Guinea Pigs

Fridays are bad days to plan things like presentations, labs, new material, etc., and today was true to form. About a third of my class was out for some kind of musical performance and of course they weren't all from the same group, so several groups had missing members. I also left my camera at home, so no photos till Monday.

Actually a good thing it turns out. In spite of the missing persons, I decided to go ahead with a volunteer group for one presentation. I wanted to use them as guinea pigs, and told them as much when they volunteered, and gave them extra credit for going first - it's only fair since they will make a lot of mistakes that others will learn from (hopefully). And mistakes they did make. They were nervous, which reinforced the need to be prepared and have notes - it's hard to talk off the top of your head when your nervous. A few members of the group didn't know their stuff, so it gave me a chance to ask questions to let the others know what they would be expected to know. They also found out that there's a difference between being able to answer a teacher's questions about a topic and being able to explain something without prompts from the teacher. They didn't speak clearly or loudly enough. Some of them had poor body language, staring downward, fidgeting, etc. Some of the students seem to have learned more about teaching from sitcoms than from observing actual teachers: I don't think I've ever heard a real teacher say, "Now class, today we are going to learn about the digestive system..." - you have to imagine the kid putting on his mock friendly teacher face and reciting that line.

The other students rated the whole group' presentation based on the rubric. I rated individual students. In general they were a bit more generous than I was, which is OK. I will give a final score based on an average of the individual scores and the group scores.

The scale models aren't quite living up to my expectations. They all look pretty much the same: Once they saw a group using balloons for some of the parts, everyone wanted balloons. Making it a group project in class was part of the problem. In the future I would probably make it a homework assignment - they might get a little more creative if they have to look around the house for materials or go to the dollar store or grocery store and find something to work with. Class time was probably better spent preparing the presentations, working together on the research.