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.

Teaching Earth Science

Last week was a bit of a surprise for me. The previous week I had met and spoken with the Earth Science teacher here at lunch. She seemed to be quite underwhelmed with the resources available in her classroom as far as available rocks and that sort of thing go. So I told her I would bring her some rocks from our lab since we had been cleaning out our rock collection. So I showed up in her class and she asked if I would teach a section on plate tectonics, particularly one on how paleomagnetics work. So I was suddenly teaching an earth science class with no practice or prep. Luckily I had some rocks with me. And I took some iron shavings and a magnet from the chemistry classroom to show students how crystals will align themselves with a magnet. So the lesson was pretty thrown together, but the students seemed into it. However, she had an activity for the students to do that she explained very little about before giving it to them, so the students didn't seem to really "get" what they were doing. I wanted to try to explain it better, so I went around to each group of students to try and get them to understand what they were doing. I don't think it worked very well that way. So for the next period I asked her to do it as a demo first, so the students would get what they were doing a bit better. That seemed to help, but her explanation wasn't very good. They just thought they were drawing stripes on a paper. I have since thought of a better way of doing this activity (more like Simon says, where we call out normal and reversed, one student draws on the paper every time it's reversed, and the other student just slowly pulls the papers apart the whole time). For a last-second lesson, I think it went pretty well, but it's hard to leap in without knowing what her ultimate goal was. So the second class went better because I knew where she wanted the students to end up, so I tried to guide them that way.

Observations

I have a few blogs to catch up on since I've been sick. So this is the first one. Two weeks ago I was observing some teachers around the school. First, I watched Duke teaching electron orbital notation. That was cool to see because it's something that is relatively abstract that he covered quite easily. He had them building a chart that had both ends of the periodic table. Then he had them fill in all of the electron orbitals, different notations for them, and the dot structure. This was so students could see patterns in the periodic table. Once they learned the pattern, it was a lot easier to memorize what was going on with the different elements.

The second teacher I observed is a very dynamic biology teacher. He was teaching chemistry for his bio students so they would have some idea of how chemical structures worked. It was really interesting to see how he put the information. He began telling a story about gangs, and the students got really into it. It was a really silly story, and I was trying to figure out why he was spending so much time on it. Eventually he revealed that as he was telling this story about a gang, he was actually drawing atomic structure and the student suddenly realized they'd been duped and the whole story was fake. However, it worked really well, and the students remembered what he was saying. Then he misbuttoned his lab coat, and the students had to describe what he did wrong. He had put the same button through two button holes. And he used that to describe that you can't mismatch the number of buttons and the number of button holes. So he drew "button holes" which were negative signs, and "buttons" which were plus signs, above the elements that had that particular charge. He showed how it matches across the periodic table, and that you have to balance your number of buttons with your number of button holes. I really liked the way he taught this since it was really easy to follow. So he had students balance a few equations, and they really seemed to get it. I don't know if this style of teaching would really work for anybody else, but it was amazing to watch how he led the students to their conclusions. They all got the answer on their own, even though he led them very carefully to it.

The second teacher I observed had a very non-dynamic style. She still interacted with the students and kept them engaged, but in a very different way. She showed them a demonstration that she had talked with them about the class before, and said she had been trying to figure out a way to show them in class. It was shining light from the projector through two pinholes in a piece of foil to show them the light spectrum. It worked really well and the students definitely thought it was cool. She was constantly asking them questions to keep them engaged, and she even threw styrofoam balls at them as emission products. A lot of teachers I've noticed put things in a historical perspective. They introduce ideas as a train of thought in history: this was how they discovered it. It makes it a bit of a mystery, with an unknown outcome, so the students are drawn along in the story.

So I got a little bit of material from each teacher that could be useful. I think it's hard to recreate a style like the first teacher, but it certainly got me thinking outside the box for how to describe something. I'll have to see what I can come up with when I talk to the students next Friday about my research.

Big activity day!

Had my first big lesson with this group! I think it went really really well. The students were enthusiastic, very responsive, and knew all sorts of things I wouldn't have necessarily expected. The bead part really got their attention, and they all wanted some. More because they were just really fun and different from anything they'd seen before. The minerals really caught their attention too. So I'm going to break down the lesson here really quick so all these things make sense.

First: Intro with fluorescent minerals. I asked them where they'd heard the term fluorescent before, and if they'd heard the term UV anywhere. They all knew lights and sunblock. I talked to them briefly about sunglasses having a UV coating as well. Duke had done a good intro to light and types of energy including different waves, so the students could also name different wavelengths of light. They all oohed and ahhed at the minerals, particularly the one that is white in regular light but fluoresces yellow in UV. I wanted something a little less abstract for them, since most haven't worked with rocks. So I showed them tonic water, which they'd seen in the grocery store. It glows a beautiful blue under UV light. The quinine in the tonic water is fluorescent. So that got them hooked on wanting to know more.

