Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say? (Part 2)

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

What makes a good teacher?

You may find this section either reassuring or maybe infuriating, if only because it is a rather short section without a lot of detail or supporting evidence. Willingham takes all the variables about good teaching that show up in surveys, end-of-year-evaluations, student comments, etc., and boils it all down to a couple of simple ideas:

1. Do I connect with my students on a personal level? That is, do my students have the sense that I am a nice person?
2. Is my instruction well-organized from the students' perspective? Am I taking the complex, intricate details of my content and organizing it in such a way that the students feel they can make sense of it?
   

That's it. If I answered yes to both those questions, honestly, then I am probably an effective teacher. If I answered no to even one of them, then I am not likely an effective teacher, or not as effective as I could be. Notice in both questions the emphasis is on the students' perspective. It doesn't matter how organized I think my instruction is if the students are utterly baffled by it. Similarly, from the students' view "tough love" may come across as all tough and no love, or attempts to be "friends" with students may come across as phony or lead to role confusion and feelings of betrayal when report cards come out. I do think Willingham's treatment of the issue is a little oversimplified and I suspect there's a better word than "nice" that would have been more helpful, but I do agree that the interpersonal relationships between students and teachers (or teachers and administrators, for that matter!) make a world of difference.

On the other hand, if Willingham is correct, then the good news is that there are many paths to take that will get us to the goal of connecting with students on a personal level. Many teachers are able to project a caring and likeable persona in a variety of ways. Willingham gives some examples from his observations - the "comedian" who uses humor, the "mother figure" who dotes on her students, the storyteller who has a personal anecdote for everything, the showman who would set off fireworks if it were allowed. If you think back to teachers who really had an impact on your life I'm sure you can come up with other examples and I would love to hear about them in the comments section.

The key is that they all use their own personalities to forge a style that connects with their students. This element of good teaching cannot be "taught" or prescribed. It must come naturally and organically from yourself, but you may have to work at developing habits that demonstrate to students that you care about them on a personal level - it's not enough to say in words that you care, they have to perceive that you care.

Being a wonderfully warm and likeable person won't matter, though, if you don't master the second requirement of good teaching. Unlike your personality, organization doesn't necessarily come naturally, may take a lot of work to develop, and in fact encompasses a whole lot of assumptions about the preparedness of the teacher. For example, organizing content so that students will be able to make sense of it obviously demands that the teacher understand content well enough to distill the essential elements from the details and be able to make connections appropriate for the grade level and abilities of the students. The following sections of the chapter, and indeed much of the book, are devoted to this second element of good teaching.

In the next section Willingham discusses a strategy for organizing instruction around stories.

Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Part 1

Covering four separate threads- memory, the characteristics of a good teacher, storytelling, and memorization strategies - this chapter is a little unfocused. Of course they are all related, but the transitions from one theme to another seem abrupt. On the other hand, it gives me an easy way to split the blog posts about chapter 3 into smaller, more manageable chunks, which is especially helpful with the busy week we have going right now. So here's the first short blast.

In the opening section on memory, Willingham discusses why some things stick in our brains and others do not. He goes through some misconceptions, such as the idea that in order to make things memorable you must have an emotional connection to the content. This is the familiar "do you remember what you were doing on 9/11" type question, where the emotional impact of the event helps us remember in vivid detail the otherwise trivial activities we might have been engaged in on that day. It turns out that emotional events can indeed facilitate the recall of events, but we don't necessarily need emotional engagement to commit things to memory, and even if it were true, it's not so easy to bring about authentic emotional connections with everything (or even most things) we teach in a classroom setting.

What about the notion that our minds are like video cameras, recording everything we experience, subject to recall under the right circumstances, such as hypnosis? Also a myth. This is fairly easily tested in a laboratory in which subjects are given things to remember and asked to recall the information a short time later either under hypnosis or without hypnosis. Both groups perform equally well - or equally poorly, depending on how you look at it. Interestingly, the hypnotized group always expresses more confidence that their recall is accurate, even when they are wrong.

