I was talking with some of my colleagues yesterday about classroom management, and about a colleague of ours, a second-year teacher who is struggling a little with finding that magic balance.
To demonstrate the power of hydraulics, some of my students and I built a hovercraft out of plywood and a wet/dry vacuum cleaner. Continue reading
When I’m teaching, I live for teachable moments. Right now, I’m teaching my physics students about fluids—pressure and hydraulics, to be followed by buoyancy, gas laws, and Bernoulli’s Principle. However, today one of my students innocently asked, “Maybe you can explain something I’ve never understood. How can a boat float if it’s made of something denser than water?” So I rearranged the schedule on the spot.
Isaac Asimov once quipped, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it), but ‘gee, that’s funny …’ ” The phrase is exciting because it means the scientist noticed something and realized that it could be significant. When it doesn’t happen this way, the dialogue sounds more like, “Nope. That didn’t work either. Maybe I should try this… Nope, but a little closer. Now I’m going to try that… Not much different. Maybe I’ll try the other thing… Possibly better. Let me try it a few more times… Oh, what if I try something else?… Yes, I think that mostly worked…”
I’ve always wanted to build a bed of nails, especially since I started teaching physics. Now I’ve done it.
An “open book test” means students are allowed to use their books, and an “open notes” test means they’re allowed to use their notes. I’ve become fond of “open friend” quizzes. My students took one today. Continue reading
Today I did one of my favorite demos for my classes. The demo is convincing visual evidence that forming intermolecular bonds releases energy.
One of the reasons that the first few years of teaching are much harder than later years is because teachers basically start out with nothing. Ideas and lessons come from other experienced teachers, but teachers have to try the lessons and worksheets, see how they work, and then edit them a couple of times. After a couple of rounds of edits, the lessons are fairly robust, and most of the substantive changes have already happened.
During Christmas vacation, I was talking with my eleven-year-old daughter about school. She loves math (as do I). I asked her about her experience with word problems, knowing that most of my students struggle with them. She said that they weren’t too bad. Her Algebra 1 teacher assigns her class to both write and solve word problems on a fairly regular basis.
The idea of assigning students to write word problems was new to me, and it sounded like a promising idea. Continue reading
Last Friday, a colleague asked me to watch her homeroom for a few minutes. One of the girls in the homeroom was fixing her hair and fretting about a couple of hairs that didn’t want to behave. I commented that people don’t look that closely at other people, and that she was most likely the only person who was going to notice her hair on that level of detail.
She remained unconvinced, so I told her to look away and asked her to tell me which side my hair is parted on. She replied defensively, “I was looking at you, not your hair… oh… um… yeah.”
