“So That’s What I’ve Been Missing All This Time!”

Posted on November 11, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

I heard these words from two students today in AP chem class. Neither time had anything to do with chemistry, though.

One girl, “Steph,” had left her glasses on her desk. Another girl, “Jen,” put them on just as “Alexis” walked up. Jen pretended that the glasses were hers; she made up a story about how she normally wears contacts, but she didn’t have time to cope with them this morning so she had to wear her glasses. Alexis was completely convinced by the act and eventually went back to her seat to continue with the problem set that the class was working on. Meanwhile, Jen was looking around while wearing Steph’s glasses, and realized that she could suddenly see everything a lot more clearly. “Oh wow. Does everybody see like this? I’ve been missing so much detail all my life and I never knew it.”

When Jen’s excitement died down, people passed Steph’s glasses around and other people tried them on. Eventually, “Dave” tried them on and the whole process repeated itself. “Oh wow. Does everybody see like this? I’ve been missing so much detail all my life and I never knew it.”

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Boys Will Be Boys

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

This morning I won a footrace through the halls of my school.

I was walking down the halls before first period, and a group of boys was standing to one side of the main second-floor corridor, and one of them appeared to throw a punch at another one. As I watched the interaction, it was quickly apparent that the boys were engaging in friendly “play-fighting”, much to my relief.

I walked up to give them my “be nice–teachers often can’t tell the difference” spiel, and as I told the group to wait (and not disperse) so I could talk to them, one of the kids bolted up the stairs. I followed.

He ran at a sprint up to the third floor, down a crowded hallway, around a corner, down another crowded hallway, and around another corner, with me in hot pursuit, shouting repeatedly, “You, in the blue shirt. Stop!” He rounded another corner, taking off the blue sweatshirt as he ran. (He had a white T-shirt underneath.) Eventually, squeezing through the crowds slowed him down enough for me to catch him.

It was like a game of tag. As soon as I tagged him, he stopped, turned to me, and said, “You got me.” That was it. We had a race. I won, and he lost. Game over.

Several of my students saw me chasing this kid through the halls and asked me about it later, during class. When I told the story, it made perfect sense to the boys, but the girls were baffled. I explained: it’s the same mentality as a fight. When teenage boys fight, there are unwritten rules. It’s a contest. As soon as somebody shows up to break up the fight, they stop. Game over. There’s a winner and a loser, and as often as not, as soon as the fight is declared over, the two boys can be friends with each other. It’s not at all like a teenage girl fight, which is a fight to the bitter end. When a teacher steps in to break up a girl fight, as often as not, the girls both reach around the teacher to keep getting at each other, and it usually takes at least two teachers to keep them apart.

I also taught some chemistry today, but I’ll bet the kids don’t remember it.

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“What’s My Favorite Part Of Teaching?”

Posted on October 17, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

This is a cross-posting of something I said in a forum on RateMyTeachers.com.

The question was:

heyy my name is Talia and I’m 15, I attend St.marys secondary. A question that alot of my friends asked is why would teachers want to get up so early just to teach? So if you are a teacher please tell us whats you’re favorite part of teaching and why, oh and besides the money. 😀

Here’s my reply, which generated quite a few positive comments:

Obligatory money comment: I took a more than 50% pay cut to become a teacher. I’ve never even thought of going back.

Why do I teach? I love working with teenagers. I love their idealism. I love their attitude. I love the way they demand that I make their time in my class worthwhile, even if they’re only there because it’s a required class. I love the genuine excitement when they master a new concept or skill. I love it when we discuss something that most of the adult population would find too difficult to even begin to contemplate and the kids say “Wow, that’s really simple.” I love their expectation that everything they learn is supposed to somehow help them make the world better once they’re out of school. I love watching (and helping) them learn social skills to use with their peers, knowing that they are practicing the skills that will improve their lives for years to come. I love the kids who appreciate what I do, because they motivate me to keep doing it. I love the kids who only appreciate what I do when I do it well, because they help me to see the difference between what’s good and what’s crap. I love the kids who almost never appreciate anything I do, because on those rare occasions when they appreciate something, I know it’s really outstanding. I love the kids who face incredible challenges in their lives and still manage to come to school, come to class, and get any work done at all. I especially love it when they let me see into a little piece of their lives and give me an opportunity to help them overcome some of those challenges. I love knowing that anything I do may make a difference that I may never be aware of in someone’s life.