The real key to memory appears to be some combination of repetition (discussed later) and actively thinking about the thing to be remembered:

The brain lays its bets this way: If you don't think about something very much, then you probably won't want to think about it again, so it need not be stored. If you think about something, then it's likely that you will want to think about it in the same way in the future.

Seems kind of obvious but it does have some implications for teaching and learning that deserve to be explored. You are not doubt familiar with the expression "be careful what you wish for, it just might come true." We can take a little license here and say be careful what you ask your students to think about, because that's what they will remember. Willingham gives an example of a teacher who wants students to learn about the Underground Railroad, and thinks it would be nice have students bake biscuits, a typical food of runaway slaves. Unfortunately this activity diverts students from thinking about the runaway slaves and the lives they lived on the run, as the students will likely think almost exclusively about measuring and mixing ingredients. (Willingham doesn't offer an alternative activity, which would have been nice.)

Nonetheless, I do think it is important to consider, as we strive to bring our subject matter to life through sometimes elaborate and complex projects, whether the efforts will lead students to actually think about the content and make connections as we intend, or instead lead them to countless hours thinking about how to make cool effects in powerpoint.

Next:
What good teachers have in common.

Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need?

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Factual Knowledge Matters
Nothing really new here, again demolishing the false choice between teaching knowledge and teaching critical thinking - we know that you can't think critically in a vacuum (you have to think about something, i.e. facts) but facts are pretty useless if you can't generate inferences from them and connect them with related facts and otherwise think critically about them. Common sense and a strong pedagogical tradition already acknowledge that we must do both.

Just as an example, reading is virtually impossible without background knowledge - this seems self-evident, and should be, but Willingham reviews the research and reminds us why it is so important. First, all writers leave out vast amounts of information when they write. They leave this information out because it is assumed the reader will have the requisite background knowledge to fill in the gaps, and simply because it is impossible to make explicit every detail. Attempting to do so would also make for very long and boring reading.

Research shows that elementary school students do pretty well in reading across the socioeconomic spectrum up until about grade 4. Suddenly, reading switches from an emphasis on decoding skills to an emphasis on comprehending. From this point forward, students from lower socioeconomic groups struggle to keep up with their peers from higher socioeconomic groups in large part, or perhaps wholly, as a result of the knowledge gap that makes reading comprehension so much more difficult for them. Where does the knowledge gap come from? Students from higher income families (as a group) are exposed to more reading-relevant knowledge in the home, which gives them a leg up at school, which leads to an increasingly wide gap as the years go by. A crucial component of this phenomenon of an accelerating gap (unfair as it may seem) is that the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge.

Some have argued that learning facts is less important in an age of instant internet access to vast stores of information. But research shows that you can't just google the facts when you need them. A large body of facts must be in long-term memory and easily retrievable, therefore teaching should provide students with knowledge. The example of reading comprehension should make that pretty clear - even if it were possible to know what information the author of a particular text is leaving out, who would want to interrupt a story every 5 seconds to look up the meaning of a word or concept?

For schools and teaching, the key is knowing what facts are required and how to get students to learn those facts - remember, the title of the book is "Why don't students like school?" and memorizing long lists of meaningless (to them) facts is probably high on the list of student dislikes. So what's the solution? One "easy" answer is reading itself - students should be reading reading reading. Reading is an excellent way to gain knowledge, knowledge we don't even know we will need, general knowledge about the world beyond our immediate narrow interests. Broadly speaking, this is precisely what we would want most students to know after leaving school - enough to read a serious daily newspaper and make sense of the events taking place in the world around them, enough to watch and understand a serious discussion on TV about global warming, the economy, a health issue, etc.

