There are always fireworks

We do a unit in Year 10 called Combustion. Since setting things on fire is a well-moderated passion of mine, I am always excited during this unit. This year, I found a youtube tutorial that actually worked first time. I don't think I've ever had this happen before.





Okay, so the introduction is boring and I very nearly closed it, but I'm glad I persevered. A few notes:

Watch out for the powdered magnesium, because it goes everywhere and I don't imagine you need to be breathing it in. Make in a fume hood, wear a mask, definitely wear your steampunk goggles safety glasses.

Putting sparklers in the oven? Not our oven, thanks. We dried them on the bench in the sun. It took about five days, but it was worth it. We'll break them out again in November, they were that good.

Seasons

Learning about why the Earth has seasons has definitely thrown up some of my favourite student misconceptions. Last year, I had the student who earnestly tried to argue that seasons are caused because the sun goes round the Earth and it's closer in summer. This year, it was the student who said it was because the plants needed summer to grow and so seasons started because of the plants.

Personally, I have a special love for the equinoxes and solstices, and celebrate them each year. As a teacher, I have a few odd seasons in my head too. For example, late September to November is Red Pen Season, when I eat, sleep and breathe revision and marking. It's not my favourite season.

I know that some of my students have this sort of headcanon for thinking about the world in a way that is not strictly scientific or 'true' for some values of true. It's real or sensible to them in their own perspective, though, and I think that's a valuable thing to have. I think it leads to the sort of quirky creativity that helps people get their head around things, and it's not something we should try to stamp out.

So I guess I am thinking about where to draw the line between completely, utterly, bizarrely wrong beliefs and eccentric and personal interpretations of the world around you. I think, for me, it's the recognition that my personal interpretation is just that, and not mistaking it for a universal perspective.

It's for your own good!

Over on twitter, there has been a bit of a discussion going on about e-learning. You know, just for a change. This post is not about that, or, at least, only tangentially. I will try to have a thoughtful and well-reasoned critique of the pressures of NCEA vs institutional stagnation vs teacher effort at some point. This is not that critique.

Instead, this is based on the extremely unscientific poll I took with my Y13 class today. I asked, "Would you like it if we spent less time doing book work and talking and more time using online resources and making exciting things online?"

I left it nice and vague, thinking that there would be a fair bit off discussion. I was not wrong. There was a lot of discussion, and it was quite interesting. Here are some responses:

"No. When the hell am I ever going to have to make a podcast or whatever those thingies were that you wanted to make?"

"I like it best when we talk in class and you explain things and we all write on the board together."

"Online is not interactive enough."

"Is this worth credits?"

"You like computers. We don't."

"Can we do some physics now?"

I was intrigued. Also, just in case you were worried by the last one, we had just spent a mentally exhausting 50 minutes exploring the Bohr model of the atom and relating it to atomic line spectra. There had already been plenty of physics.

I dug a little deeper. You see, this class is curious about things. They want to know what the speed of light is doing in the mass-energy equivalence equation. They want to know about why Nicola Tesla was eccentric, and why Lise Meitner is a classic example of women getting shafted in the sciences. Here is the rub, though. They want to get through the NCEA standards more than they want to know all this other interesting, exciting, fascinating stuff.

Personally, I can't say I blame them. I'd be concerned about my NCEA level 3 exams too, if I was in their shoes. So, I think the reason they said 'no' to my original question comes down to a couple of big things:

1. They have NCEA level 3 exams soon. We really don't have time to do anything time-consuming. If they have to master a new skill to do it (like learn to use Googlesites), then they're not interested
2. They have NCEA level 3 exams soon. If it's not contributing to their credits, they're not interested.
3. They don't use computers and online resources the way I do. These particular students use computers for some very specific things: writing word documents, and checking facebook so that they can keep up with the lives of other people that they know

It took me a long time to figure out what they meant by that last one. Then I realised that, for this class, social media is about strengthening connections with people they already know. That's what the response about online 'not being interactive enough' was about.

So, I am going to take a while to think about this. As I see it, I have a couple of future directions that I need to reflect on. First, how do I make enough wriggle room in what I do so that we have time to learn about interesting things like Tesla's thing for pigeons? Second, how do I learn more about what students are interested in doing with e-learning, and how do I find time to make that work?

