Convection Current Experiments

At the end of the last class period, I assigned a small homework assignment. I wanted each student to define four terms. Unfortunately only about 7 of 25 students attempted the homework assignment.

On day two of the class, I we did an experiment where the students placed one drop of food coloring into clear plastic plate filled with water. The drop of food coloring was allowed to settle in the water and then the plated was placed over a warmer cup of water. The heat from this warm cup of water heated the plate and forced convection to begin occurring inside the fluid. The students were given the task of drawing a picture of the movement of the dye every thirty seconds. If the students watched carefully, they would be able to observe the convective current motion in the water in the plate.

Unfortunately, this experiment did not go quite as planned. Towards the end of my lecture in the previous class, I showed the students the necessary steps to complete the lab. I also typed up protocols for each group to follow. Nonetheless, on the day of experimentation, more than half of the class did not know what to do. Placing the first drop of dye in the water was something that had to be done with extreme care. Most of the groups had difficulty with this step, and with so many groups, I just ended up running around to each station and placing their first drop of dye for them. With so many students asking me questions and saying that they were ready for the next step, it felt slightly chaotic. I think I could have done a better job of organizing how each group would proceed through the experiment. Also, I needed to think of a better way to describe how to place the drop of dye in the water. At the halfway point through the class, most groups had completed the experiment. As the dye began to move, I went to each group and asked them questions to make sure they were grasping the important concepts from the experiment. Through discussion, we realized that the dye was being warmed which caused it to rise and expand.

After everyone completed the experiment and cleaned up, I re-did the experiment in front of the class and we discussed what they were supposed to observe. I asked the class what our observations were (dye rising and expanding) and what must have caused this. The rest of the hour, I tried to connect the concept of the convection that we saw occurring inside the plate with the convection that occurs inside the earth’s mantle. Again, the class was very attentive and participated when I asked them questions. It really seemed like those students interested in connecting the concepts together did so successfully. I could see the learning process taking place right before my eyes. It’s very interesting to ask a student to draw a pure conclusion based off an observation they’ve just made, watch their expressions as they think and mentally connect the dots, and then, deliver a conclusion that is in fact correct. It’s like you can see the knowledge being formed in their minds.

A few general observations that I made…

First, the students are very disinterested in doing homework. They won’t even complete small assignments that are essentially free points. Also, the students have an aversion to reading protocols. Even though each group had a set of instructions at their stations, very few took the initiative to read the protocols. Mr. Sowder and I discussed this after the class, and he mentioned that this is common in other science classes as well. During the class, as I wrote notes on the board, I heard several moans and groans from students about the amount of information I was putting on the board. For some reason, these students strongly dislike taking notes. I don’t think that they see a benefit in writing down what the teacher is writing on the board. I got the feeling that they preferred to just watch me as if I were a performer. They certainly have yet to understand the role that taking notes and reviewing them plays in the learning process.

One of the more interesting and accidental observations that I made happened in the morning while I was setting up for the day’s activities. Mr. Sowder’s first hour is a biology class. Much to my surprise of the 25 students in the class, only 2 students were male. For freshmen biology is considered an advanced class. Mr. Sowder’s 2^nd and 4^th hour classes are physical and earth science courses. I’ll comment on why this was so shocking later.

Next week is my last week, so I’ll have the rest of the summer to discuss random topics that have occurred to me throughout the ear.

Density Experiment

The last two weeks have been sort of like the ending to a movie. In Mr. Sowder’s class, the students have transitioned from learning physical science to earth science. The overall objective of the last unit of the semester is to help the students discover why the earth is shaped the way it is and why various formations exist on the earth’s surface. The students spent time plotting marks on a globe that represented earthquakes and volcano eruptions over the last 30 years. Mr. Sowder and I decided that I would lead a lab demonstration that explained the process of convective currents. Mr. Sowder would then take the information about convective currents and connect it with the theory of plate tectonics.

This assignment was perhaps my greatest challenge of the year. Earlier I had done presentations on college, or lectures on electricity, but I’d yet to lead a full-fledge lab. Furthermore, I was not entirely familiar with convective currents or plate tectonics. I know that this project would require a significant amount of research on my part. To make a long story short, I used several websites to get a food understanding of these concepts. Then, I found a few good activities that the class could do. From there, I constructed my lesson plan and crossed my fingers.