Simply asking students to read more is sound advice but a bit of the horse and water problem (there, I just made reference to an old adage that I assume you will be familiar with - if not, you are probably wondering what the hell reading has to do with horses and water). It also doesn't always work when you want students to learn specific information about particular topics such as history or science or math, etc. Part of the answer here is implied in the paradox presented in chapter one - thinking is hard and we avoid it whenever possible, but we're also curious creatures who like to solve problems. That helps settle the the question of what facts are important in the narrower sense of classroom objectives, and that would be the facts necessary to solve a problem related to the major, recurring themes in a discipline. It also helps with the motivation issue - students will be more interested in learning facts that are seen as necessary to solve a problem - the facts then become meaningful and the students will have to think about the facts in order to make progress with the problem. (This concept will be addressed in some detail in chapter 3.)

More thoughts on knowledge

Students must have the necessary background knowledge before thinking critically about an issue.This idea was touched on in Chapter 1. It's fine to start a lesson with a mystery or a discrepant event, but make sure you return to the activity after students have been taught the concepts needed to actually solve the problem.

Shallow knowledge is better than none. No one can have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge at least allows us to get the basic meaning of a broad range of reading materials we might encounter. It can also be the foundation for developing deeper understanding later if needed.

Students can acquire knowledge incidentally - A math class can present problems with science or social studies knowledge embedded in the problem, likewise for other disciplines. I appreciate the fact that students come to my biology class having already learned a little about human descent and DNA from their 9th grade humanities classes.

Start early - well, we don't have much control over that. We know that students who have family lives rich with vocabulary and exposure to knowledge of the world have a tremendous advantage in the school setting- this is a public and education policy issue.

Next-
Chapter 3: Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

So everyone loves solving problems if they are the right kinds of problems - Goldilocks problems, not too easy and not too hard...

Since everyone is different, and we have a variety of students in a range of different places academically speaking, finding a problem with the right degree of difficulty presents a challenge in any classroom. You know where this is going – differentiated instruction.

We know that, but Why Don’t Students Like School? is not about differentiated instruction per se, though a couple of later chapters are devoted to the issue. Willingham instead focuses on the “instruction” aspect of it and thus proposes a framework around which differentiation can be built. His approach will sound familiar to anyone who has experience with the inquiry method, and that means asking questions: the right questions for the right students at the right time.

Willingham takes a science example, which I will naturally use to illustrate the point. It is a common science teaching strategy to start a unit or lesson with some sort of "discrepant event," a demonstration or activity where the results are unexpected or counter-intuitive. One classic discrepant event involves a glass bottle with a shelled, hard-boiled egg placed on top that cannot be pushed into the bottle. However, place a lighted match or piece of paper inside the bottle, then place the egg on the rim of the bottle, and when the flame goes out the egg will be "sucked" into the bottle. Cool! The problem is, if students are then asked to explain what happened they have absolutely no way to even form a reasonable hypothesis because they just don't have the background knowledge of the gas laws (the relationship between temperature, volume, & pressure in gases) to understand what is happening.

The solution is to revisit the egg in a bottle demonstration later in the unit when students have enough background to solve the problem. Of course this is common sense, and not a new idea for anyone trained in science teaching strategies. The demo serves as a motivator, a common experience to refer back to, a mystery that is revealed over time as the unit progresses. I suppose that many teachers. perhaps strapped for time, jump straight to the explanation and dispense with the discovery process.

An example from another discipline might be the use of political cartoons in social studies, where a better strategy might be to show the cartoon in the beginning of a unit, then revisit the cartoon throughout the unit as more and more elements of the cartoon become clear and the students themselves uncover its meaning. I don't know whether this if already the way that my colleagues normally use political cartoons, I do know they are frequently used as summative assessments on state exams.

It occurs to me that the author is using a similar strategy in the design of his book (and it may even be that he mentioned it already in the introduction, but it is just now becoming clear what he meant, and thus I feel like I've discovered it myself). Each chapter presents questions for the reader to ponder, but no one chapter fully answers the question, instead the topics are revisited throughout and new information is presented in later chapters that elucidate earlier questions.

