Pennies, part 2

Ok, we've moved on to the second part of the penny lab. I always struggle with the less fun part of going through the calculations and making sure they know how to do that. It's easy to teach when it's exciting stuff. It's harder when it's the mundane. I had to figure out a way to make things relevant to the students. Anyways, today we went over all of the calculations. We had the students learning what the difference between and average and a weighted average are.

The sort of fun relevant part was that the students in most of the classes are totally dominated by brunettes. I guessed what the average weight of our brunettes are, and what the average weights of our blonds are, and had the students figure out the weighted average of the students in the class. They had to figure out percents from numbers. In one case there were 27 students in the class, and we had one blond. So they had to figure out that only 4% of the students were blond, write that as a decimal (0.04) and multiply that times what we determined was the average weight for a blond (110lbs). They seemed more awake when we were using actual students, but they still had to do the math. We had already done it a few times, so it worked in the end.

I really don't like it when students look bored or are just watching me talk. But it's hard to describe stuff and then have them do it. It's easier if they do it as I'm doing it. But then I can't check on them. So I don't really know what to do. I like second period the best because they interact more. First period always seems slightly sleepy. And third period seems a little bit scared to answer. They are definitely becoming distinct students. A few of them are certainly the personalities of the groups. Duke got through this lesson with the students in one period when he did it with the other chemistry group. I feel sort of bad for my students because I'm not as good at teaching chemistry. I don't have the cool stories or other stuff I have with Earth Science. But at least it's something I do. But sometimes I feel like what I do isn't that interesting at this level. Ah well, I have a whole year to make an impact. Hopefully I will. This year we have an interesting experiment going on in that he has one other regular chemistry class. So we'll see how this all goes!