whether they make a difference, but given how well diseases travel through schools, I figured it couldn’t hurt. For the record, the active ingredients in Kleenex Anti-Viral tissues are citric acid and sodium lauryl sulfate.
Today, one of my students got out one of the tissues and told a classmate, “I’ve heard that these taste like lemon.” Continue reading
Like many teachers, I live for those moments when I can watch a light bulb go on in one of my students’ heads. When it happens, even once, it can make my entire day.
My organic chemistry class has been discussing random esoteric organic chem factoids.
One of my students turned in a science fair project that turned out to be his sister’s project from last year. I find it amazing that he thought he could get away with it. His sister’s project won second prize in last year’s fair, so a lot of teachers remember it. I was one of the coordinators this year, so I had more reason than most teachers to consult last year’s list frequently. I also happen to have a graded copy of his sister’s report from last year, which was in a folder I inherited from last year’s science fair coordinator, of examples of well-written reports. “His” report was an identical copy of hers, with a replacement hand-drawn cover page. He didn’t even bother to fix the typos.
This will result in his failing two classes this quarter. The science project is 25% of his grade for third quarter. Because he is taking two honors-level science classes, the science fair counts as 25% of his grade in both classes. He’s not a good enough student to be able to pass either one after losing 25% off the top.
Some of the clues he left:
I’m going to break the news to him on Monday, after which I need to call his parents. In the words of a 1990s-era Gelman Sciences cartoon, “The E. coli is going to impact the air recirculator.”
My school holds its science fair every year in March. Two of the kids in my organic chem class are doing a study on the effects of zinc on earthworms. (The motivation for the project is that one of the kids recently lost her grandmother to Alzheimer’s disease. Zinc is one of the suspected factors for patients with the disease. They chose worms, at the suggestion of the department head/anatomy & physiology teacher because worms are easy to study, eat a lot (their entire body weight in a day), and have a (rudimentary) central nervous system.)
When the worms arrived, one of the students ran off to the department head’s office to get them and brought the box back to class. As we opened the box to look, most of the kids were fascinated by the worms and gathered around to look. Only four kids in the class were seriously grossed-out by the worms, two of whom happen to be the kids doing the project!
I gave my honors chemistry II students a lab practicum for their mid-term exam on Friday. I divided them into of three students per group (assigned randomly) and gave the groups two problems to solve and write up (in a format similar to the one I require for lab notebooks) during the 90-minute exam.
I gave my honors chemistry 2 students a lab practicum for their mid-term exam yesterday. I assigned them in groups of three and gave them two problems to solve and write up (in a format similar to the one I require for lab notebooks) during the 90-minute exam:
As has been the case for their other experiments during the year, they had to figure out the procedure on their own, perform the experiment, record the data, and perform the calculations.
Last year I gave a similar practicum exam to my CP1 (the level below honors) chem 2 students, except that it was a 2-hour exam and they had to perform three experiments. This time around, I was struck by a major difference: the honors kids spent a lot more time thinking their experiments through before starting. The CP1 kids had no trouble completing three experiments in two hours, but the honors kids, even with an additional five minutes per experiment, ran out of time.
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but most high school kids have never been taught any general-purpose techniques for problem-solving. Those of you who have been reading my journal might recall that I’ve been making an effort to give my classes challenging problems and give them just enough help to keep them from getting stuck, such as the smoke detector problem I gave a few months back.
The current topic (colligative properties) is a hodge-podge of equations that are almost the same as each other, but not quite. Rather than make a flowchart, which the kids would become dependent on, I’ve been trying to teach them the kind of analytical thinking that will allow them to set up these and other problems themselves. Today, I think (hope?) I’ve made a quantum leap in figuring out how to do this.
I’ve made the suggestion many times that it’s easiest to start from what the question is asking for and work backwards to what you’re given, but this instruction doesn’t seem to mean anything to most of them. Today, I tried doing each word problems by first coming up with a written strategy. Once the strategy was complete, we’d follow it, which would lead us right to the answer. The strategies came out something like this:
We’re looking for foo
We can get foo from the formula foo = bar x baz .
We know bar but not baz.We’re now looking for baz.
We can get baz from the formula baz = quux x blech
We know quux but not blech.We’re now looking for blech
We can get blech from the formula blech = bling x blang x blung.
We know bling, blang, and blung, so we’re ready to go!
For each problem, once we had the strategy written down, we used it as road map, starting from the bottom and working our way back to the top, checking off the steps as we completed them. After working a couple of problems this way, a bunch of the kids seemed to understand the process a lot better. I’ll still have to see how well they can do it by themselves, but the initial attempt seems to have come closer than anything else I’ve tried.
I had a frustrating organic chem class on Wednesday. The class appeared not to understand or be able to reproduce some of the reactions that we had studied in detail in recent classes. This is normal and expected behavior for many high school classes, but not for an honors class comprised mainly of kids who are in the top 20 in their class (of over 500).
As it turns out, it wasn’t the whole class, but just a couple of vocal individuals. One of the other students in the class sought me out after school and apologized for her classmates’ behavior. This student pointed out that she and the other students who had been keeping up with the assignments and classwork were on top of the material, and that she was frustrated that a few kids who weren’t keeping up appeared to be blaming me instead of taking responsibility for their own understanding.
This was completely unprompted, and was in fact the first time I had received any feedback at all from this particular student. It also happened to be just what I needed to hear.
Today was my first formal observation of the year. (For the vast majority of you out there who aren’t schoolteachers, non-tenured teachers typically get formally observed three times a year. Write-ups of those observations become part of the teacher’s permanent file and are part of the black box process that goes into deciding whether the teacher will be rehired.)
There were a couple of hiccoughs in the process with this observation. The dean who did the observation (who is extremely conscientious), had to reschedule twice. Both times were school emergencies, such that he wasn’t even able to tell me that he wasn’t coming. Third time’s the charm, I guess.
He observed my AP chem class. I’ve got a really strong rappor with these kids. So as a “favor” to me, they were really good during the observation. They didn’t do any of the things that usually go on in the delightful chaos that usually reigns during the class. They didn’t talk in class. They didn’t tease each other, or me. They didn’t engage in playful banter. They didn’t shout out answers, right and wrong. They didn’t interrupt me when they didn’t understand something. They didn’t interrupt me when they did understand something. They didn’t argue with each other when they had different opinions about what the right answer should have been. They sat in their seats and dutifully wrote everything down, including the jokes. (Unfortunately, I was trying to hold a discussion-based class, not a lecture.)
It was a double-period class, with lunch between the two periods, and the observation lasted only for the first of the two periods. When the kids got back from lunch, I asked them to take out a scrap of paper. On one side, I asked them to write down all the things they thought a “good” class ought to do when their teacher was being observed. On the other, I asked them to write the things that make the class fun for them. I then asked them to tear the paper so that each list was on a separate piece of paper. Then I had them tear the “good class” list to smitherenes, after which I explained why I was exasperated. Their response? “But we did it for you!”
*sigh*
And I so badly wanted to show them off.
I was reading the book Writing New England: an Anthology from the Puritans to the Present ed. Andrew Delbanco, pub. Harvard University Press, and ran across an excerpt from The Headmaster, by John McPhee. The essay describes Dr. Frank Boyden, who was headmaster at the Deerfield School (a private boys’ school) from 1902-1968.