Second: Went over the Bohr model again (or in the case of second and third period, Duke went over this very quickly at the beginning, which I think helped a lot). Wanted to really emphasize that this is not an electron flying off, but moving between two orbitals. This is the key idea in chemistry we want to get across, so I wanted them to remember this in particular. Hopefully having a fun reason to remember will help it stick.

Third: We introduced the idea of a deep sea core. I passed around the core we took so the students could see it and they could look at the mud and know that it didn't really look different from top to bottom. They all got kind of weirded out when I told them that the stuff in this mud is stuff that is in the water, and that they've swallowed most of it. At this point I introduced the idea of an XRF. They'd heard of fluorescence now, so they seemed to get the idea that if we are shooting x-rays, they behave the same way as other fluorescence. So I told them to show something to them, we always try to find something they can actually see. They would be using a model to learn about a system. So I had a bracelet with the UV beads on and I asked the students what color the beads were. They all said white or clearish. I walked outside with the bracelet on and asked them what color the beads had turned. They said all different colors and were totally hooked. I told them they would all get some, and they were suddenly very excited. So I talked about using them as a core, and how the machine would scan down the core, and look at x-ray fluorescence. They would scan down their cores and look at the number of counts in their core. So we sent them off, doing one question at a time.

The first problem we ran into was that students like to jump ahead to answer questions. So it was a little bit of a struggle to get students to NOT answer questions ahead of time. I would ask them if they knew how to answer it, and they would say no. I'd then tell them it was because we hadn't gotten to that yet, and then they'd just have to be patient.

The students did their counts and took their cores outside to look at them and the sun made the colors really bright and easy to see. Unfortunately it was very hot outside, so the students didn't really want to sit in the sun, and I didn't really want to make them sit in the sun. They were all amazed at how bright they got. So I took that opportunity to talk to them about UV from the sun and the importance of wearing sunblock.

When we came back together inside to walk them through the graphing part of the exercise. So we did a little demo of how to do the graph. Duke did it first period so I could see how he wanted to introduce a graph, and I did it for second and third period. This was a great way to introduce me to how to do this without screwing over first period with a bad explanation. I always explain things a little bit differently from Duke, but it was nice to see the order he did things in and the level of explanation he felt necessary. I have a tendency not to explain quite enough, and it helps me to work with him so I explain more step-by-step.

So we finished up the graph, and gave them some actual elements, then changed top to bottom of the core to time (top = now, bottom = 100 years ago). This way they could say their element changed over time in a certain way. One of the things they struggle with is how to describe something in a way that other people understand it without seeing it. So I told them to imagine they were really really nerdy, and super excited about this graph. If they wanted to explain what the graph looked like to their super nerdy friend on the phone, how would they explain it? That seemed to give them the idea of explaining things more fully than "it went down."

For the next part, we returned to the real core and showed them some actual data. This was the part that surprised me about the students. They were really able to interpret the data well. We talked a little about what the scatter in the data meant. I asked them what they had heard of lead being used it. They were surprising with what they knew. Some examples are: paint, pipes, Mexican candy (the only one that all the classes got!), stuff you put on you during an x-ray (which most of the students had gotten before), toys made in China (which we were specific was not in ALL toys from China). So I asked who had been to a gas station. They all raised their hands. What does it say on the pump? Unleaded. They all had no idea lead used to be added to gasoline. So we got a little bit into additives and why gasoline had lead added in the first place (and what the super, premium, and that sort of thing means). Some of them had been to Mexico and seen that the gas there has lead in it sometimes. So we talked a little bit about their experience with lead. Then we talked about what lead in the environment does, and why it's bad for things.

Finally, we brought everything back to the differences between our model and our actual data. So we compared what we can get from the UV beads to what we can get from the XRF. They always have a little bit of hard time comparing models to real things, so we start off with what they have in common, and go with the differences second. They did pretty good with this, with slightly different responses in each class, and a little filling in by me at the end.

All in all, this went really really well. Difficulties: that students work at very different rates. In the future, it might be good to know the students better and know which ones work faster and make sure they get the two-part cores, so they have more going on than the students that are a little slower. I'm getting to know them better, but I would like to have had a better idea ahead of time. Positives: the students were really excited to learn more, were surprising with what they knew, and were talkative and enthusiastic. They are getting to be more willing to admit they don't know things. That's an important thing for me. I want them to say when they don't know something and not be scared to talk to me about their questions. So we're starting to get to that point.

Anyways, that was the first big lesson. On to lesson number two!