Next: Chapter 2: How can I teach students the skills they need? (On the necessity of knowledge)

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Yeah I know, writing is hard too, because it requires so much thinking! And since reading is also hard, I broke up the first chapter into 2 parts. Part 1 here deals with the background theoretical issues, part 2 will discuss teaching implications....

Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School?

Not really much here we don’t already know, but the way Willingham expresses the ideas makes them seem new – and I mean that in a good way. Sometimes it helps to hear things we already know in a different way to remind us or re-awaken awareness of these basic truths.

Everything follows from the idea presented in the introduction that thinking is hard. In chapter 1 the author expands this idea, presenting an overview of the functioning of the brain (most of the frustration of working through difficult, novel problems lies in the limits of "working memory") and using unfamiliar problem solving puzzles to induce that feeling of perplexity or even frustration in the reader that our students experience perhaps every day when we present them with difficult tasks.

Thinking is hard, and we avoid thinking whenever we can. We don’t go about our daily routines thinking through each and every move we make – we wouldn’t get very far if we did. Instead we rely much more on memory, whether factual memory (telephone numbers, names, etc.) or procedural memory (how to get to work, what to do when you get there, how to calculate a tip at a restaurant, etc.).

The good news is that although thinking is hard and we tend to avoid it if we can, we also get pleasure from solving problems, i.e. thinking, but only under certain limited circumstances. Again this will be kind of obvious and familiar: the problem has to be difficult enough that it really is a problem that you have to work to solve, but not so difficult that after concentrated effort no solution is forthcoming. Willingham’s definition of a “problem” is general, reasonable, and appropriate. A problem could be understanding a poem, solving a math problem, or to throw in an example of my own, figuring out how DNA replicates.

Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 2: Implications for teaching)

Why Don't Students Like School?

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

Introduction

N.B. Snide political comments are my own and not those of the author.

I am blogging my reading of the book Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I started with the introduction this morning on the subway and was intrigued by a couple of points that I will mention here. I definitely want to keep reading.

First, for a science teacher steeped in the inquiry methodology that was all the rage a few years ago, comes the admonition from Willingham that "you should not try to get your students to think like real scientists." Well, I've got to find out what that's all about.

The second point should be obvious to anyone who is remotely following the political discourse in this country today, and that is that we need to stop thinking about how good humans are at thinking and realize that we are in fact pretty bad at it. Will this help me to understand the phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, & right wing talk in general?

The introduction lays out the basic problem: cognitive science has taught us a lot about how the brain works, which you might think would lead us to develop better learning and teaching strategies, but a peek at any average classroom today would tell you that not so much has changed in how instruction is delivered and how schools are structured. The book promises an understanding of how the mind works and practical implications of this knowledge for how to become a better teacher.

I have been to workshops that make similar promises, so I will approach this one with cautious optimism...

Next: Chapter 1: Why Don’t Students Like School? (Part 1: Thinking is hard)

Special Delivery

I've been meaning to post these pics for over a week now, but could not find the USB cable for my camera (it's a mini-usb connector). SO I finally gave up and bought a multi-card reader.

At any rate, I walked into my 3rd period class one day and glanced at the cockroach habitat to see right there, out in the open for everyone to watch, the birth of what looks to be about 30-50 baby cockroaches.

And here's a somewhat blurry close-up. You can see the dark spots, which are their eyes, against an otherwise completely white body. You can also see a section of the egg sac, it's a shiny translucent piece, just off center with the babies yet to emerge. They started to darken within an hour and by the following day were completely black all over.

Needless to say, the kids who were fortunate enough to be there were grossed out but fascinated by the whole idea. In three years I've never witnessed the birth process before, so I was pretty psyched myself. Mom seemed pretty exhausted and didn't move much afterward, not surprisingly. In fact she was still in the same spot the following day. But she seems to have recovered just fine and has now re-assimilated with the rest of the colony.

