Escalating and De-Escalating

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

One of the things I have the hardest time watching at school is when a teacher or administrator starts challenging a student over some infraction, and the student doesn’t immediately capitulate. Continue reading →

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Egg On My Head

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

Today two groups of students successfully dropped raw eggs onto my head from the roof of the school as I walked underneath.  Last week another group of students did the same thing. Continue reading →

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Students Taking Charge of Their Learning

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

One of the things I appreciate about this year’s students is the way they take charge of their own learning. Continue reading →

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Self Esteem

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

Most teenagers are fragile.  Their self-image is often built on a shaky foundation and altogether too often hinges on things their friends, parents, teachers, and other might say by chance. Continue reading →

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Happy Parents

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

Parents’ Night was last Thursday.  I had a long line for the whole evening–I seem to be quite a few students’ favorite teacher, and several of their parents wanted to meet me in person. Continue reading →

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Physics in 5 Seconds

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

Every year I introduce inquiry labs and lab write-ups by giving my students a lab to do at home.  They bring in the result and present it to the class and then they write it up in their lab notebooks.  In my chemistry classes, the lab was to bake cookies without a recipe.  Now that I’m teaching physics, the lab is to make a 5-second timer out of anything they can find as long as they don’t use electricity, a clock, or human power beyond what it takes to start the timer. Continue reading →

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“We’ve never had this problem before.”

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

That was my department head’s tongue-in-cheek comment to me on Friday morning when yet another student asked for her signature to switch into physics.  Some of the students had successfully switched in.  Some clearly did not have the math background and were denied.  One had marginal math grades, so I gave him an assignment that would show me whether or not he had the skills to be able to be successful in the class.  (He was able to do the assignment successfully so I allowed him into the class.)  But the idea that so many students would be asking to switch into physics was clearly not something she had ever anticipated.

Continue reading →

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Physics Day 6: Everything You Need to Pass the Final Exam

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

Once in a while I’ll come up with and use a teaching idea that I think is going to fail, but I’ll do it anyway because I think it will fail in a useful way.  This time I was wrong: it didn’t fail at all.  In fact, it turned out to be quite successful. Continue reading →

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Grading and Grading Systems

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

On 7/19/2011 3:22 AM, M. Horton wrote:

The idea behind this is that it’s not fair to give an “F” student who didn’t learn anything up to 50 points in the grade book. But the student who didn’t do the assignment at all (and also didn’t learn anything) gets 50 points less than that…a zero. Continue reading →

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Success Strategies in the Learning Center

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Mr. Bigler

I just gave my students a test on stoichiometry.  As I was grading them, I noticed that all of the students who had taken the test in the Learning Center had identical wrong answers to the free response questions.  One of the answers in particular had struck me as odd.

I described the situation to the learning specialist who had been with the students when they took the test.  She shrugged and said, “Yeah, none of us [learning specialists] knew how to do those problems, so we guessed.”

This is just so wrong on so many levels…   The academic honesty issue aside, it’s worth noting that the learning specialists had sat in on my classes in order to help their students, and they also had copies of my class notes, in which the problems were explained in detail.

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