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What Can You Do With This: Snow Banks

I'm not sure I have the readership to pull this off as effectively as Dan has, but I've been thinking about this one for awhile and suddenly found a great example of it literally in my front yard¹.

Just to clarify: Those are the snowbanks flanking both sides of the driveway. When I shovel I throw equal amounts of snow on both sides of the driveway. See Dan's original post for the instructions and leave your ideas in the comments. View high quality images of the snow banks here and here.

UPDATE: To clarify further, when I was finished shoveling, both snow banks were basically the same size and shape. Two days later, when these pictures were taken, they weren't.
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UPDATE 2: See comments below for more explanation. The additional picture below might help guide the discussion about why the right snow bank has melted significantly more towards talking about the position of the Sun and the tilt of the Earth.

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¹ It seems like I've been using Dan's ideas a lot here lately. I swear I'm not cyberstalking- good ideas are good ideas. When I saw the snowbanks I couldn't NOT play along with the meme.

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Element card results

A big thank you to all of you who voted on my classes' element cards. In general I would say the project was a success. The front of the cards were generally decorated, though the backs of the cards were usually pretty lacking despite my appeals to make both sides visually appealing.

If you missed my earlier post where I explained the project please visit. I've also updated that post to include links to files of the handout I give students.

2nd Block

1st place: Plutonium

Plutonium

2nd Place: Carbon

Carbon

3rd Place: Fluorine
Fluorine

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3rd Block

1st place: Neon

Neon

2nd place: Aluminum

Aluminum

3rd place: Sulfur

Sulfur

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4th Block

1st place: Potassium

Potassium

2nd place: Calcium

Calcium

3rd place: Tin

Tin

Now I just need to do this for a few more years until I get a complete set of element cards. 🙂

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Vote Now! (Element Trading Cards)

This isn't one of those super-tech-integrative activities people swoon over- but it's one I enjoy (and if you just want to vote on the cards and not read this, scroll down to the bottom).

After going over the basics of the atom and the periodic table, each student selects a different element off the periodic table. When doing this with multiple classes I don't let any two students use the same element (I've never had over 117 students do this in the same semester).

There's often some grumbling they so-and-so couldn't get the element that sounds like their name (Samarium is picked by a significant number of students named Sam), and always the fun of having male knuckleheads always select Holmium, Thullium, and Platinum (Holmium's symbol = Ho; Thullium's atomic number = 69; Platinum for the bling, natch), but all in all they seem to enjoy getting their "own" element.

I used to do this project every year mainly to reinforce effective online search techniques, and didn't do it when I moved covering atoms and the periodic table later in the semester- after we'd already gone over effective internet research techniques. The project isn't super-rigorous on the science end. I give the students a list of information to find for their element, they find it and design the front and back of their cards. Half the grade for this assignment is in the design. I thought of making design worth less, but all this talk of visual literacy floating through the intertubes made me think it's worth that much. If they can't display the information so it's easy to find and read, then the information is worth less.

As a result, I always have had classes vote on the best designed cards from each class to earn a few bonus points for the winners. Typically I'll have my 3rd period vote on my 2nd period's cards and vice versa. This year I figured I'd up the ante a bit by using one of those fancy online polling sites for the vote and invite anyone who'd like to vote to do so. So, you're invited!

Each class has it's own poll, so feel free to vote in all three polls: The polls are now closed. 🙂

  • First Block (this is the poll I posted to Twitter. If you've already voted you can skip it)
  • Second Block
  • Third Block

I used PollAuthority.com (as recommended by @Dsalvucci via Twitter), as it was the only site I could find where I could have images used as answers in the polls. I had a little trouble getting the poll to work properly the first time around, but overall the poll creation process was pretty easy. It turns out that once the poll is finished and saved you are unable to further edit the poll, which is what I was trying to do. Once I figured out that issue things went swimmingly.

Thanks for voting! I'll give an update this weekend or early next week when voting is completed.