And besides that, I’m not even remotely a morning person. Anything that can make me look forward to getting up at 5:00am must be worthwhile, right? 😉

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Turning Up the Speed on the Treadmill

Posted on October 14, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

When I was at MIT, I used the metaphor of a treadmill to describe the progression of a semester. Someone else was controlling the speed of the treadmill. Each week, the person would turn the speed up a little faster. By the end of the semester, it was all I could do to keep myself on the treadmill and not go flying across the room and crash into the wall.

There are a lot of ways, to be sure, in which a public high school just can’t compare to an institution like MIT. However, in some measure, I’m now the person in control of the treadmills that my students are on. I get to decide how fast I want them to be going by the end of the year, and how much to increment the speed each week in hopes of getting them there.

On Monday, each of my classes will do another experiment of their own design, slightly more complex than the previous one. This should give me a pretty good indication of how well I’m gauging the treadmill speed. For this one, I’m also requiring a formal write-up. Last year and the year before, my students didn’t quite get where I wanted them to with the formal reports, so even though I’ve got more high-caliber students this year, I’m going to split the report into more manageable chunks to see if that makes it easier for them to do a really good job on each chunk.

In other notes, I think I’ve successfully unruffled the feathers of one of my students’ parents. Some teachers probably think I’m completely weird for this, but I really enjoy the process of turning angry or upset parents into allies.

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One of the Reasons I Love My Department Head

Posted on October 13, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

I’ve started letting my students bring Munchkins and other snacks on Fridays. I provide fresh-roasted coffee (and hot chocolate for the non-coffee-drinkers). We call it “chem coffeehouse”. We still do classwork, but in a much more informal setting. The kids love it. (These are all AP and honors students, so they’re pretty good about not making a mess.)

I mentioned this to my department head. (Note that food & drink other than bottled water are prohibited by school rules.) She likes the idea. Her comment: the kids are going to have to get used to studying & learning in more informal settings in college. It’s good to start getting them used to the idea in high school. Otherwise, they get so much freedom all at once that some of them have trouble dealing with it and end up doing very badly their freshman year. However, she did advise me to do what I can to keep the rest of the administration from noticing to the point where they’d have to ask me to stop.

This is one of the many reasons I like working for her.

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“Mr. Bigler, What Are We Going to Learn Today?”

Posted on September 30, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

This is how my day started. Not with the more typical student question of “are we going to do anything,” but with a question that carried with it the tacit assumption that of course we would be learning something, and the only question was what it would be. My response? “Thank you for that! It’s only 7:30am and already you’ve made my day!” Followed by a description of my plan for the day.

Whenever I can, I teach by discussion. I throw ideas out. We talk about them. I explain any necessary concepts, and we discuss the implications. I try to start with “what if…?” and I try to ask the questions that I don’t have answers for. A couple of days ago, we found the theoretical endpoint of the periodic table, quite by accident. We were talking about the fundamental forces (the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity), and I pulled up some information on the web that gave relative strengths of the four. The strong force was arbitrarily set to unity, which resulted a value of about 1/137 for the electromagnetic force. Assuming that the 1/137 is for something that has the charge of a proton or electron, that means that when the number of protons reaches 137, the repulsive force between the positive charges should equal the nuclear force that holds the nucleus together. If this is true, it would mean that it’s impossible to have a nucleus that contains more than 137 protons.

So what did we learn today? We started with the relative amounts of energy released by an atomic bomb vs. TNT, which prompted a discussion of the cold war and what it was like to live in an era when we all believed the end of the world would already have happened by now. From there, we gradually worked our way to the design of a nuclear power plant. Along the way, we covered how a generator works and an A.D.D. moment (my term for a tangent) about the mechanisms of how carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide cause suffocation.

