Day 5: Camberwell Girls' Grammar School

Today I visited Giselle Lobo at Camberwell Girls' Grammar School. CGSS is located in Camberwell, which is an eastern suburb of Melbourne. It's an all-girls school, and remarkably this was the first time I have had the chance to observe female students since I arrived in Australia. In one school I visited previously the female students happened to be in a different period than the one I observed, but in the other schools the female students simply do not choose to study physics. I have been quite surprised by this, but CGGS certainly doesn't have a problem getting its students to study physics. There are two year 11 sections and two year 12 sections. Giselle has the dubious honor of teaching both year 12 maths (methods) and years 10-12 physics. Teaching a year 12 course here in Australia is both an honor an a large responsibility- they generally require a lot of work due to the VCE exams at the end of the year.

CGGS is in the midst of a large renovation. It appears that it will be a great addition to the school, but at the same time it was distracting to the students to have the construction noise right outside their classroom. So much so that Giselle moved her afternoon class to a different location. She didn't have access to all of her equipment in the new location, but the students didn't complain about the noise like they did in the earlier section. The first classrom was a large physics classroom with lab equipment and an lcd projector. The second classroom had a whiteboard and two large televisions that Giselle connected her iPad to using Airplay.

The first class I observed was year 12 students who were learning how to apply the right hand rule. They were thrown by some of the symbols the textbook used- labeling a dot as point "X" is confusing if you're trying to figure out whether the electric field is coming out of the page or going in! (For non-physicists: a vector coming out of the page is represented as a point (tip of the arrow) and going in is an x (end view of the arrow with fletchings, usually with a circle around it)). The students were engaged and remained remarkably focused given the din outside the door.

After lunch I observed one of Giselle's colleague's math 12 courses in methods. In general methods is sort of the middle route - specialist is more difficult calculus and there is a third option, but to be honest I can't remember what it even is. This class was reviewing the content of their recent SAC Exam (school assessed component). Each student's final grade in the course is a weighted average of their score on the state-authored VEC exam and a series of exams that are administered and scored by the school, which are affectionately called SAC's. The students didn't have their own exams in front of them because the exams haven't been completely scored yet, but they seemed to remember the majority of the material. It was calculus- anything from integration and sums to related rates. To be honest I was surprised by how deep this course went into the content- makes me think that the specialist course probably hits well above the AP bar I'm accustomed to.

The final class I observed was Giselle's year 11 students, who were working on motion problems. They learned this material last year during year 10, but they only have one quarter of physics (10 weeks), so they didn't get terribly far into it. Today's lesson was probing for what they remembered and required them to utilize multiple representations of motion- moving from a written description to graphs of position, velocity, and acceleration vs. time. They had the general gist of it but had some difficulty deciding whether line segments on velocity graphs should be straight or curved. This led to an interesting discussion of how realistic they needed to be when modeling motion. The class was using the Conceptual Understanding Procedures (CUPs) materials from Monash University. These seemed similar in intent to the Modeling Curriculum I use and I liked them a lot. 

The whiteboard at the end of class. There was another version of the top-left velocity graph with negative signs in place of the red positive marks representing increasing slope, but it got erased before I could snap a picture.