Science STARS Presentation

The final presentation day was pretty great. The Bomb Stars were a little nervous at first, but then they really got into their demos.

What makes great teachers great?

Gotta give this a read… not sure when…

“Malcolm Gladwell has a good piece in the current New Yorker about how hard it is to figure out what makes great teachers great.”

(stolen from boingboing.net)

Cognitive Dissonance (Pixar-style)

A friend emailed this to me with the subject line “cognitive dissonance”.

The description on the order page includes these awesome tidbits:

“Help Wall-E clean up Earth and find his true love with this kit!”

and

“Don’t forget a Disposable Helium Tank”

Science Stars Week 10

Tuesday was our last STARS meeting at Wilson. This Saturday the Bomb Stars will present their poster and slides and demos at the U of R, for a group of about 50 5th and 6th grade girls, as well as their families. We had 5 girls here this week, and it sounds like all of them will be bringing at least one parent and one other family member.

Today was a lot of fun. We really pushed things during the last 3 weeks to make sure we had lots of data collected, so we could do some meaningful analysis, so we could plan a decent poster, and it seems like it all paid off. We first got the girls together and recapped their “science story” - and what order the stages came in (Model, Data Analysis, Experiments, Question, Conclusions - you figure it out…). This actually led to a good discussion, because Jaslynn put Experiments before Model, which allowed us to talk about the non-linear loping/cyclical nature of scientific inquiry, and how we had to do a few experiments before we came up with our model, but then we did more experiments after that to confirm and explore our model, and this is what scientists do all the time.

We were able to divide up tasks nicely in order to get the poster started and the 3 slide teaser completed. We arrived with a framework built for the 3 slides, and let the girls modify and add text as they wanted, and swap and move photos around. It would have been nice to let them do it from scratch, given the assignment of  just “make 3 slides: Question, Methods, and Teaser” - but that could have easily taken an hour or two. We also arrived with lots of printed out graphic elements, explosions, titles, photos, etc., and let them go to town with the poster, which really came out well. I think their confidence and interest in making the poster may have been heightened by having them see examples of science fair posters last week - two of the other groups reported that their girls did not have too much interest in putting the poster together. Hard to say - might have just been a long busy day for everyone, too. We also had lots of materials and choices for the poster parts, and we had the sections titles taken from the science story, so that probably helped get it moving.

Overall, the girls worked really well together, we saw perfectionism and focused hard work evidenced a lot in the poster creation, and we all a good time doing it - it was even relaxing a few times in there. We didn’t quite get to do a dry run of our demos or presentations, but we’ll probably push for that when the girls arrive on Saturday.

Science Stars Week 9

Today should have been a tough day, since we didn’t have a single demo or hands-on activity for the girls, but it actually went pretty well. Last week we only had two girls present to do the final data analysis, and this week we had 5, with both from last week present. That meant the 2 could catch the other 3 up to speed on what happened last week, which worked pretty well, especially since those 2 had made such a great series of graphs.

We started out with our usual icebreaker - this time doing the old “Would you rather…” game, which went over pretty well. We had a couple of distraction problems early on, but these were mainly due to the fact that we were in close proximity to the dry-erase board and markers, which was too tempting for some of the girls. Previously we’ve really had good results when we go have discussions out in the hallway or in other non-classroom spaces, and this was a good example of how important cutting out distractions can be.

This week, aided by the data analysis recap from the 2 girls from last week, and by their notebooks, we did a good amount of recapping of all the things we’ve done since the beginning, to help put the girls in mind for telling their story and presenting their data and results on Dec. 6th to their families and other students. April’s idea of having them single out things that are part of our “science story” was a good way to make their story (and the process of their study) explicit to them. I sort of suspect that until this week, many of the girls would have told you that from week to week they just did science stuff that doesn’t really connect to the other weeks - so this was important in tying it together. This is partly due to the changing attendance from week to week, and partly to the time crunch we are under. We’ve tried every week to make connections to previous weeks and talk about what it will lead to, but I think this is something that gets lost in the shuffle a bit, especially due to the time crunch that we are under each week. Looking back, I suppose it might have been useful to to a regular “segment” each week, of “what have we done so far, what did we just do, what will this lead to next” - but that would have taken a chunk of time each week. And we were ALWAYS short on time.

So the girls eventually got a “science story” on the board, along with LOTS of “cool stuff to show” (demo ideas) for the final presentation, though we had to push and scaffold a bit to get some missing bits of the science story. But we got there. And we all spent a while looking at a slideshow of “science fair photos” that we had grabbed from all over the web, since we thought that many of the girls might have never seen tri-fold poster presentations. I think this kind of modeling is really important. A few months ago, I might have been concerned that this might limit their thinking to copies of the examples we showed them, but I have come to realize that kids don’t want to copy, but they really do want (and need) to understand WHAT they are supposed to do, and grown-up words like “poster presentation” are pretty baffling without any context. We carefully chose examples that had both boys and girls, kids of various ethnicity, posters that looked like parents had made them, and posters done totally by hand, and posters that were totally serious as well as posters with some humor in them.

