I’ve decided to try the 30-day jump rope challenge (http://ashotofadrenaline.net/jump-rope-challenge/). I plan to track how things change over time, so I can show my students what five minutes a day can do. I hope it does something.
My current jump rope stats:
PR: 52 jumps without missing. I just started learning this last year, but haven’t been practicing regularly.
Most common: 18-22 jumps, with lots of 1’s and 2’s.
We’ll see what happens!
I found a recipe I liked http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2014/07/easiest-fridge-dill-pickles/. I used less salt, and made only one quart. They came out nice. My first batch was too salty, but I think I mixed up two recipes. C’est la vie.
At some point, i’d like to try a sweeter recipe, which my family would like better. I’m thinking beets (I found out you can pickle them raw), Maybe with some ginger.
I used something close to this recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2013/06/pickled-vegetable-sandwich-slaw/
That gave me enough liquid to fill one large Mason jar. The results are still out because this was only 15 minutes ago.
Have a small jar with more cabbage (I had to use the whole head, which I got from my CSA – www.farmerjoesgardens.com) So I made some brine, but I didn’t measure, so it seems too salty. We’ll see.
Clearly, I didn’t have enough time to write about everything (or even some things) I did last year.
So, it’s time to repurpose this thing. I am going to expand the things I write about. Things that I think about that are too long for FB.
I am going to do a bunch of things which I consider to be experiments this year. I’ll write about some of them here. I do a lot of experiments, which I define as things I’ve not tried before, or not tried a lot.
Some experiments are already in progress, I’ll write about those as the go on. Some are quickies, which I can write about sooner. I’ll try to post things about teaching too. For my loyal band of follower.
Hang on for the ride. The first dip is a small one 🙂
So, I’ve had an idea for a while now to somehow incorporate the current fascination with zombies into my chemistry class. I just couldn’t think how.
I had a little idea over the summer: Zombie Apocalypse Team, as in “I definitely want you on my zombie apocalypse team!” I thought about this a bit and thought I could use ranks (as in private, sergeant, general) to help motivate students to a higher level of mastery. I’m not into external motivation so much, but I thought I’d give it a whirl. I also did not like the military sense of it either, because I knew I’d immediately lose some students’ interest for the year. Later I translated that to “How well are you living after the apocalypse?” (barely surviving, getting by, life of ease, living large, etc.) , which I still might use.
Well, along comes EdCampCT, where I met up with Katy Reddick (link) my daughter’s erstwhile Latin teacher, who uses werewolves in her class. A brief discussion with her pointed me in a new direction – “You need a story arc. Something to use all year. Maybe the labs could be zombie related.” I publicly agreed and privately thought “How can possibly I do that?” So I let it sit in the right side of my brain for a while.
Why a zombie apocalypse theme? First, I secretly changed the theme. I didn’t want the year to be about how to kill zombies with chemistry. The real theme is “Rebuilding the post zombie apocalyptic society”. This allows me much wider latitude in re-framing what we do in lab.
We had a class discussion of the good, the bad, and the ugly in such a society. Power’s out, transportation is out, so our materials will need to be recycled. I’ll let some electricity in for the electronic balances, because the old triple beams are going to get tedious real fast. In my mind, I use 1830 as a reference year. If it didn’t exist then, we don’t have it after the apocalypse.
I’ve tried other ideas in the past: the environment, food, health and other standard fare. None really seemed to capture students imaginations. Zombies has. Not all students, but when you hear and audible “Yes!” on the first day of school, things are looking up.
The secret plot it to use this to incorporate more “E” in STEM. By going back to 1830, when chemistry was coming into its own, I have a plausible reason to recreate a bunch of stuff. I plan to incorporate much more engineering into labs this year.
My next post will describe the first lab where I used these ideas.
I jumped into SBG (standards based grading) in high school chemistry with both feet this year. So far it’s been pretty OK. Some grading is taking longer, but I’m pretty happy with the results. Not all of my students get that it’s about learning, not about points.