UPDATE: I've closed the polls and tallied the result. I've posted the winners in a more recent post. In addition, here are the handouts I give to my students for this project:

 

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Annual Report 2008

I've taken Dan up on his Annual Report Contest this year. Luckily I'm just dorky enough to keep track of a few data sets of interest to me. I was also lucky to have a snow day today- otherwise these would probably not be complete. If they're a little hard to read click on them to view the full sized image.

UPDATE: I added a few of my observations/reflections in the comments. Check 'em out.

There you have it: 2008 in four slides. Feel free to make any inferences about my year from any of the data above. It'd be interesting to hear how clearly (or not) the data communicates aspects of the year. I'll point out a few things I found interesting in the comments in a couple days. Also, feel free to critique the design and such. I can take it.

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Image Credits:

State Theater by william_couch (background for Movies)
This Pump has CLEARLY been on fire in the past by Jym Ferrier (background for Gasoline)

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The importance of stupidity

Martin A. Schwartz in an essay titled, The importance of stupidity in scientific research, published online by the Journal of Cell Science, says:

...I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. [...]

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

As a teacher who seems to constantly be changing, updating, redirecting, and otherwise in flux with the curriculum that I present to my students each semester (even if I'm teaching the exact same classes every semester), I identified strongly with feeling stupid.

I'm constantly wondering if there aren't better ways to do the things I'm doing; constantly doubting whether I can get the important bits of science through all the standards, state assessments, and district requirements.

This article reminds me why I constantly change things up. I could rest on my decent curriculum & teaching skills and take it easy. However, decent isn't enough. I may never be great, but I'm sure I'll avoid being mediocre. I may fail in some pursuits, but I hope that those failures can guide me to successes.

What I'd love: to work alongside teachers and administrators who enter this realm of stupidity to try to figure out a better way than the current way.

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Follow then fail

I haven't posted for 25 days. Yes, the holidays played a decent part of that hiatus, but it's also been the result of the binge of artifacts I had students create just before winter break. In short, I was so excited to break away from the traditional teaching style that I probably stretched myself too thin.

I previously taught at a small high school in Michigan. If you were in 10th grade at Whitmore Lake High School, you had Mr. Wildeboer for Earth & Physical Science. I was the only teacher who taught Earth/Physical Science since it was introduced in 2002¹ (my first year). This situation meant that I was solely responsible for the content of that class. I developed all of its lessons, projects, labs, and activities myself.

I was given the freedom to experiment, create projects, swap out exams for cumulative projects, cut back on breadth and focus on depth, and do pretty much whatever I felt would be best for the students. Freedom to do what I personally saw as best was the advantage of being a "lonely" teacher. The disadvantage was that I never really had anyone to work through ideas and struggles with. Sure, I could talk to other teachers who could provide valuable feedback, but it's something different entirely to collaborate closely with another teacher while developing lessons or other curricular materials.

This year there are three other teachers who have the same classes I do. When I was hired, I was quite excited at the prospect of being able to collaborate with other teachers. I knew that might mean I wouldn't have the same degree of freedom as I had enjoyed previously, but I figured I could live with the trade. I didn't start the year working with the other teachers very well (several old posts explain why), but that was more the fault of Central Office than anything. As time when on however, I found we weren't working together as closely as I would've liked. At lunches and meetings we'd talk about what we were currently on, where we were going next, and what supplies we each needed. Unfortunately, that was about it. We shared a little back and forth, but I wasn't thrilled with the worksheets being sent my way. I would take some time to tweak them, then use my own presentations (which were shared, though I don't have reliable intel that they were ever used outside my room).

I tried to replicate what the other teachers were doing as best as I could while only making design and other minor changes to improve the quality (IMHO) of what I was setting down in front of students. This was frustrating. In hindsight it seems foolish.  I provided what I consider sub-par curriculum materials to my students because I wanted to stay at the exact pace of the other teachers. I did this even though we really weren't collaborating with each other, and looking back, I realize that I was really replicating was teaching style². No wonder I was frustrated. What I was doing was trying to do was suppress the style I had developed over several years of practice, research, and experimentation. It was foolish of me, and I now regret it.

