Chaos, compliance & classrooms (oh my…)

(This covers the second class activity mentioned in the previous post.)

The 8th grade general science class started a lab activity last Friday that got pretty chaotic. Since then, I have been pondering my comfort levels with chaos and freedom in the classroom.

This class is on the non-advanced track, and it could alternately be viewed as having the less compliant kids - not necessarily those who aren’t ready for harder material, but it’s hard to sort that out sometimes. This class gets off-task pretty easily, and definitely needs more hand-holding on labs and activities.

The class started with a short worksheet of speed/distance/time problems, to prepare the kids for the kind of calculations they need to be able to do in the lab they were about to start. My CT drew the classic SDT triangle on the board, and then did something he rarely does - pulled out the candy for speedy/correct answers - a game he calls “speed hands”.

Side note: I’ve never really liked the SDT triangle, but then I have intuitively understood the relationship between speed, time and distance since I was a kid - out of boredom on long car trips I would calculate and recalculate time to various places based on the car speedometer and the road signs. I feel like learning the trick with the triangle lets you skip the actual understanding of what’s going on, and then you also end up not really sure what your units are in the end - or you need to memorize that part along with the triangle. (My gut reaction would be to start talking about a simple example - like how far can a car travel in 1 hour, if it’s going 55 miles per hour. ) But I guess if it’s a tool the kids are familiar with, there is a limit to how much math a science teacher would want to re-teach, or teach in a different way, I suppose. I think I have to remember that just because I learned something a certain way, or found it intuitive in a certain way, that doesn’t mean others will. Especially since I was a good compliant kid who was happy to memorize and happy to learn all the ins and outs of long mathematical techniques. I think this is going to be something that I struggle with going forward as a teacher. (I just noticed that Kathryn talks more about math skills in middle school science class over here. I’m with her - but I don’t know if we’re alone.)

After 10 minutes or less with the worksheet and speedhands game, he handed out the lab instructions and materials, and then let them choose their own lab groups. He reminded them that he reserves the right to break up groups who are obviously having toruble getting things done. He confided in me that he purposely lets them make some bad choices, and if it later causes problems (data doesn’t get collected, lab doesn’t get done, etc.), he can talk about the choices they made with them. And later in the year they may start making different choices about who to work with. The lab proceeded with the students having a large degree of freedom to build ramps from meter sticks and stacks of textbooks, and use stopwatches to measure the time it took a hot wheels car to travel 1 meter away from the bottom of the ramp, while varying the height of the ramp.

The room got pretty chaotic. Most of the groups built textbook stacks over their heads, which forced the CT to step in for safety reasons. The data collection really didn’t start for most groups until about the last 10 minutes of class, and they had to take the last 5 minutes for clean up. I was definitely sort of frazzled, but then as we were taking a breather after the last kids left the room, my CT addressed just what I was thinking. He said something about how it definitely was chaotic, but all the groups did start to collect their data in the end. So maybe a bit of chaos is ok. But we also talked about the fact that the class on the advanced track would have blazed through that lab, with little need for help.

I’ll be curious to see if they’re able to get down to business and finish the lab next time, or if they need more chaos time. He’s been through this before, so I definitely trust him on this one.  (And I know I’m a bit of a nervous nellie when it comes to chaos and disorder in human interactions - that’s probably something for me to be aware as well, going forward as a student teacher.)