Recent Labs

My schedule imposes a sort of lab routine on me that is not always easy to keep up with. Each week students either a) come in very early at 7:45 for a required lab period or b) come back early from lunch, meaning that they only get 20 minutes to get food & eat and get upstairs for their required lab or c) have a double period at the end of the day, as with my highly energetic 8th graders, including an already 10-minutes-longer-than-usual 8th period. In either case, not having a formal lab isn't really an option, as students will begin to resent the lab period and question why it is necessary and start skipping - and who wouldn't at least think about it if no labs were given in the "lab" period? Or in the case of my 8th graders, almost 2 hours together without a lab would be unbearable. So I feel compelled to find a lab for them every week, and on topic.(*See Comment below.)

Last week I used a cheese making lab that I got from a listserv - I would like to give credit where credit is due, but I can't find the author of the lab. This lab was more or less on topic as we were discussing biochemistry (proteins, carbs, lipids, etc.) and the cheese making lab has to do with denaturing proteins with a mild acid (we used lemon juice). Most of the students refused to taste the cheese (I used food prep materials for the heating and "fresh" lemon juice and paper cups to keep everything clean). I mixed in some sugar and tasted it myself - not unlike cheesecake in some ways. What really grossed them out, for some reason, was when I drank a little of the whey. Of course I mentioned Little Miss Muffet as well:

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey;

Along came a spider, who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away.

This week we created food webs for a lab, based on a set of cards that depict various players in a Chaparral ecosystem. I reduced the cards so that they would fit on 2 sheets of paper, then students cut them out and arrange on poster paper, draw lines connecting them based on information on the cards. Understanding why the arrows point toward the consumer (away from the energy source) is a real challenge for the students.They always want to point toward the one that gets eaten.

On Friday we had a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History to see the Galapagos IMAX film and the Biodiversity exhibit. I didn't prep them as well as I would have liked to. This being my first experience taking a high school group on a field trip, there were a number of issues I didn't anticipate or really have a good grip on - logistical issues, not behavioral. For instance, in high school there are no real "official" classes, so my 2nd & 6th period classes have students who are in different humanities and math classes - in other words, unlike middle school where students form a pretty much cohesive unit that stays together all day, in high school students get individual programs, so the whole field trip experience is in many ways a more disruptive process. The museum was also packed, so completing the "lab" was problematic, just as a matter of being able to view all the necessary exhibits and stand in a position to read the material and gather the necessary information. It was, however, all-in-all a positive experience.

Comment

I may have given a false impression here regarding my feelings about labs (vs. lecture, e.g.), so a little clarification. The difficulty I have is not with the idea of doing lab or hands-on activities, but doing them on commmand according to a set schedule and set time limit regardless of whether we are at a point in the unit where a lab makes sense or not and regardless of the fact that we may have a lab one week that takes several days to complete, and the scheduled lab time falls on a day where some discussion/lecture would be a more pressing need. I would much prefer a schedule where all science classes were 55 minutes long and one meeting per day, allowing me to schedule activities according to the needs of the unit rather than the needs of an artificial and outdated model of lecture and lab periods.