Talking about global warming

So last week was a prep week for me. I came in and observed Duke teaching, and prepped for this week's lesson, which was to talk to students about what I study. So I decided to talk to them a little bit about global warming and go over some of the terms they had heard but maybe hadn't had explained to them. So I asked the Socrates group how to introduce this idea, and if they had any suggestions for how to connect with the students. So what I ended up showing was a clip from the beginning of The Day After Tomorrow. This turned out to be a great suggestion! Thanks group! The students knew the movie, a bunch of them liked it, and it opened up to a lot of discussion. I let the group kind of lead where we went based on what their responses were to prompts. So first I asked them what was going on in the movie. What were the guys doing at the beginning? They always said drilling. So we talked about ice cores and what they collect. With some classes we talked about reflection of ice cooling off the earth. With some we talked a lot about terms they had heard, and led them to it. So I asked them what they had heard about global warming. All of the classes came up with greenhouse gasses, they came up with pollution, and one class came up with breathing. So we talked about sources for greenhouse gasses. They were all a little bit shocked when I told them we were all breathing a little bit of cow fart. I got a lot of "aha" type looks when I told them how greenhouse gasses work. I used a blanket analogy with them and they all seemed to get it. I also told them absorption and re-emission was like a dog shaking water off. A lot of them seemed to have an aha moment with that one. I feel like a lot of people have talked to them about global warming, but nobody every really said how it worked. One of the students even said this was the most interesting class he'd had. So I took that as a good sign. I feel like since the students led with questions, a lot of what we talked about was driven by their ideas. I didn't want to go into it with too much of a plan, although a little bit of one in case I got lost in the middle.

On a secondary note, I looked at the district test scores. No surprise, but first and third period did really good and second period did not do as well. Second period is my rowdy class that has a harder time focusing anyways, so I'm not really surprised. However, second period does respond well to questions and are a lot of fun to work with. They are harder to focus, however. Duke's other period did just as well as first and third, so there's no loss of knowledge. There weren't really any district questions that dealt with what I taught, so it was hard to say if I really had much effect, but I at least didn't have a negative effect. I haven't seen Duke's class compared to the other chemistry classes at the school yet, but that would be interesting as well.