Coming soon: What happened when I decided to stop worrying about keeping up...

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¹ Interestingly enough, due to changes in the state curriculum, the school decided to switch up the science curriculum starting the year after I left. The class I taught was replaced with something different- meaning the class started and ended with my tenure.

² I don't mean to suggest here that the other teachers were ineffective. I have a certain reperatoire of activities and projects that have proven to be effective and mesh well with my personality. I'm happier when I teach within my personality, and happy teaching leads to happier students.

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Image Credits:

Power Law of Participation by Ross Mayfield
Streeter Seidell, Comedian by Zach Klein

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Rookie mistakes

I sat down to grade my students' chemical reaction primer artifacts this weekend. It didn't take me long to realize that as a class we weren't done with these projects yet. Clearly I hadn't built in the necessary support for the project's format. I seemed to do pretty well supporting the information (as described previously), but I made a few fatal errors:

  1. These freshmen have next to no experience citing sources. I required in-text citations and a bibliography. We went over this on day 1, but not too much more than simple reminders since then. Many students did either a bibliography or did in-text citations, but not both.
  2. Many students gave Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com URLs as their sources for information or images. Again, we went over this on day 1, but with little prior knowledge of citing internet sources it's an easy mistake to make.
  3. I emphasized strongly that their artifacts should include lots of images related to chemical reactions. I didn't make it clear enough that those pictures needed to match up with the content being described. I can't tell you how many times I had pictures of chemical reactions with no explanation of what reaction it was or why it belonged in that spot.
  4. I didn't include a review and rewrite of their projects on the schedule. Especially the first time around, they really needed it.

Rookie mistakes, all of them. All easy enough to anticipate. Heck, I've even included reviews and rewrites in similar projects I've done. What was I thinking? Today, I created time for a review and rewrite. I graded the hell out of their artifacts knowing that I would give them time to fix them up.

I was pretty worried about class today. I was handing back rubrics with some very low grades on a project that was worth as much as a full-on test. I was very careful in how I opened the discussion on doing rewrites so as not to cause frustration, despair, or anxiety over the grades on the rubrics I was passing back. Here's what I did:

  • Created a positive (perhaps inspirational?) environment. I've been sharing short (~1 minute-ish) and fun videos with my classes all year. I usually don't start class with them, but I wanted to set a positive tone right up front. What better way than with 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes?
  • Explained myself honestly. Because this was the first time they've done anything like this, their perception of what their finished artifact should look like is different than my perception- and that's okay. I told them it's my fault that I didn't do a better job explaining my high, even ridonculous expectations (went back to an old slide to illustrate), and that I should've scheduled a review and rewrite from the very start.
  • Ensured them the grade on the rubric wasn't binding. Once I decided to allow students to revise their artifacts, I toyed with the idea of not going through their artifacts and just explain to the class as a whole the issues I was seeing. I avoided another rookie mistake by diligently going through each student's artifact and grading it like I would if the grade would really count. I wanted each of them to see what specific things were lacking and needed to be fixed. It took 10 hours of grading this weekend. Morally, it was the right decision.
  • Maintained a totally positive outlook on their artifacts. I didn't want students to get the idea that I was disappointed or frustrated with their work and was simply having pity on them by giving them a do-over. I want them to know that revisions are a natural and necessary part of the work flow.

Dan Meyer noted that as your teaching expertise grows the technical challenges (i.e. designing and implementing projects, among other things) disappear and the real challenge becomes moral (will you put in the effort to ensure all are successful?). My technical challenges have decreased dramatically since year one. However, I'm not confident there will ever be a time when I don't mess up the technical stuff. What differentiates my mistakes in year seven from mistakes in year one is that now I can fix the mistakes.