Addendum:

Oh yeah, from what I could tell, since the process was already underway when I first noticed them, it appears that the delivery took a little less than half an hour to complete.

First Real Snow

On Friday we woke up to what would eventually be about 6 inches of snow - in a relatively snow-less winter, this was something to celebrate. So here are a couple of pics of the kids in Ft. Tryon Park.


My camera is definitely spazzing on me - there's some crazy horizontal streaking in the images, but I haven't had time to check what the problem is.

After watching some other kids, they both just on their own decided to start "snowboarding" (basically standing up on a boogie board, and later borrowing someone's plastic snowboard). It took them about 10 tries to get the hang of it. Ah youth...

I would have pictures but they were terribly badly exposed. I'm thinking of going into debt finally for a digital SLR after years of piddling with this point & shoot toy.

Muscle Fatigue

The required NY State Living Environment lab called "Making Connections" (no electronic version is available) investigates muscle fatigue as students squeeze a clothespin as quickly as possible for a one-minute period of time. The lab, without mentioning lactic acid per se, goes on the state that muscle fatigue is caused by a buildup of the waste products of cellular activity, lactic acid being the standard suspect (the regents curriculum is notorious for avoiding the use of specific names of things).

That explanation has been pretty much laid to rest recently, and the NY Times article from February 12 (I'm just getting around to catching up on the news feeders) finds another likely explanation in leaky calcium ion channels :

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion.

There's a graphic that I'll post below, but it will probably disappear soon. It isn't really all that helpful:

It also leaves open the question as to why the calcium channels become leaky in the first place. Is it a change in pH, temperature, physical stress on the proteins that make up the channel? That question isn't even raised in the Times article. The obvious issue that is raised is the potential for abuse in competitive athletics of therapies to combat fatigue (the study was initially designed to find ways to combat cardiac muscle fatigue from heart disease). The investigators in this study were able to reduce fatigue in skeletal muscle of mice using drugs called rycals, which stopped the leaky calcium channels, and allowed the mice to continue exercise for 10 - 20% longer than without the drug. There's an interesting speculation at the end of the article about the utility of muscle fatigue:

“Maybe this is a protective mechanism,” he said. “Maybe fatigue is saying that you are getting ready to go into a danger zone. So it is cutting you off. If you could will yourself to run as fast and as long as you could, some people would run until they keeled over and died.”

Just ask Pheidippides.

Road Runner

I've been a member of the New York Road Runners Club since sometime in 1994. I always enjoyed participating in their "races," not as a competetive runner (I'm exceedingly slow by race standards as I'll document below) but just as a way of pushing myself a bit and mainly for fun. Today I ran in the Snowflake 4 miler, and although we just got a load of snow yesterday, no precipitation was falling today during the race. It was my first race since 2003, back when I was dreaming of running in the NYC marathon but didn't quite make it there. I'm working toward that goal again now. I need 9 races this year to get automatic entry for the 2009 marathon. That part is easy. The hard part is then getting my mileage up to a point where I am physically ready for the marathon.

One nice benefit of the club is that they keep all your race history on file and available online. So I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past. Of course the drawback is that I can look at my performance today and compare it to how I was doing in the past! What a difference 14 years makes. Back before the kids were born (pre-1998) I was consistently running sub 8-min miles, for 3 & 4 mile races.

Today I really thought I was moving fast and pushing myself, when much to my disappointment I looked at my watch at the one mile mark and saw - 10 minutes. Wow. Of course the first part of the course is always slow going as the crowded starting field gradually thins out, so I finally finished the race at 36 minutes - a 9 minute pace overall, but boy was I huffing and puffing over that final mile. If the mile markers were accurate and we take away the first mile, the final three were at approximately 8:40 pace, which isn't that far off the old marks. Pretty much in line with the 2002/2003 marks I was turning in as I was dreaming of the marathon. Of course I was about 10 lbs heavier then, so I'm a little concerned about the apparent effects of aging on my body. I will definitely be looking for improvement over the next few months as I get back into my training.