Damn, this is fun!

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Teaching Problem-Solving in Baby Steps

Posted on September 27, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

I’m working on getting my students used to problem-solving. They’re making progress. It’s baby steps right now, but every little step gets us a little closer. There’s a part of me that wants to ask, “How can you not know how to do this?” but of course the answer is “Because you haven’t taught me to do it, and neither has anybody else.”

Today’s problem was simple. Given a Geiger counter, a ruler, and the knowledge that smoke detectors contain Americium-241, which has a half-life of 432 years, determine the approximate amount of Am-241 in a smoke detector.

It took some discussion of using the half-life in a way they’re not used to, some discussion about flux, and a little help with the dimensional analysis, but they were all eventually able to solve the problem.

Of course the eventual goal is for the kids to be able to set the problem up without help, but the fact that we’re even heading in that direction at all is reason enough to be happy.

It did make their brains hurt a little, but all of the groups eventually got reasonable answers. We calculated about a nanogram, given the assumptions that the detector was detecting all of the particles, that the only emissions the detector was seeing were the alpha-emissions from the decaying americium (which it turns out may not be that great of an assumption), and some very rough order-of-magnitude estimates of the surface area of the detector and the distance between the detector and the source.

Now all I need to do is to gradually wean them from having someone show them how to set up the problems.

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A First Attempt at Inquiry-Based Labs

Posted on September 20, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

We’re now into the third week of school, and the kids are beginning to impress me.

The biggest changes I’ve made since last year are to the way I’m doing lab experiments. During my first two years of teaching, I did what most other teachers do–give the kids a detailed procedure for a lab, have them copy the procedure into their lab notebooks, have them do the experiment from their lab notebooks as much as possible, and scratch my head and wonder why they don’t understand the first thing about what the lab is all about, even after they’ve written the whole thing out in painstaking detail.

With a little help from the chemistrycoach.com website, it dawned on me. I was doing all of their thinking for them. Copying a word-for-word procedure is one of those repetitive tasks like knitting or crocheting–it’s a task that you can put on autopilot to free your mind to wander. The kids were copying the entire procedure without paying attention to any of it. Once they were in the lab, they were following a detailed word-for-word procedure that was guaranteed to work. This didn’t encourage them to think about anything. It allowed them to get lost in the sensory experience of using chemicals and lab equipment, and they never had to even notice the bigger picture, let alone understand it.

I’ve made two changes this year. First of all, I’m not giving them detailed procedures. I’m giving them the objective, and enough info about the techniques involved to enable them to piece together the experiment for themselves. They need to figure out the specifics of what to do and how to do it.

Second, no more writing out detailed procedures beforehand. I’ve chosen a lab notebook format (and there are many to choose from) in which they write a “scheme”, but not a detailed procedure before they start doing the experiment. The scheme is basically an outline or flow chart that sketches out the big picture, with just enough detail to remind them of what they’re supposed to accomplish and more or less how to go about it. They take detailed notes on the procedure and results in the lab as they perform the experiment. Leaving the details until they’re actually performing the lab ensures that the procedural details in their notebooks end up matching what they actually did, just like they would do in a research lab or industry.

Based on the first experiments with each class, it’s working even better than I hoped it would. The kids are actually *thinking* about what they’re doing, before and during the experiment. When they hit an obstacle, I ask probing questions that make them think about the problem, but I don’t actually suggest a solution. As a result, they’ve come up with some creative ideas that have impressed me. Even the solutions they’ve come up with that didn’t work have shown that they understand the concepts involved, understand the problem, and are applying good problem-solving strategies.

What’s even better is that because the kids know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, they’re enjoying the labs on a level that they haven’t in their previous science classes. And better yet, they’re enjoying it for the very reasons I want them to enjoy it. This is why I became a science teacher.

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Teacher’s Favorite Sentence

Posted on September 13, 2005 by Mr. Bigler

I think the sentence I like hearing most from my students is “Wow, that’s really easy!”

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