Mr. Sowder gave me two days to complete the lesson plan and I agreed to come in and do the lesson for his second hour (in addition to the fourth hour class which I normally visit). After researching convection currents, I thought it would be important to the students to have an understanding of density first. I began the lecture by explaining the terms mass, volume and density and showing how they were related. We did a few examples, but I wasn’t completely sure how well the class understood the concept. To explore density a little bit more, I began to do some demonstrations. I filled three cups with water, 91% rubbing alcohol, and vegetable oil. We then observed what happened when we put ice, wood, and aluminum in each cup. Much to the surprise of the class, the ice sank in the rubbing alcohol and kind of sank in the vegetable oil. The wood floated in all three and the aluminum sank in all three. Based of these observations and a table of densities, we walked through the steps of understanding that lower density materials float whereas higher density materials sink. The students absolutely loved this part of the class. They were very interested in seeing what would happen with the different solids in each fluid. I don’t think any students had seen ice sink before and I felt that was the key part to get them hooked on the day’s activity.

After establishing the basic concept of density, I asked the class to predict what would happen if we mixed alcohol, vegetable oil ad rubbing alcohol. Through lots of guessing, we made a prediction using the known densities of each species. I added food coloring to the rubbing alcohol in order to make it distinguishable from the water. The experiment worked nicely and the students were pleased to see their predictions come true.

Tune in next time to hear how the second day worked with the convective currents experiment.

General Observations

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to write this update. Most of my blog updates are used to illustrate what I am doing inside the classroom; however, I always have general thoughts that don’t necessarily fit inside of a particular update. Thus, I keep a list of these thoughts and when I have time, I get to write an update completed centered on them. This post is one of those.

In this blog, I’ll try to touch on several issues that have been on my mind:

What do we do with students who are failing a course?
What influences does a co-ed have on the education of its students?
Is there a place for uniforms in schools?
What to do with a student who misses a third of the class?
How do you communicate with irrational students?

Now, that I think about it, I will probably have more questions than answers… but I think someone said, the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know. That certainly has been the case for me. I’ll try to follow the pattern of topic, background and my thoughts.

Topic number one… students who are failing…

Here I am not referring to a student who is doing poorly at the beginning of the term and has hopes of recovering before the end of the year, rather I am referring to students who are so far in the hole that they have no chance to pass the course. In my high school experience and my experiences at YHS, it seems that students who are going to fail a class have no interest in contributing to the class and primarily try to be a disruption. It is very unfair to the students who are interested in learning and doing well that a teacher has to spend so much time disciplining students who aren’t there to contribute to the class. The students who aren’t beyond the point of return simply don’t care.

Perhaps it would be nice to remove these students from the class in which they are failing to a smaller class that is accelerated. In this smaller class, the students could receive more personal attention and try to catch up. Maybe the student wouldn’t be allowed to leave the class until they could pass an exam that demonstrated an understanding of the material that they had failed. Passing this test couldn’t completely replace their failing grade, but it could start them off at a C. This way the student would be able to work his way to a better grade a have an incentive to stay focused.

This topic brings me to another point that’s frustrated me since I have been at YHS. In Mr. Sowder and Mrs. Porter’s classes, there are brilliant students who in the proper environment would surely be great mathematicians, scientist, doctors, etc. Unfortunately, these students are not given the proper nurturing because the teacher has to spend so much time on students who are capable of succeeding but require so much energy and attention from the teacher. I can sometimes visually see the frustration and annoyance on the brighter student’s faces as the teacher spends valuable class time disciplining non-productive students. The student must recognize how awfully unfair this situation is. In an environment, where the goal is education, those interested in learning receive little attention, while those whose aim is to disrupt learning receive lots of attention.

I think it would be a nice reward for the motivated students to allow them to have classes all to themselves. I imagine a class filled with the well behaved students. The teacher would probably get through much more of the material with much less stress. Also, maybe this would allow the size of classes to be larger because discipline wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Larger class sizes in one area leads to smaller classes in another, the students who do have trouble staying on task. If I could open my own school, there would be classes with less than 10 students, that were for disruptive students. Often students become disruptive because they are bored or don’t understand what is going on in the classroom. Once a student is engaged, they aren’t disruptive. I think the small class size could address this issue.

Well… I now realize that each topic probably warrants its own post. I will try to discuss a topic a week in addition to my normal updates. Let’s just consider those topics a preview of what’s to come!

Low Expectations

I had a shocking experience this week in both Mrs. Porter’s and Mr. Sowder’s classes. The school encourages teachers to inform the students of their grades prior to sending the report cards homes. In Mrs. Porter’s class on Tuesday she gave all of her students a list of all of their grades with the final grade at the bottom. Although I’ve been in the class every week and I see the level that the students perform at, it was still shocking to see how many of the students had a C- or below. What surprised me more was to see how many students celebrated having anything above an F. During my first meeting with Mr. Sowder and Mrs. Porter, they both told me that one big issue was that students just wanted to pass or to receive their credit, that this was the mentality at the middle school and that it carried over to the high school. Even with this warning, I was still amazed. The only students who seemed dissatisfied with their grades were some of the students who were failing.

