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Tag Archives: challenges
Request to Math Teachers: Teach Graphical Solutions
The instructions seemed adequate: plot your data, draw a best-fit line, and extrapolate the line to find the y-intercept. Graph paper and rulers were available on a table at the front of the classroom. To me, the implication was crystal … Continue reading
Seizing the Moment
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 … Continue reading
Keeping a Lab Notebook for Inquiry Labs
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 … Continue reading
Creating Problems For Themselves
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 … Continue reading
Escalating and De-Escalating
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. +2-4
Success Strategies in the Learning Center
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 … Continue reading
The Dangers of Criteria-Based Grading
This year, I taught at a charter school that uses criteria-based grading. To describe the system briefly, the learning objectives of each subject are broken down into individual criteria, called benchmarks. For each assessment (test, assignment, etc.), every question or … Continue reading
Requiring Chemistry?
On 2/16/2011 11:49 AM, James Guzinski posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list: I just read in Science, Vol 331, 28 January 2011, p. 405, that “Biology will be the only high school science class for 21 to 25% of U.S. high … Continue reading
Throwing Technology at Problems in Education
Technology in the lab can take large amounts of data accurately, but substituting technology for a more direct experience with the scientific principle or technique can prevent students from internalizing the principle or technique. Continue reading
A Case for Plotting Graphs By Hand
One of the labs I do with my Chemistry I class is to measure the temperature and volume of a gas under two sets of conditions, and, based on Charles’s Law, extrapolate the graph to estimate the temperature of absolute zero. … Continue reading