I could use a little advice, or at least some ideas, if you are reading this. Here’s the setup. I am currently the only teacher in my building that is using SBG. Our grading software is a percentage based system, so I’ve equated my levels of mastery to point values:
Expert – 100% – Goes beyond what was taught.
Proficient – 94% – can do what was taught without error
Competent – 85% – makes errors in application of concepts
Learning – 75% – shows evidence of a significant conceptual error
Beginning – 60% – shows evidence of multiple conceptual errors
I have prettier words for these things, but this is the general idea. If anyone is interested, I’ll post more details.
Here’s the dilemma. Some of the assessments I give don’t provide an opportunity for students to go beyond the proficient level. It’s sometimes difficult to come up with questions that go beyond what was taught while still staying in bounds of the standards. Also, those questions tend to lend themselves to longer format answers, which increases grading time and effort. Further, putting a question on an assessment that most students can’t answer adds to the length of an assessment for little effect except for the few students who can do it.
On one hand, I like that there is space for students who excel to get credit for that, so I like to differentiate the expert level. On the other hand, my sense of fairness tugs at me when the assessment gives no chance to get the expert level. So what to do? Some ideas are:
It takes a bit longer, but sometimes you can have students write their own notes from examples. I used this last week. Rather than lecture about what is in each of the 16 sections of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), I gave students copies of five MSDS, and asked them to write the title of each section, and summarize what kind of information is in each section. I gave them a worksheet with an empty table to structure the activity a bit more. After the table I put some questions that required close reading of the MSDS to answer (like what chemical is the most hazardous, cite evidence from the MSDS to support your claim.
I had students define vocab from one section of our text in their own words, then had them find groups of words and identify the connection among them with hash tags (ala twitter). For example: solid, liquid gas, plasma #statesofmatter. This worked best when I told the students that there were four easy groups, and challenged them to find two more. In review, I asked random studemts for the four easy ones, and volunteers for the more challenging ones.
This is a good way to introduce vocabulary that you’ll be using during a unit.
On Thursday this week, I knew I was going to be out for a couple of periods, so I needed an activity that my students could do with a substitute. We are working on a unit on Safety, and there are a number of routine safety procedures that I am holding the students responsible for. Among them are: obtaining chemicals safely, cleaning up at the end of lab and lighting and adjusting a Bunsen burner.
I made a list of all the steps for the procedures (21 in all) in random order on one sheet of paper. On another I placed instructions and space for each of the procedures. The students cut the steps apart, separate them by procedure and tape them to the paper in the correct order. Then I had them jot down a line or two next to each step explaining why they put that step there. For some steps, the order doesn’t matter, for others it is hugely important. The idea here is to get their brain juices flowing, because it is easier to remember the order of the steps if it has some meaning.
The students could work in groups of 1, 2, or 3. Sometimes, we force students to work in groups when it is not necessary. Many students are introverts (by which I mean they gain energy through reflection rather than through interaction as extroverts do), and prefer to work on their own. So sometimes I let them. This also avoids the whole “last one picked for a group – nobody likes me” problem. This took about 40 minutes.
I reviewed the exercise by calling on students randomly (I have their names written on wooden coffee stirrers, I’m too cheap for Popsicle sticks :), discussing the important points as we go through each procedure.
Students often don’t know good (efficient) ways to learning thin.gs, so this was a great opportunity to work on that. Many of the students I have are taking Chemistry because they need a second lab course. To make chemistry worthwhile to them, I’d like them to take away tools they can use in college to help them learn faster. Chemistry is a great place for that because the students who struggle with learning it will see the benefits of learning how to learn. All this is to explain why I asked the students to give suggestions on how they might try to remember all 21 steps. Repetition and rewriting the steps came up a lot, but each class came up with seven or eight ideas. I hope to show them on Monday how to use mental visualization to help them learn faster. I finished one class by memorizing 23 objects in order in about 6 minutes. Monday, I’ll show them how.
Well, today I jumped into standards based grading with both feet. I haven’t seen too much sbar in chemistry, except Ms.Bethea. I got the go ahead from the administration. So here goes…
Doc Och's Box 