I am not sure what factors motivate students to want to do well, but I am even more clueless as to what factors allow students to be content with a C. In my experience as an undergraduate student in engineering, I noticed a similar phenomenon. Highly motivated students who did not do well in their first few terms, mentally adjusted their personal expectations. Whereas in their freshmen year, they expected to receive A’s, by their junior year they expected to receive C’s. This was a result of a very demanding curriculum and perhaps inadequate preparation.

I wonder at what point along the K-12 path do students become simply interested in passing a class. Seeing this mentality before my eyes forced me into action. That evening I e-mailed Ms. Porter to ask if I could speak to her class on the following day about the importance of grades and test scores. I wanted to remind them that grades do matter and that equally as important is to learn the material because it will appear again on standardized tests that influence college admissions. I went to the ACT website and took about seven questions that were relevant to the material that Mrs. Porter had been teaching.

During my next visit, I reminded the class of what they told me on my first day. Most said that they were interested in going to college after high school. Thus, I asked them what the top two criteria that colleges use to admit students were. After a bit of guessing, we narrowed it down to GPA and ACT/SAT scores. I urged the class not to settle for poor grades when they could achieve better. At the end of the discussion, I passed out the seven question practice ACT and told them that there would be a prize for the student who got the highest score.

This was my third time “presenting” in front of the class and by far, it went the best. Since I have been around the class for so long, they all know me and are much more interested in listening to what I have to say than they were when I was a stranger. I saw that some of the students really understood what I was saying; however, I think the students need constant reminders that they are on a path to go to college and become professionals and that everything they are doing is in preparation for that.

Two days later, I observed the same attitudes in Mr. Sowder’s class when he distributed the grades. Primarily, the only students who were very angry were students who were failing.

The Power of Experimentation

[Editor’s note: Somehow I wrote the next two blog posts and then proceed to lose them before I could update the site. I have always felt that the first pass at writing generally best captures the true sentiments from the author. Hopefully, I am still able to accurately represent my experiences.]

The other day in Mr. Sowder’s class, his teaching assistant, Mrs. Hacket was conducting an experiment on thermal energy transfer. This was one of the last sections of a unit that focused on different types and uses of energy. The experiment involved pouring hot water into a Styrofoam cup and room temperature water into another Styrofoam cup. Lids were then placed on the cups to insulate them and a u-shaped metal bar was inserted through both lids to connect the two cups. The students had to record the temperature of both cups of water at one minute intervals.

My task for the day was to walk around the room and make sure the groups were doing the experiment correctly. Additionally, I decided to ask the students questions make sure they understood what were doing and to ask them questions that would encourage them to think in depth about the experiment. When I made my first pass with each group, I always asked, “What are we doing today,” and “What is the purpose of this experiment.” Very often, students aren’t sure what to do once they go back to the lab even though the teacher just explained the protocol in the class.

[As a side note, I had a conversation with my cousin this past weekend that made me reflect on why some students might not easily be able to listen to directions and apply them to the laboratory. In discussing my experiences working with different high school students, my cousin asked if I could verify something that he had heard. He’d heard that black children learn better when they are shown how to do something and white students assimilate information better when they are given audible information in a linear format. While I am certainly no expert in the field of learning and education, I thought about this for a moment and told him that I had not observed this trend. I thought that perhaps this trend might be true along some socioeconomic gap. Perhaps, students whose parents read to them a lot as infants and children are better accustomed to receiving audible information and mentally converting this to a real world experience. On the other hand, students who may not have been read to very much, might be more accustomed to learning solely through the actual experience and not being able to make the connection between audible instructions and a real-world activity. This was just a guess off the top of my head, but I thought I’d share since it seemed to be relevant here.]

Although most students couldn’t answer my first two questions immediately, through a bit of conversation we unveiled what they already had learned in terms of the purpose of today’s activities. In my second pass, I decided to ask questions like why were one cup warming and the other cooling, why was the metal bar warming up, what did that mean with regards to energy transfer, etc. I would literally think of any question germane to the understanding the experiment and I asked it. All in all, the students seemed to enjoy the activity and took very good data. Later, Ms. Hackett had the students combine all of their data and learn about taking averages and creating plots in Excel to predict where the temperatures would eventually level off.