The two questions are related. But tomorrow, when I see these guys, we're going to take a moment to learn a little more about Lise Meitner. It's important.

Alternative assessment (and the bribery of my students)

This week, I am not giving my Level 2 Physics class a topic test, even though they have finished all their learning about waves. Instead, I have given them an extended collaborative project. They all blinked when I said that, so I have taken to calling it "your jewellery project".

I don't really like topic tests. The project I have given them requires the students to work together to answer a range of questions that cover everything you'd expect a topic test to cover, but they get more time, can use their books and online resources, and can talk. I assigned the groups by getting them to line up in order of the wavelength of their favourite colour. I'm seeing a range of group styles in their different approaches.

First, some groups assign questions to different people and they work more or less independently on their own tasks. They seemed to assign the questions randomly. On the plus side, they are working pretty consistently. On the minus side, it does make them more likely to ask me for help instead of asking someone else in their group or looking up the answer. I guess they like having a reassuring someone to tell them things.

Other groups went through the entire question sheet and separated out particular questions. One group has one person who is the 'diagram specialist'. This person is doing all the ray diagrams, while another person is doing all the mathematical problems. This is quite efficient, and shows that they have some pretty clear ideas about delegating and division of labour. It means I can't be completely confident that all of them understand all of the topics, but I think that is a small price to pay.

Still other groups are all working on the same question at the same time, just different aspects of each one. These groups tend to be noisy, with lots of checking that they are all on the same page and all on track. They don't ask a lot of questions, but when I check in on them, they are clear about what they are doing and where they are going.

I think these types of group styles can rise organically in classes, like this one, where the majority of students know each other fairly well and are all confident about communicating their ideas. In other classes, particularly bigger ones where the students are younger and less self-directed, most groups default to the first type. I think this is a bit limiting in some scenarios, and I think I might set up some activities deliberately to tease out some other styles of group management.

I am pretty pleased with how seriously the Level 2 students are taking this project. Of course, when I handed it out and explained the parameters, they negotiated hard for a prize for the best team. We had some discussion about how 'best' should be defined, eventually agreeing that it would be a combination of group work skills and value added to answers since their last formative assessment. Naturally, the prize consists of food. On Wednesday, we will have a judging session and the winning team will nominate their choice of home baking. I think it's worth a few hours of my time.

Key Competencies

I like the New Zealand Curriculum. I get excited by things like the Vision and Values in it. I think its awesome that we are encouraged - expected, even - to explicitly teach about citizenship, to integrate creativity, and to develop curiousity.

Anyway, one of the big pushes in our school right now is to make the way that we teach the Key Competencies more explicit in our classrooms. I think this is a great idea, so long as it can be done relatively painlessly. Fortunately, this is possible. I used the activity below with my Y10 students yesterday:

Key Competencies Self Evaluation

I just wrote this on the board, and typed it up this morning so it could be shared. Some students found the matching difficult, and I worked with them to remind them/build with them a definition of what each KC actually is. Some students flew through it, and were coming to me with their statements and wanting to know what to do if they thought they did the KC twice. I haven't had a good look at what anyone wrote yet, but I will do that soon and give some feedback and feedforward. Overall, though, it was a simple activity that students got into far more than I expected. I guess all my excitement was infectious for some people.

I'm kind of embarrassed for them

I don't think my students quite understood what I meant when I said, "I will scan the pages that you make into a pdf and upload it to a sharing site so that you - and others - can access it." Personally, I think that is clear and unambiguous. My students did not quite get it, which, I think, explains why their pages look like something escaped from their pens and died on the paper. Well, perhaps that's a little harsh. Most of them are legible.

Optics Visual Dictionary

This was my first attempt at making an online visual dictionary with my Level 2 Physics class. They chose a word from a list I generated; in a perfect world, they would generate their own list from a pre-reading activity. Allowing the students to choose their own words worked well. Some students tried to pick a word they thought would be easy, but they turned out to be deceptively difficult. You should have seen the student who picked 'upright' as his word; it was a vexing task for him.

The biggest problem with this, I think, was that the students just didn't realise that when I said that I would upload it, that meant that I would be sharing it with other people. I trust that next time will look a lot more organised.

Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.