25 percent

The end of the 1st quarter of the school year is upon us. My AP students are feeling it most acutely- some have several targets they haven't achieved proficiency on yet. They're signing up for re-assessments, and it looks like it's going to be a very busy week. The limit is one re-assessment a day, which can contain up to two targets. They have to submit their requests via my google docs form at least 24 hours in advance, which makes this whole she-bang reasonable. One particularly organized student submitted 3 different requests for next week, which was stunning at first, but at least I had the weekend to prepare.

People keep asking what I learned while I was in Argentina. They want to know what techniques I learned or what tricks the teachers shared with me. I feel like it's a let-down to say this, but when I think back about it, what I learned had more to do with how my actions can affect the class. I realize now that I'd become complacent, not in my methods or what I did, but in my expectations of students. In Argentina I saw students that were on a similar level as my own who were being pushed harder and challenged to go beyond what my own students were tackling. I realized that the limiting factor in my teaching wasn't my students' capabilities or work ethics, but rather my own ideas of what they could do.

So this year I've tried to push further. Not in a mean tortuous way, but in a hey-you-are-more-capable-than-you-think-and-I-know-you-can-do-this sort of way. One example was pretty minor, but it seems to be helping the students. When they write lab reports I've always had them include trend lines on their graphs. This year I've gone further- they need to modify the generic y=blabla*x + blerp equations to fit their own variables. For example, if they are changing air volume in a balloon and then measuring its airtime, the resulting equation should be something like time = (blabla seconds/pumps)*volume+blerp seconds. This seems to help reinforce that the equations are supposed to be modelling something physical; it's been easier to get them to make the connection between the equation of their equations and real world behavior at really big or really small values. This isn't anything new... I've expected my students to think about this type of stuff. It's just that few of them have. The relatively simple change in my expectations for their equations has produced the reflective behavior I wanted, though I didn't expect this to happen.

My students always choose their own lab topics and design their own experiments. This year we've seem some really neat stuff. One group chose to make a marshmallow gun, which is pretty neat. The cool thing is that they've gone down a different road than other groups who have tackled this topic in previous years. They've changed barrel length a little bit, but the big leap they made was to modify the scale of the gun. The original design was for mini-marshmallows, but they made new models to shoot regular-sized marshmallows and jumbo marshmallows. The air source they're using is still the same, so this led to an interesting discussion about scaling. Another neat thing was that the jumbo-sized marshmallows didn't fit perfectly in the barrel, so we had to wrap them in some wadding a la revolutionary war! Lots of layers to this one, but it's just one experiment out of roughly 20 that are running right now.

shopvac powered jumbo marshmallow gun

Another new wrinkle with my lab program is the reports themselves. I've used the same format for reports for the past 6 years with only minor changes. Each partner writes their own report, but they use different formats. One writes a technical report complete with abstract, and the other writes a popular report in a two-column format. I borrowed this technique from Larry Hiller in Buffalo, and I like it. Not just because it makes cheating much much harder, but also because it gets the students to think about their audiences. They can share graphs, tables, figures, etc., but the rest of the writing is their own. Ok, enough suspense (or rambling? hard to tell). The new wrinkle is that once students master the reports, they only have to submit a 1-page informal write-up that is graded on a sufficient/insufficient basis. The bar I set this year was a 90% on a formal report. I think I would make it >90% for future years, and maybe make them master both styles before they can switch to the informal reports. My students from last year who wrote ~8 formal reports in my course are slightly peeved, and rightfully so. I explained that I try to change things for the better each year, and that this is an experiment of sorts. I changed the AP C Physics course drastically this year, and I think it's way better than it used to be. But they don't have anything to compare it to, so they don't know how lucky they are. Speaking of which, this week they'll be completing a reflective activity about their performance thus far in my course. Anyone have any favorite questions they use to get kids thinking about their own work and efforts?

I have a few AP students who aren't nearly proficient on quite a few targets. I'm a little worried, but fingers are crossed that they'll pull it together before the end of the week. Nearly 25% of the year has passed, vacation season on the horizon... gotta make hay while the sun is shining!