Fantastic Voyage into Creationism

I thought I would show some excerpts from the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage to my biology classes. Although some of the biology is just plain wrong, I'm not sure how much of it is due to a more primitive state of the science in the 1960's and how much is just Hollywood getting rid of any little factual details that might interfere with a good story. I'll ignore the absurd physics elements, but here's a good starting point for considering just the silliness of shrinking things. For a biology example, there's the red blood cells (corpuscles) changing from blue to red as they pick up oxygen in the lungs. I thought the blue blood myth was pretty well known already in the 60s? The special effects here are all lava-lampish, so there's that little detail as well.

A second problem is the antibodies. We just studied the immune system in my classes, so the kids would probably pick up on that error - antibodies don't just spontaneously appear to attack a new pathogen. There's a substantial lag time between exposure and the production of antibodies. On top of that, the antibodies are seen almost as mindful agents seeking out the intruder - which simply isn't the case. Lastly, the wetsuits worn by the scientists are all the same material, so how is it that the antibodies only attack Raquel Welch and not the others? Of course it's a great excuse to have four men clawing at her breasts to remove the antibodies before she suffocates.

Then there's the problem of the cytoskeleton. At the size they have been reduced to, antibodies are clearly visible, about the size of a hand. At such a scale, the cytoskeleton, not to mention other blood proteins, would be a bit of an obstacle. As it is, the cells are portrayed as a thin, fragile, almost gelatinous film with little more than water inside. So many other little details that don't work from a scientific point of view, it might be fun to watch it just to let the kids point them out in class.

On a positive note, there is an interesting trip through the heart, the lungs, the inner ear, a look at lymph vessels, and the depiction of blood vessels as a tunnel of cells, which is pretty cool.

As the title of the post implies, however, there's the other more sinister aspect of the film, the classic cold-war anti-communist propaganda element. Part of it is overt - the Soviets and Americans are in a race to master the whole miniaturization technology for military purposes (see silliness article again). The patient in the movie has the information on how to overcome the time limit (60 minutes, to the second apparently) and he's coming to the US with the secret. Of course he is then the target of an assassination attempt by Soviet operatives that leaves him with a brain injury, leading to the "fantastic voyage" to save him with a laser surgical procedure to remove a blood clot.

More understated (for it's time), is how the villain is depicted and contrasted with the good doctor who will do the actual operation. Our villain, obvious from the beginning with his bald head and British accent, is the paragon of the rational scientist. He has little time for waxing poetic about the human body and offers instead Darwinian explanations (the horror!) for the wonders of the human body. The good doctor has other ideas, and the other hero of the movie, sent along for security purposes and suspecting a saboteur on the mission, forms a bond with the doctor as they quote together passages from literature extolling the virtues of the almighty creator and his creation. Although his sympathies are suspect in the beginning of the movie, we know when he starts spouting this crap (the human mind is finite, incapable of comprehending the infinite), that he can't be a commie. He's on our side. It's the atheist who is easily corrupted without an absolute moral compass to guide him. Appropriate, then, that he is in fact the ship's navigator. The ship goes off course almost from the beginning and his plans for proceeding are at several critical junctures overridden by the rest of the crew. Communist atheism was also part of the revulsion Americans felt toward the Soviet Union and much of the rabid anti-communism from the right grew out of this fact. Then it's a short walk from Darwin to Stalin among the religious right and their intellectual co-dependents.

So I'll try to find a way to skip all the garbage and show some of the interesting bits.

Dancing Like Rabbits

I guess you know you are truly* old when you start worrying about how the kids today are dancing. Every generation it seems has its dance moves that the old folks deem way out of line with proper decorum and public decency. I know the whole "Elvis the Pelvis" prudery from the 50's - but honestly, the only way it could get any raunchier than today would be if the kids just strip and have actual sex out on the dance floor. So I REALLY worry about the next generation that has to one-up these guys!