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Teaser:
Even though I messed up, it's amazing to me that some students still hit it out of the park. Here are two artifacts that needed little fixing:

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Alfie Kohn on Self-Discipline

Thanks to a tweet this morning by Will Richardson (@willrich45), I came upon the article "Why Self-Discipline is Overrated" written by Alfie Kohn and published in the Phi Beta Kappan in November, 2008.

5 bullet summary

Self-discipline is a trait that generally gets high praise from both progressive and traditional educators. However, Kohn points out that:

  • extreme self-discipline is as much of a disorder as extreme lack of self-control, yet we usually attempt to prevent the latter and praise the former.
  • all internal motivation isn't good. Students can be wrecked by always worrying about what they "should" be doing.
  • our pervasive cultural emphasis on self-discipline seems to be based upon conservative religious philosophies.
  • emphasizing self-discipline ensures that the fault lies with the students instead of the structure that the students find themselves in.
  • obviously not all self-discipline is bad. Just our total systemic bias towards it is.

Go Alfie!

What resonates most with me in this article is Kohn's point that focusing on self-discipline is a method of being sure the status quo remains unchallenged. Our educational system explains away student "lack of slef-control" as the students fault. Instead of examining why students have little desire to complete the tasks we set before them and questioning our current practices, we just pass students off as immature and lacking in some way.

This general theme also pops up between any groups that have authority over each other. Districts where teachers are "causing problems" according to administration often are simply challenging the status quo.

Psychologically (to the extent that I know psychology), I agree that simply because students are sitting quietly in class and focused on their work doesn't mean they'll be better prepared than their classmates who are often loud and disruptive. Anecdotally, I've known many friends, family members, aquantainces, and ex-students who were a handful in school and yet managed to go on to live happy and successful lives.

Yeah, but...

How do you teach students to lose control? Further, how do you teach students who are overly self-disciplined to loosen up while at the same time help students who really do need to learn some self-control? Kohn doesn't drop any hints towards that end. As a teacher, I can actively strive to provide lessons and activities which students want to work on, but how can I help a student who has become overly self-disciplined? Is there anything I can do?

I've always been frustrated that while I might really like most of Kohn's ideas, many of his writings don't offer practical examples. "What does that look like in action?" is question that keeps coming up as I read. I can hypothesize to some extent, but seeing a few real-life examples to benchmark would be wonderful.

Unfettered quotes

  • "Learning, after all, depends not on what students do so much as on how they regard and construe what they do."
  • "What counts is the capacity to choose whether and when to persevere, to control oneself, to follow the rules – rather than the simple tendency to do these things in every situation."
  • "There is no reason to work for social change if we assume that people just need to buckle down and try harder.  Thus, the attention paid to self-discipline is not only philosophically conservative in its premises, but also politically conservative in its consequences."
  • "...to identify a lack of self-discipline as the problem is to focus our efforts on making children conform to a status quo that is left unexamined and is unlikely to change."
  • "Some children who look like every adult’s dream of a dedicated student may in reality be anxious, driven, and motivated by a perpetual need to feel better about themselves, rather than by anything resembling curiosity.  In a word, they are workaholics in training."

Best quote taken totally out of context

  • "...children are self-centered little beasts that need to be tamed..."

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Image Credits

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Nearly text free (and loving it)

I used the following presentation to go over how and why to balance chemical equations with my 9th graders:

Balancing Chemical Rx

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: chemistry chemical)

The concept itself isn't complex, but instruction often gets bogged down in providing students with a list of specific steps to follow (First, count the number of atoms, second...).  Suddenly it goes from being a simple concept to a complex procedure which almost requires students to actually memorize the specific steps.

I started with a quick review of the Law of Conservation of Mass (matter cannot be created or destroyed, though it can be rearranged), and then jump into the teeter-totter analogy to explain why unbalanced equations violate this law. We then worked through some examples together.

