A smattering of updates – the good with the bad.

I want to record a few things about the last couple of days of class here – cool stuff, some successes, some not as good, but all useful in terms of moving forward.

Geometry:

I have been working incredibly hard to get this class talking about their work. I have stood on chairs. I’ve given pep talks, and gotten merely nods of agreement from students, but there is this amazing resistance to sharing their work or answering questions when it is a teacher-centric moment. There are a couple students that are very willing to present, but I almost think that their willingness overshadows many others who need to get feedback from peers but don’t know how to go about it. What do I do?

We turn it into a workshop. If a student is done, great. I grab the notebook and throw it under the document camera, and we talk about it. (In my opinion, the number one reason to have a document camera in the classroom, aside from demonstrating lab procedures in science, is to make it easy and quick for students get feedback from many people at once. Want to make this even better and less confrontational? Throw up student work and use Today’s Meet to collect comments from everyone.

The most crucial thing that seems to loosen everyone up for this conversation is that we start out with a compliment. Not “you got the right answer”. Usually I tolerate a couple “the handwriting is really neat” and “I like that you can draw a straight line” comments before I say let’s have some comments that focus on the mathematics here. I also give effusive and public thanks to the person whose work is up there (often not fully with their permission, but this is because I am trying to break them of the habit of only wanting to share work that is perfect.) This praise often includes how Student X (who may be not on task but is refocused by being called out) is appreciative that he/she is seeing how a peer was thinking, whether it was incorrect or not. I also noticed that after starting to do this, all students are now doing a better job of writing out their work rather than saying “I’ll do it right on the test, right now I just want to get a quick answer.”

Algebra 2

We had a few students absent yesterday (which, based on our class size, knocks out a significant portion of the group) so I decided to bite the bullet and do some Python programming with them. We used the Introduction to Python activity made by Google. We are a 1:1 Mac school, and I had everyone install the Python 3 package for OS 10.6 and above. This worked well in the activities up through exercise 8. After this, students were then supposed to write programs using a new window in IDLE. I did not do my research well enough, unfortunately, as I read shortly afterward that IDLE is a bit unstable on Macs due to issues with the GUI module. At this point, however, we were at the end of the period, so it wasn’t the end of the world. I will be able to do more with them now that they have at least seen it.

How would I gauge the student response? Much less resistance than I thought. They seemed to really enjoy figuring out what they were doing, especially with the % operator. That took a long time. Then one student asked if the word was ‘remainder’ in English, and the rest slapped their heads as they simultaneously figured it out. Everyone enjoyed the change of pace.

For homework, in addition to doing some review problems for the unit exam this week, I had them look at the programs here at the class wiki page.

Physics

I had great success giving students immediate feedback on the physics test they took last week by giving them the solutions to look at before handing it in. I had them write feedback for themselves in colored pencils to distinguish their feedback from their original writing. In most cases, students caught their own mistakes and saw the errors in their reasoning right away. I liked many of the notes that students left for themselves.

This was after reading about Frank Noschese’s experience doing this with his students after a quiz. I realize that this is something powerful that should be done during the learning cycle rather than with a summative assessment – but it also satisfied a lot of their needs to know when they left how they did. Even getting a test back a couple days later, the sense of urgency is lost. I had them walking out of the room talking about the physics rather than talking about how great it was not to be taking a test anymore.

Today we started figuring out circular motion. We played broom ball in the hallway with a simple task – get good at making the medicine ball go around in a circle using only the broom as the source of force.

We then came in and tried to figure out what was going on. I took pictures of all of their diagrams showing velocity and the applied force to the ball.

It was really interesting to see how they talked to each other about their diagrams. I think they were pretty close to reality too, particularly since the 4 kilogram medicine ball really didn’t have enough momentum to make it very far (even on a smooth marble floor) without needing a bit of a tangential force to keep its speed constant. They were pretty much agreed on the fact that velocity was tangent and net force was at least pointed into the circle. To what extent it was pointed in, there wasn’t a consensus. So Weinberg thinks he’s all smart, and throws up the Geogebra sketch he put together for this very purpose:

All I did was put together the same diagram that is generally in textbooks for deriving the characteristics of centripetal acceleration. We weren’t going to go through the steps – I just wanted them to see a quick little demo of how as point C was brought closer to B, that the change in velocity approached the radial direction. Just to see it. Suddenly the students were all messed up. Direction of change of velocity? Why is there a direction for change in velocity? We eventually settled on doing some vector diagrams to show why this is, but it certainly took me down a notch. If these students had trouble with this diagram, what were the students who I showed this diagram and did the full derivation in previous years thinking?

Patience and trust – I appreciate that they didn’t jump out the windows to escape the madness.

_______________________________________________________

All in all, some good things happening in the math tower. Definitely enjoying the experimentation and movement AWAY from lecturing and using the I do, we do, you do model, but there are going to be days when you try something and it bombs. Pick up the pieces, remind the students you appreciate their patience, and be ready to try again the next day.