Oh, yeah, I should mention I chaperoned the high school Valentine's Day dance last night. And in case you haven't seen it, just imagine dirty dancing without the dancing. The tension I felt as chaperone was difficult to handle. I basically decided that as long as they weren't groping one another with their hands and as long as everyone involved was a willing participant, I wasn't going to make up a rule on the spot that this kind of dancing would be unacceptable. That didn't make me any less uncomfortable watching it. In the future I suppose we need to get together and decide on some ground (or should I say "grind") rules for what is and is not tolerable among consenting high school students at a school function.

Further Reading

Students 'freak' out over dirty dancing ban

Students protest ban against dirty dancing (Connecticut)

*Hmm, I kept looking at truely and just didn't seem right, even though when I clicked on spell check it didn't show an error. So I looked at a dictionary and sure enough, truly. Now realize Bloglines formatting toolbar, including spell checker isn't working on my computer. Oy.

Masters Project

I'm determined to find a doable project this time, even if it isn't the most exciting. What I have proposed for now is to look at student understanding of DNA structure and replication using either, 1)Hands-on, 3D models or, 2) computer simulations. I haven't got any feedback yet from the instructor or my classmates, but I can't think of any reason it shouldn't be an acceptable study. I still need to do a literature search to see what's already been done and look for some cognitive science rationale for my hypothesis: both methods are important, a combination of the two will be more effective than either one alone.

From there it's a matter of finding the appropriate instructional materials and designing the assessments. I will have to decide whether to use my own home-made materials (Pasta DNA models) or purchase a commercially produced kit, such as this one. I'm leaning toward the commercial kit if only because the pasta lab gets a little tedious and is a bit removed from the standard visual models of what DNA looks like. Then, finding computer simulations that are comparably comprehensive and cover the same concepts will require some digging. All students will get the same introductory lessons from me before manipulating the materials/software. Wish me luck.

Mealworm Madness

Just finished up the mealworm lab with one class, and will probably scrap it for this year for my other classes. We were not able to get much in the way of useful data. I believe the major problem was the materials - a lot of little things went wrong that I need to correct. First, the cylindrical tubes made of a slippery (for mealworms) plastic caused the mealworms to bunch up together at the entrance, then spin their "wheels" as they tried to walk from one place to another. So each end of the tube, which contained the experimental conditions (such as light/dark, dry/moist, etc.) was just too difficult for the mealworms to get to, much less change their minds and head for the opposite side. They tended to go in whichever direction they were initially oriented in - understandably.

So back to the drawing board in terms of designing the experimental spaces - I will need to go back to a more boxy format with cardboard, which will also make it easier for the students to handle the mealworms. I will post the updated lab sheets when I get that done, meanwhile I've attached a note for teachers warning of the issues.

Addendum

I neglected to mention the insane amount of time I spent finding and modifying the tubes for this activity. Note to self - try on a small scale before investing in a whole class set of custom made materials!!!

A Note

This is probably the longest stretch I've gone without posting. It's been a challenging year in terms of finding the time - or perhaps more to the point, the focus and energy -- needed to keep up with work and then set aside time to reflect on it. In all honesty I've been a little down lately, feeling a bit lost and lethargic, spending too much time procrastinating and worrying, getting by from day-to-day. I try not to let it show, and can usually turn up the energy for class and have reasonably interesting lessons and discussions with students, but during the non-teaching intervals, I'm really using time inefficiently. I may even have to start practicing some of the time- and stress-management strategies I teach to my health classes. As it is, I'm finishing up my master's project this semester and may have no choice, since I will really be in trouble if I don't get back into the swing of it. Blogging is actually a decent indicator of how things are going - If I can keep up the postings, then it's usually because things are going well and I have positive things to write about. If things are going badly, I don't want to sit here and whine about it so I just stop posting. Let's see how it goes the next couple of weeks as the new semester really kicks in. Up next, a post about the mealworm lab I wrote up this summer that needs some work!

