Day 18 - Should Stories be True?

http://www.cartalk.com/content/cruisin-grandmas-house

I've used the Car Talk Puzzler linked above in past years. This year I decided to add a personal spin to the story. I changed the girl in the story to a girl I knew in high school. She had a bad accident in her Pontiac Fiero and then her dad bought her a Suburban. I used her as the example in the story totally changing all the details to match the puzzler but embellishing it with details from my high school experience.

A good friend of mine uses stories from his personal life all the time to help teach physics. When I've been in PD sessions he runs he breaks them out and they are great. They are entertaining and very engaging. He paints pictures you can see and then references the characters while making points long after he's finished his narrative. It looks like a powerful teaching tool.

In my example of this I have some moral pangs about changing history in order to teach physics. Is it ok to totally change a story and the present it as true in order to teach?

Day 17 - Loss of relevance?

This is not a picture from my classroom today, but the classroom of a good friend of mine. She teaches our Principals of Chemistry class. Today they were discussing the properties of elements and such. You know, whatever it is that chemistry teachers do. After working some examples together she was walking around the room when she overheard someone say, "I still don't know how to find the atomic hashtag."

At this point my friend said that she felt she'd lost all relevance for her kids. Personally I don't think that's true. What do you think? Are kids really in such a different place today? Some might call this a digital native/immagrant problem, but I've never accepted that dichotomy. Most of my students are not really very good with most internet technologies. They, as a rule, tend to be very good at using the current popular social network, but little else beyond that. 

Some educators would say that if a teacher is not on twitter they can't be relavent to kids today. I couldn't disagree more. I don't know any educator who us twitter the same way our students do. Anway, I'm going to stop typing now before I go on a rant.

Day 16 - Modeling Depolyments

Working through the Modeling Deployments in The Constant Velocity unit. Not much to say other than I really do think when they are used well they really can help students learn. I don't think I did a good job today, I led way too much.

Day 15 - MACUL Board Meeting

This is a picture from my first meeting as a member of the Board of Directors for the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning. I ran for the board last spring, but didn't make it. However, one of the board members had to step down and last week I was asked to take his place. 

It was a good day and I got to meet lots of new people and renew old acquaintances. My only misgivings joining the board relate to the number of days I'll have to miss school. We have an all day meeting every month. That said, I'm looking forward to helping out, plus I really did need more to do as I wasn't really busy enough already.

Day 14 - TI-Nspire

I've always been impressed the old TI-83&84 graphing calculators as tools for analysis in physics. The TI-Nspire is even cooler. Our math department has decided that all students need to have this calculator so I get to benefit from them having it as well.

For graphing data I like this better as students can name the columns with their variables, with the older TIs they would just be L1 and L2. For the novice learners, I think this will be important. My only major gripe is they still can't do a Variable Power Regression.

For the more astute, you may have noticed the Nspire doesn't come in blue. Apparently they do make rubber skins for them to offer a bit of protection. The only other thing to know is they have a built in rechargeable battery. With the backlit color screen it doesn't seem to last as long as a TI-84 with AAAs, which means you need to have a charging cord handy on test days. There will always be at least one student per class who will need it.

Day 12 - Google+ in Electronics

This year I wanted to go back to something that I'd done in the past. I wanted to have students blog throughout the course. When I brought this up I faced stiff opposition from my class. It was very nearly an open revolt. They all wanted to do Twitter instead. We compromised and are using Google+. You can check out our Google+ Community if you want.

So far the posts are not very useful nor inspiring. However, they give me another look where my students are as the progress through the course material. Now that most student groups (is a pair a group?) are posting regularly we'll talk about what a post should look like.

Day 11 - Buggy Cars Day two

On day one of Buggy Cars all groups started with the cars at 0m. On day two I give them a second starting point and even have some of them run their cars the other way. I love the Buggy Car labs, but I do have to say the constant beat of the metronome haunts my dreams!

Day 10 - Buggy Cars Day One

Today was our first day with the Buggy Cars, marking the beginning of our Constant Velocity Unit. Tomorrow will be even more fun when we get a chance to discuss and redesign our investigations to support our model building.

Today students decided on which variables to measure so I'm sure I'll see some interesting stuff. Tomorrow I'm confident we'll settle on distance and time.

Day 9 - Grading

I had a cold all weekend and finally got around to grading Friday's quiz this morning. I'm always amazed at how students solve problems. In this case students had to find the slope of the line that would explain this data set. What I found surprising was this approach to finding the slope. I had four or five different students do this. They totaled up the data in each column then divided one by the other.

I find this interesting because I have no idea why a student would approach this problem in this way. Often when I see several students taking the same approach to solving a problem I can figure out what the thought process was, but in this case I can not. As I type this I realize I should probably ask one of them to explain why they tried this approach. Unfortunately I've already passed the quiz back and I didn't note down the students who did this. In the future when I see something that baffels me about student thought process I need to make a note and then do a quick post quiz interview.

Days 6-8 Already falling behind

Wow, only a week in and I'm already dropping the ball. I totally missed taking pictures for most of the week. On Day 6 I'd meant to take a picture during our Parent Night, but that was such a whirlwind that I never got to it. I have no pictures, so I will just give the capsule descriptions I'd have used.

For parent night we only have about seven minutes with each group. I began with a capsule description of Physics and asked them to recall Newton's Third  Law. With a little prompting they were able to recall it. We then discussed applications of. The law while I pushed a wall. We then talked a bit about what a Modeling Classroom looks like and what it doesn't look like. Then I modeled the Earth moon system with a basketball and tennis ball and the actual  distance they should be apart to highlight the misconceptions we often harbor. I finish with the question, "Which pulls harder, the Earth on the Moon or the Moon on the Earth?" I love this because they all forget the N3 discussion from five minutes earlier. Thus helping illustrate that telling isn't teaching.

Day 7 - We did circle labs in honors physics today. We had a collection of circles to work with. They needed to do two investigations, at least one of which used area as a variable. All variables must be measured directly, no calculating circumference or area. I really like this as it gives us a very familiar constant.

Day 8 - My electronics class is starting to take off. The class centers around the use of the Arduino Microcontroller. It's kind of awesome. There is no state mandated curriculum and my administration lets me do whatever I want with the class. I have a web page with lessons for students to work through and they work through them at their own rate. When they finish a "Unit" the call me over and I assess their mastery of the material presented.

Ok, next week I'll try to be better and have a picture to go with each day.

Day 5 - Internet Woes

I know, not a very interesting picture. This is one of our new Aerohive wireless access points. The light is white, unfortunately it was green for most of the day. Green means no internet. Our server died just before school started last week and internet has been in an out and not at all reliable even when you can get it. It's amazing how much I've come to rely on my constant connection in both my life and teaching.

Hopefully everything is good to go now for the school year.

Day 4 - y-intercept

This is one of my favorite data labs because the y-intercept is non-zero and has a real meaning.

Day 3 - Whiteboarding

In physics we do a lot of work in small groups on whiteboards. Today we started a mini-data lab investigating the relationship between the length of a pipe and its mass. It's a pretty straight forward idea, however, it will help us build the skills we need to lay the foundation for the rest of the school year.

Day 2 - Pre-Testing

Boring picture, but important day! Today I administered the Force Concept Inventory to my students. This is a 30 question multiple choice test designed to assess understanding of Newton's Laws. There is a great deal of research backing it up. I'll give it again near the end of the year to gauge how well I did as a teacher.

Day 1 - Marshmallow Challange

Today we did the Marshmallow Challenge. It was a lot of fun to see how the different groups went about it. What a great Day One activity.