Next week the girls are going to create their poster and teaser slideshow, and we talked about what will go into those, and made lists of what supplies we need to bring. We THINK that should go pretty smoothly, since they love cutting, gluing, and making stuff, especially if we can provide them with a good variety of materials. We’ll have to focus on making sure they get all the important things into the poster, while still letting them make it their own.

“Embracing the tumble”

Here’s an article all pre-service teachers should probably read. Some Stanford researchers have been studying the different attitudes that people have when they are confronted with failure.

Given that I’ve been plowing through three huge, overly ambitious earth science lessons with three sections in 5 days, I’ve run into a few aspects here and there that I might term “failures”.

Here’s an interesting quote - I’ve gotta learn to think more like these kids…

These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”

(I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m all down on myself - I definitely hit some lessons and some aspects pretty well. But I think learning to do a better job rolling with the punches and get back up again is going to be good for anyone.)

The messiness of science…

Phew. I’m in the home stretch of my “3 Innovative Lessons.” Due to a variety of factors, I really had no choice on my lesson topics. I had to cover soil, the water cycle, and porosity & permeability. My CT didn’t seem too excited by these topics, and even when I told my dad (geology professor) about them, he basically grunted and said “Hmmph… soils.”

That said, my dad gave me some great help with the lesson. He loaned me some soil corers (see photo) along with some fancy compasses, fancy soil sieves, soil color charts, and other stuff. (And don’t let me forget my amazing supervisor, who gave me so many good suggestions and so much guidance and reassurance when I was panicking about it all.) This helped me turn “soils…” into a glorious exploration of the Nature of (soil) Science!

Well, sort of, until the weather intervened.

The original plan was for me to take the class outside to dig up soil samples, and then bring them back to the room for analysis in a very open-ended fashion. The lessons was designed so that there would be as much observation, use of scientific instruments, messiness of science, and all that general NOS stuff as possible. I knew that snow and cold were in the forecast, so I went outside the school on the day before my soil lesson (luckily a parent-teacher conf day) and dug up a bunch of samples in the woods behind the school.

Let me repeat that. I (a student teacher who is not yet known or recognizable to all staff) went and searched around behind the school, digging and cursing, with a shovel and a soil corer for about 45 minutes. It isn’t too surprising that some teachers got nervous, and called the head custodian and told him that some weird guy was burying something in the woods behind the school. And the head custodian came over to that side of the building and found the shovel that I had jammed in the door so I could get back in, and he started to get nervous that the “weird guy” was actually now in the building. When he finally ventured outside and saw me, he said he was about a minute away from calling the cops.

Now that would have been awesome.

I am really glad that I know the custodian and he knows me, and he has a good sense of humor. He was relieved to see it was me, and the whole thing pretty much blew over.

But I haven’t really talked about my lessons yet. Guess I will save that for another post.

Alright students – all D tables may now get in line…

During most of September and October the two cafeterias at my school were under construction. They were converting two small cafeterias to one large one, and taking a bit of space to also build a teachers lounge. So for most of the school year so far, most of the kids in the middle school have had to buy their lunch in the partially closed cafeteria and then schlep it down to the gym to eat, all in under 25 minutes. (There were a small number of tables kept in use in one of the old cafeterias during the construction project.)

This all seemed like a big headache for everyone involved.  Everyone was really looking forward to the new cafeteria opening and solving everyone’s problems. I ate with some of my students in the new cafeteria a few days ago, and I was surprised at how the new cafeteria seemed to already have its own problems. The serving and lunch lines are pretty compact, and so the kids have to go up to buy lunch in four groups (A, B, C, D), based on the letter label on their table. This ended up giving the D kids (which included our table) about 9 minutes to eat lunch once they got their food. The kids at my table were pretty vocal about how annoying it was to have to wait so long to get their food, in a brand new re-built cafeteria.

The new cafeteria is pretty nice looking, but it seems weird that the school went through all the trouble of building a new cafeteria to end up with something that forces the 3 lunch periods to be further broken into 4 sub-shifts. I’m sure there were all sorts of trade-offs that had to be made, in terms of how much money they could spend, how much space they could add to the building without running into the front drive, etc. But I am curious what the main priorities were as it was being planned – was it to improve lunch for the kids? Or just to get a new cafeteria because the old ones were worn out? (I admit I do not know much about the old cafeterias.) I know these annoyances are pretty minor when compared to schools that have real overcrowding and where some kids have to eat lunch as early as ten in the morning… but it’s just weird that in a situation where all sort of effort and money was being spent, the end result seems to have its’ own problems.

