Weekly reflections, week 1

Well, we have to keep a weekly journal of reflections for Socrates, and this seemed like a good use for this blog since I haven't used it in a while.  Week one went pretty well.  I will be working with periods 1-3.  That will be an interesting test of what difference I make since there is another chemistry class that Duke is working with for 6th period that I am not working with.  For anyone not on the socrates group, Duke is the teacher I am working with this year.  I'll be working with high school chemistry, at Eastlake High School.  Ok, back to week one.  I introduced the students to a little bit about my background: who I am, what I do, why I'm there.  Some periods were more questioning than others.  Period two seemed the most awake and asked a lot of questions, mostly about Alaska.  They were pretty funny.  Really I was mostly watching what Duke was doing with the students.  I also watched the classes that I will not be working with and was briefly introduced to them.  We had all six periods on Friday, at about an hour each.  

This week is a little different.  We are now in week two.  My regular day will be Tuesdays.  We are piloting our activity this afternoon with the Preserve Our Planet (POP) students.  They agreed to be our guinea pigs and give it a shot.  We'll have about an hour with them, so it won't be the full demo.  Hopefully everything will work..  We'll see!  Today the students are going over measurements.  I'm helping out checking the students work to see how they do the measurements lab.  Basically we're making sure they know the accuracy of what they measure, and the precision with which they can make certain measurements.  I'm observing Duke.  He starts the lesson with a lecture that involves a lot of student questioning.  Basically, he'll show them once, ask them about a basic scenario, then ask them about a more specific scenario that is a little more difficult to make sure they understand what happened in the simple one.  Right now I'm going to make up the worksheet for students to do this afternoon.  We'll see how this goes.  I'm trying to make up a penny lab for the week after next also, so we can do isotopes with the students.  I won't be around next week, so I may come in twice on the week that I actually do the activity.