How do you know?

This year I've got a lot of students who are vocally resistant to science - evolution in particular, but science in general is suspect in the minds of a lot more students than I've witnessed before. A frequent challenge is "how do they know that?" and a frequent answer (provided by the student asking the question in the first place) is, "they don't, they're just guessing." That's a literal quote, mind you.

So, after deciding last year to retire the activity, this year I am again dusting off the "Black Box" lab to address the idea that science is about just guessing what's going on in the world, or because we can't "see" the structure of an atom, or the solar system, or macroevolution, we shouldn't have much confidence in the models presented by scientists. Where this thinking ultimately leads is to a rationalization for rejecting science in favor more comfortable or "convenient" explanations, such as creationism.

I can't say a lot about the activity, since the element of mystery is crucial, and I wouldn't want a student to stumble upon this blog and spoil it. I'm attaching the lab sheets that I revised last week, without teacher's guide - if you want a copy, send me an e-mail and I'll get it to you.

Black Box Lab - Student Edition

Global Warming & Risk Management

How It All Ends - Watch more free videos

- Watch more free videos

Stress = Silence

I suppose that there are people for whom blogging would be a form of stress release and therefore blog even more when stressed. I'm of the opposite variety - when the demands of work become overwhelming, the blog falls way down on my priorities list.

So it has been a couple of weeks. I have a lot of stored materials ready to go when the time comes, but there are also gaps to be filled, and that's what I've been doing lately. Already the workload of 120 students - setting up computer gradebook, arranging seating assignments, checking on materials, collecting contact information, sending out progress reports to parents, posting assignments on the website, collecting labs and homeworks and journals - I'm drowning!

But much of this work is "front-loading" and will get easier. I look closely at labs and homeworks in the beginning, but after this I will do honor policy ("raise your hand if you don't have homework") plus spot check ("the following 5 randomly chosen students please turn in your homework for grading"). Ditto with the labs. Then the only thing I need to concentrate on is projects & journals.

I decided on a different lab this year for natural selection. I pretty much took Kim Foglia's lab and copied into my standard format, changed some of the text to reflect my own way of presenting the topic to reduce confusion, cut out some of the more detailed analytical questions (too confusing for my students) and voila. Here it is:

Natural Selection Game

First Day 2007

Here's a first day activity based on Dan Collea's suggestion on the Bioforum Listserv and modified for my own circumstances and comfort levels. It brings biology to "life" from Day 1 by introducing an interesting creature - my hissing cockroaches - for students to observe. At the end of the period on I will distribute my course packet for students to read as homework.

I'm calling it a lab, a "getting to know you" activity where I gather info about them, they gather info about the cockroaches and later they also gather info about me and the course. The lab folds in a discussion of the scientific method - observe, formulate hypotheses, test hypotheses - It may evolve into more elaborate investigations, but for now I'm keeping it rather simple, with a limited initial duration but open-ended possibilities for further explorations. The last section asks students to imagine the cockroaches can talk - what kinds of questions would you ask? Some of these questions may then lead to follow up investigations. I will revise as it unfolds.

Getting to Know You.

Updated Course Packet

Not much has changed. I streamlined the course overview, re-arranged a couple of items, included details of our new lab policy and changed the dates to reflect the 2008 Regents exam administration.

I changed the grading policy a bit as well. I lumped together tests, quizzes, projects, and classwork because I found that in a given marking period, I assign radically different amounts of each of the categories - sometimes there are just a lot of tests and not many projects, for example, which gives an undue weight to a single project if I gave each category its own percentage. As a group, they are now 70% of the grade, which is what they would add up to if I separated them out. That allows me to keep the 20% for labs and 10% for homework. Both of those components are fairly consistent.

Course Packet 2007-8