Science Stars Week 8

We only had 2 girls this week, which was a shame in some ways (lots of girls will need to be brought up to speed next week), but was pretty nice in other ways (less hectic for all, more time to go in depth).

Today was data collating and analysis day. We’ve done a variety of trials over the past 3 days, and so our plan today was to pull everything together and start analysing and graphing the data. We decided to skip using the computer lab, because while we appreciate the usefulness of learning to plot and chart data in Excel, our data was simple enough that Excel would have been overkill, and we felt that we would have the learning curve and the logistics of the computer lab would have eaten up lots of time that could be put to better use.

With just 2 girls, we got to have a “relaxed” day to some degree - we were able to really engage with both girls, and talk at length about our data, what kind of patterns and relationships we were seeing, and what kind of conclusions we can make. They both did a great job pulling together all the various trials, and then graphing them. It did seem like doing a bar graph “sideways” was a little bit of a new concept to them, and they may have only ever done them with the bars coming up from the x-axis, but they adapted and got it almost immediately. The master data talbe and graph will definitely help with getting the girls who come back next week up to speed.

We made good use of the girls’ notebooks today, both in pulling out data, and in adding new data and artifacts. Anne did a great lesson about the actual chemical reactions between baking soda and various acids that we used, and the girls we also able to try out good old fashioned pH paper, and paste the strips into their notebooks. They really get super engaged when they have artifacts to put in their notebooks - anything crafty like that, and so we are trying to think of ways to leverage that in the creation of their poster and presentation.

Old School

I stopped in to say hi to my grandmother this morning, since I was down in Geneseo picking up some equipment for my upcoming lessons on soil(!). My dad’s mom is in her 90s, and she was a teacher for a while before she got married and had 6 kids. She went to the Gorham Normal School (which I believe is now part of the Maine state college system) in Maine for 3 years, after 3 years of college. When she graduated, the depression was still going on, and she took a job in a one room schoolhouse in a very small rural town in Maine, not far over the border from Portsmouth, NH. She spent most of her life in Rhode Island, but moved here to upstate NY a few years ago to be around family. (That’s a photo of her and me in Mendon Ponds Park around 1971, on the left.)

When I was little, she told me a number of stories about teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. Back then, my favorite one was about the bad kid who kept shooting spitballs. She kept him after school one day, and had him sit on a stool in the middle of the room. then she gave him a piece of paper, and told him he could shoot as many spitballs as he wanted all over the room. He gleefully did so for about 20 minutes, but then she let the hammer fall. She gave him a pair of mittens, and told him he couldn’t leave until he had picked up every single spitball, while wearing the mittens. My grandmother has tons of stories like that one - where she outsmarts grownups, kids (even her own kids) and everyone in between, but not in a mean-spirited way.

I know that a story like this, if reported today in the news, would sound like torture, and maybe the fact that it’s been a funny family legend since I was little makes me unable to judge it fully. But it was definitely a very different time when she was teaching, in the 1930s. This morning we talked about differentiating instruction for her classroom that ranged from first-graders through eighth-graders. We talked about how lonely it was, to be the only teacher in the entire town - a small poverty-stricken town on a mountain, that was a 12 miles bus ride to the nearest store. She told me about the grumpy retired farmer and his wife who she boarded with - living in the “birthing room”, with six foot high ceilings, off of the kitchen.

And she told me about the parents of her kids, who would take the bus to town on Saturdays, and then show her the things they had stolen in town. She was chastised once by the preacher, for making cocoa for her kids one cold winter day using milk. In a town this poor, all the milk from the farms was to be sold for cash, and she was found out when a child asked everyone in church to “pray for the teacher for making cocoa with milk”. She refused to use “the strap” that the kids showed he, hanging in the back room of the schoolhouse, and she did her best to smile and grin through everything the kids threw at her. Like the boy who rubbed his jacket on a dead skunk and wore it in class - she just smiled and told the kids she LOVED the smell of skunk, and he finally broke down and begged to take his jacket outside.

One day a boy brought in a dead muskrat, thinking it would freak out the teacher. She just sent the kids out for recess, and then frantically looked up everything she could find in her science books about muskrats. When the kids came back inside, she gave them anatomy, ecology, and biology lessons using the carcass, showing them the muskrat’s different types of teeth, its claws and the webbing between its toes, the different types of fur it had, and more along those lines. We didn’t get to talk long enough this morning to get into what sorts of things the normal school taught her about teaching, but I suspect that they didn’t really stress building on knowledge that the kids arrive with, the way she did naturally.

She can still beat anyone at any board game, although I think she lets my kids beat her sometimes. (see photo above) She’s been enjoying hearing about my experiences in the classroom, and I’m looking forward to talking more with her about both of our teaching experiences.

(When I dug up that top photo of her and me when I was little, I found a bunch of goofy old photos of myself that I thought might provide a couple laughs for the cohort. So here ya go…)