After the class, I listened in on a conversation that Mr. Sowder and Ms. Hackett had about what had taken place during the hour. Mr. Sowder was sharing with Ms. Hackett his observations about the high level of engagement of the students. He felt and I agree that science is best taught through experimentation and exploration. It might be best to always start off a unit with a set of experiments, allow the students to record data, draw their own conclusions, and then finally, begin formally teaching the material. Inevitably, some of the topics covered in lectures will be conclusions that the students had already developed. This class period and conversation really re-emphasized the power that doing hands on experiments has. So much of my undergraduate experience has been spent in a lecture room that it is easy to forget how much hands on experience enhances what a student is learning.

Electricity!!

This week was probably the most exciting and fun week for me. In Mr. Sowder’s science class the students have been learning about various forms of energy. He has a student teacher that was doing a lecture series on renewable energy sources. Seeing that I needed to get more involved with the class, I asked Mrs. Hackett (the student teacher), if I could do a three-day lesson on electricity. She agreed, and I began working on the activity. Basically, I went to how-stuff-works.com and looked up how electricity is generated. I already had a basic understanding from concepts learned in Electricity and Magnetism, but I wanted to get a more general understanding and get ideas for how to present this to the class. After a few hours of research, I put together a power point presentation that captures the essentials of electricity. If I can figure out how, I’ll insert the presentation .

Nonetheless, the idea was to spend day one on discussing the background to electricity. For example, we talked about what is energy, what is electricity, what are electrons, etc. I used lots of pictures and encouraged the students to take notes. Day one went exceptionally well. I think the students were excited to have a new person give a presentation and I tried to keep the class at a high energy level. Due to some technical difficulties, on day two, we went to the computer lab to look at a few interactive pictures on generators. This process was very difficult because moving the students from the classroom to the computer lab and back to the classroom generally costs a lot of time in terms of getting the class settled. Also, on day two the Principal of the school resigned so the students were fairly unsettled already. To put the icing on the cake so to speak, I wasn’t able to use a computer to give my presentation. Fortunately, I remembered most of it and what most of the pictures looked like, so I just used the chalk board and different colored chalk. Once settled, the class seemed to enjoy and understand the day’s lesson. Day three was supposed to be centered on actually building an electricity generator using coils and magnets. Unfortunately, I did not contact the Physics department in time to obtain the material, so the students were assigned with the task of designing their own electricity generation system using a renewable source of energy.

Some of the students used a hamster wheel to turn a coil inside of magnets. Others used steam produced from geothermal energy. There were a wide variety of renewable concepts that the students used to generate electricity. Overall, I was very pleased and felt the students had learned something valuable.

As a side note, on the first day that I was lecturing, the student from Mr. Sowder’s class who I had talked to earlier in the term when he was kicked out of the class made an interesting comment. Toward the end of the period, I mentioned that we would continue this topic tomorrow and some of the students responded emphatically that they would not be there tomorrow. The student who I had spoken with earlier in turn asked me if I would be teaching tomorrow. When I replied, “Yes,” he said, “Well, if you’ll be here tomorrow, I’ll be here tomorrow.” The sentiment of what he said probably does not read as well as he expressed it, but the message that I took away was that he appreciated my efforts and would try to be mentally engaged the following day. This idea touches on what Mr. Sowder told me at the beginning of the year… that if I just keep coming and the students see that I am there to help then they will respond positively.

One on One Time with Students

During my last few visits, I spent a significant amount of time working with one student. This young woman has had a significant amount of trouble in school. She has told me that she is taken medication to control her moods, doesn’t really enjoy doing anything in life, and generally gets in a lot of trouble at school. In our initial interactions, she was very reluctant to attempt math problems. After working with her for three or four days, doing some one on one teaching, and providing some encouragement, she has been much more willing to try problems. She is very bright and definitely has the ability to learn the material. One day, while talking as the class was ending she mentioned that she just needed a mentor. I agree with her completely. It would be wonderful if a lot of these students had someone to work with them personally and hold them accountable for their own success. This would require a significant personal investment and time commitment on the part of the mentor, but I am sure that it would have a great impact on these students’ lives. This idea kind of goes back to what I discussed earlier about helping these students connect their current actions with future results.

In Mr. Sowder’s class, I am still doing a lot of observing and looking for a better way to get involved with the class. This week, a student was sent out of the class for being argumentative with the teacher, so I decided to join him in the hallway and have a discussion with him. I felt that since I am not the teacher and I don’t discipline the students, I might have a better chance at connecting with him and helping him understand why he was asked to leave the class. We briefly talked about how often it’s important to have a tempered reaction to situation particularly when they involve someone who is superior to you. I asked to try to use restraint the next time he disagreed with the teacher. I am not sure what impact this had on the student, but he seemed to understand that I trying to help him get through life with less confrontations.