Dragging my way through cool stuff
Just an update, in the week after Spring Break (which is also the last week of the quarter...)
I'm feeling utterly low-energy this week. Headaches yesterday and today, no spark of life in me, definitely in a depressive state.
Calculus is taking the 1998 AP exam this week-- the entire thing, top to bottom. I'm taking it along with them. I've made errors on 7 of the multiple choice, and left 2 of them blank (this out of 45 total questions). A decent showing on my part, though it emphasizes that this is a tough, tough test.
But the real coup this week is the design competition in my sophomore classes. Groups of three students per team have 50 popsicle sticks, 5' of string, and any amount of glue to build (1) a bridge to span an 8" gap and (2) a protective device to keep an egg from breaking with it is dropped. Both projects draw from the same materials, and teams have 3 days to design and build, before one day of testing. The bridge that holds the most weight before breaking wins, and the egg protector that drops from the highest altitude without breaking the egg wins.
This is a great, fun project, the kids are having a blast, and getting really into it-- straight to work, having some great ideas, and everything that's supposed to come from this. Still, I'm a little concerned: what's the content here? How do we ensure that a learning objective is met? Maybe a written piece, after the project is all over, to reflect on it?
Anyway, what's extra depressing is that there's all this great stuff going on in my classroom, and I'm just sort of... out of it. Okay, not entirely: I am walking the room periodically, asking some probing questions about the plans my students are making, and listening in from here, even as I write, and I'm really pleased by the conversations that are going on. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating how this will work next year, as a piece for my NBPTS certification (which is part of where my fretting about how to get to learning objectives will happen... what are the student outcomes, here? How do we assess the learning?)
In any case, here's some observations and suggestions I've come up with for myself, for next year:
Put the materials in paper bags before distributing them. Tell the students that "These are your materials". Students can choose to interpret this to include the bag (for a parachute, or a structural support) if they're clever about it...
Provide a wider variety of tools: little handheld saws (those mini-hacksaws?), files, sandpaper, various kinds of glue?
Provide an accurate sample egg for construction purposes (maybe even some sample hard-boiled eggs).
Consider doing this whole project during Shadows, as an example of why triangles are special. Maybe open with a research project (find a picture of a bridge on the internet to use as your model, write about why you chose that model, and then build the model for the competition). My concern about this is it limits creativity-- maybe open with a free-style competition, and do the tests, then later, do another competition based on reference photos, with scale blueprints. Sort of using the construction project as the pre-assessment and the written report on the second project as the post-assessment.
Now THAT sounds like high-quality stuff!
Still not enough to perk me up, much, but I'm feeling a bit better, now. And, I gotta say, I'm excited about the fact that this constructivist stuff means a LOT less of me standing in front of my class, blabbering on. I'm actually writing this DURING class, as my students come up to use the other computer to look up pictures of what other people have posted online, and work away at their projects, creating and re-creating ideas. Pretty nifty, really...
posted by Klock @ 8:30 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
So, maybe the depression has something to do with the likely having a cold of some sort. My throat has been pretty bad, and the headaches could be related.
Anyway, I had a group finish very early on the third day, so to keep them busy, I told them about how I was planning to do the National Board certification next year, and that I thought I might use this as part of it. We had a brief but frank conversation about needing to add more learning objectives to this project, and I asked them (for a little extra credit) to give me a brief written comment on the project, and how I might improve it.
It was really nifty to have that sort of conversation with my students. I mean, really, really cool-- the sort of honest semi-peer relationship that I think teaching should be. As it happens, their writing skills are a bit of a hinderance (in fairness, they only had about 5 minutes to write)-- generally, they thought the pre-assessment / research / post-assessment plan was a good idea.
It occurs to me that one of the things I like about that idea is that it takes a lot of the challenge of understanding the goal of the project out of the final assessment. That is to say, a lot of the time, I feel my students struggling against the DESIGN of an assessment, rather than against the CONTENT. Understanding what they're meant to do and what knowledge or skills they're meant to demonstrate stands in the way of them actually demonstrating it... So, having a dry-run to get a sense of how to design and build a thing as a group means that, when the final assessment comes along, they have some experience with the basic building, the teamwork element, etc.
Anyway, here's why my students wrote (with the CAPSLOCK on, even...)
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THIS PROJECT IS WE LEARNED TRIAL AND ERROR TEAM WORK ORGANIZATIONAL SKILLS. WHAT MR.KLOCK SHOULD'VE DONE TO MAKE THE PROJECT MORE EDUCATIONAL WAS TO MAKE THE PROJECT MORE MATHEMATICAL AND INVOLVE GEOMETRY MORE.WHAT WE HAD TO DO ONLY INVOLVED OUR SMARTS AND WAS BASED ON TEAMWORK. WE DONT BELIEVE THERE WAS MUCH MATH BEHIND THIS PROJECT. WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE MORE NUMBERS, MAYBE A SET NUMBER OF VOLUME OF AREA OR PERIMETER FOR OUR BRIDGE. BUT WE ALL STILL HAD ALOT OF FUN WORKING ON THIS PROJECT. WE WOULD JUST LIKE MORE MATH TO BE INVOLVED.
The cold seems a bit better, and the videotaping in 4th period went well-- though those kids really were mugging for the camera... :)
The timing just barely fit into 43 minutes-- I'll need to step up the pace for 6th and 8th periods. I might take over the placement of weight. I ended up building a frame, about 2 feet tall, with an 8 inch gap that looks like a
The winning group so far held 14 pounds (then tried to add another 8 in one shot, which blew it), using a combination of triangular framing and a bridge that fit over the pins. I should definitely make the pins shorter, as I think they held a lot of the weight, there.
I'm figuring out how to add a data analysis piece to the experience: each group had to count the number of sticks used in their bridge, and we built a table of sticks used and weight held. Monday, we'll use this as a discussion point for why the bridge with the fewest sticks held the most weight (THAT was a perfect bit...) This can get into the expectation of a linear correlation, and how to explain (through geometric principles) the surprising result.
So, even with the limited start I'm doing this year, there's some content going on...
Jay Osterreicher sat in and observed-- I mentioned it to him yesterday, and he asked if he could come in. Jay is a supervisor/mentor for Fresh Start (a mentoring program which I see as principally a way to identify poor teachers, and either support them or convince them to go into a different career-- this makes it an alternative to Renaissance 2010, which closes failing schools, on the assumption that that's the only way to get bad teachers out of the system. I'll get into what I think about getting bad teachers out of the system some other time...)
So, a good end to the week, I think-- I'm more energetic again, and I'm starting to see new ways to using even this "pre-test" component for a learning objective...
Post a Comment
<< Home