With each repetition I increasingly withdrew my support. By the third example students could go through and balance equations without me around. They didn't need to follow a prescribed set of steps. They knew that you can''t have more oxygen atoms on one side of the reaction than the other and worked through to figure out the balanced equation.

As for technological savvy to create the edited images of the sign: I did all image editing in PowerPoint itself; which is to say it's pretty basic and pretty crude.

Resources

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Artifacts #2- Chemical reaction primer

Part 2 of the Chemical Reaction Artifact series. Part 1 describes what an artifact of learning is and why I use them.

I'm not someone who really enjoys being the center of attention. I don't enjoy talking for longer than 5-10 minutes a time during class and yet I found myself being the center of attention talking much more than I would've liked during my classes. I had had enough. The dissonance between how I operate best and how I was actually operating led to the following project.

The idea

Students go through the unit on chemical reactions creating a different artifact for each of the three sections in the unit. The artifact must clearly communicate their understanding of the required content. They were free to choose whichever format they felt most comfortable using- most students gravitated towards a wiki-page, PowerPoint presentations, or some form of a newspaper/textbook document.

Documents given to students on day 1 of the project:

Support

I decided early in the planning phases that I would avoid the perhaps more typical model of teaching the material traditionally (notes, lecture, review, etc.) up front, then having students work on a project as the assessment. I wanted the learning process to be wrapped up in the process of creation. However, I needed to support the students' learning. I couldn't just give them the rubric and tell them to get busy- they needed (and desired) some support. I decided to implement two support structures in order to help students while still keeping much of the onus of content learning on them.

Quick & Dirty Overviews. I did a brief (10 minutes max.) explanation of the required content broken down into three sections based upon how I broke down the content in the rubric. In addition to this, on the wiki-page for the project, I embedded an old presentation that I had used several years ago as notes for this section. I explicitly told students that these overviews covered only the bare-bones basics. It was their job to flesh these ideas out, provide examples, images, diagrams, and really show that they've mastered these ideas. These overviews served as a safety blanket for many students. The artifact was big and scary, and the overviews were just a touch of that style of teaching they'd grown used to over their schooling career.

Collaborative Groups. I placed students randomly into groups of three. At the conclusion of each day they worked on their artifacts, they met in their collaborative groups. Their requirements in the groups were to: (1) show each other what they have done of their artifacts so far, (2) help each other find resources for information/images/video, (3) check that everyone is citing their sources appropriately, (4) check that each others' information is correct.

Students were somewhat resistant to meeting in their collaborative groups. They wanted to keep working on their own artifacts, not waste time seeing what other people are doing. Students didn't do a great job of sharing useful links with each other and the thought of (in the future) getting students to use common tags in delicious or diigo crossed my mind. However, I'm unsure whether the time required to get students up to speed on social bookmarking would be worth the possible benefits. What was a major success was simply getting students to see what each other are doing. Getting to see how other people used images, organized their information, cited their sources, and so on seemed to be very helpful to many students.

Labs

It'd just be wrong to not have a couple labs when learning about chemical reactions. This section included two labs.

Exothermic and Endothermic Reactions. Students create two chemical reactions; one exothermic (adding yeast to hydrogen peroxide) and one endothermic (dissolving ammonium nitrate into water- it's not really a chemical reaction but it does get very cold).

Types of Chemical Reactions. Five reactions that demonstrate the five basic types of chemical reactions. Clicking the following links takes to you photos taken of the reactions as students performed them:

In the end

Students will upload their completed artifacts to the class wiki for all to see. At the time of this writing, students have completed their artifacts, but the upload process will happen this Monday (12/8). When they're all up I'll be sure to share.

My goal is to begin using the class wiki somewhat like a portfolio for student work. Each student will have a page on which they post their artifacts and other assignments completed throughout the year. I'm starting a little late on this for the current semester, but I hope to improve the practice in the future.

Resources

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Part of the Chemical Reaction Artifact series of posts:

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Image Sources: