Another day in Ypsi, and another substitute teacher. Mr. Tuttle typically does a few warm-up problems on the board at the beginning of every class, just to get the juices flowing. So, for the past three days that Mr Tuttle has been out, I've been doing the warm-ups.
Early in the year I noticed that number of the students just copy the warm-up off the board and turn it in to get their warm-up points. Just so I'm not giving them the answers, I end up asking the class what to do at almost every conceptual juncture, which often leads to a lot of uncomfortable dead space. For example, this past week, we were doing areas and circumferences of circles, and we had a circle with a known diameter and we wanted to know the area. I asked the class, "OK, if we have the diameter of a circle, how can we get the radius?" No one answered. Knowing from my time as a TA at U of M that you cannot give them the answer to a question, or else they will just learn to wait you out, I said, "Well, I can wait." One student, who was facing the wrong way, turned around and asked incredulously, "You're really going to wait?" Eventually someone gave me the answer, I wrote down r = d/2, and we went on. Then I did something that blew them away, and I tried it again in three other classes to the same effect. We were solving for the area of the circle and we had the diameter, so I put this up on the board:
A = pi * r^2 = pi * (d/2)^2 = pi * d^2 / 4
Usually the response I got was, "Whoa, whoa, how did you get 4?" but one student said, "Ok, stop doing college math, we're in high school here." I told her reassuringly, "Don't worry, I'm sure you can do this." I'm pretty sure what threw them was I used symbols instead of plugging in numbers right away. What surprised me was these were some of the better math students who got lost. Many of them got it when they focused on what I put on the board, but I think they are used to understanding things with just a quick glance, so it jolted them when I did something in a new way.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Subs
Over the past month and a half, for 4 out of the past 6 days that I've been in the classroom, Mr. Tuttle has been out for Michigan Merit Examination related activities. As you might imagine, it's been quite a wild ride with a new substitute teacher every week. On the one hand, it is certainly much more chaotic in the classroom, but since the students spend the hour working on their assigned homework, I appreciate the chance to interact with them more.
Behavior incidents similar to the one I described the post titled "Boiling Point" have been much more common. There have been days when I come home fuming mad because a student blatantly disregards me when I've politely asked them to put away their cell phone 3 separate times; refuses to go back to their seat near the end of the period no matter how diplomatically I ask them; or will not stop making fun of another student. In one episode, three guys were teasing a tough girl who has her heart in the right place, but frequently can't control her outbursts. Now she typically hangs out with these guys, so I was letting her fend for herself, but they were just looking for a rise out of her. As she began to get more and more agitated, one of the more insidious boys kept asking her in a baby voice, "Do you need a tissue?" Finally she yelled, "Would you just lay off it!" Another one of the teasing boys asked from across the classroom, "Are you mad, [name]"? She ignored him, so he asked again. By now all the class had stopped working and was watching this unfold. Now I had a reason to step in and stop things without looking like I was just trying to protect this girl, so I said, "Look, you know she's mad, so stop asking." He then asked with a smile on his face, "Are you mad?" I responded, "Save your little altercation for another time, because the entire class is staring at you instead of getting their work done." Soon after the bell rang. It's these sorts of events that remind me of why high school can be hellish for some kids. Also I sometimes get the sense that students are just trying to get under my skin, just like they were doing to this girl, because they know that I have no power to send them to the office.
On the other side of the coin, while subs have been in the classroom I've gotten to know some kids much more recently. One girl, who I've had a rocky relationship with in the past, asked me if I wanted to read her English essay that I noticed on her desk. It was a pretty emotional piece with a description of her troubles on the basketball team and her father. She showed it to me because she was proud of it, but I felt lucky that she felt comfortable letting me read it. On another day, a student told me that he had fought with his Mom a few weeks ago, has not talked to her since, and now is living with his brother. In these instances, as well as others, they usually don't want to go too far into the details, but it's so much better knowing where each individual student is coming from. Also, the girl I talked about in my post titled "Imperfect Interactions", who said, "No, and if there was, I wouldn't ask you. I don't know you," has since asked me for help several times. It's nice to see a turn around like that, and often she knows exactly what she's doing, so I just end up confirming it for her. Once she said to herself as I was walking away, "See, I'm smart."
Behavior incidents similar to the one I described the post titled "Boiling Point" have been much more common. There have been days when I come home fuming mad because a student blatantly disregards me when I've politely asked them to put away their cell phone 3 separate times; refuses to go back to their seat near the end of the period no matter how diplomatically I ask them; or will not stop making fun of another student. In one episode, three guys were teasing a tough girl who has her heart in the right place, but frequently can't control her outbursts. Now she typically hangs out with these guys, so I was letting her fend for herself, but they were just looking for a rise out of her. As she began to get more and more agitated, one of the more insidious boys kept asking her in a baby voice, "Do you need a tissue?" Finally she yelled, "Would you just lay off it!" Another one of the teasing boys asked from across the classroom, "Are you mad, [name]"? She ignored him, so he asked again. By now all the class had stopped working and was watching this unfold. Now I had a reason to step in and stop things without looking like I was just trying to protect this girl, so I said, "Look, you know she's mad, so stop asking." He then asked with a smile on his face, "Are you mad?" I responded, "Save your little altercation for another time, because the entire class is staring at you instead of getting their work done." Soon after the bell rang. It's these sorts of events that remind me of why high school can be hellish for some kids. Also I sometimes get the sense that students are just trying to get under my skin, just like they were doing to this girl, because they know that I have no power to send them to the office.
On the other side of the coin, while subs have been in the classroom I've gotten to know some kids much more recently. One girl, who I've had a rocky relationship with in the past, asked me if I wanted to read her English essay that I noticed on her desk. It was a pretty emotional piece with a description of her troubles on the basketball team and her father. She showed it to me because she was proud of it, but I felt lucky that she felt comfortable letting me read it. On another day, a student told me that he had fought with his Mom a few weeks ago, has not talked to her since, and now is living with his brother. In these instances, as well as others, they usually don't want to go too far into the details, but it's so much better knowing where each individual student is coming from. Also, the girl I talked about in my post titled "Imperfect Interactions", who said, "No, and if there was, I wouldn't ask you. I don't know you," has since asked me for help several times. It's nice to see a turn around like that, and often she knows exactly what she's doing, so I just end up confirming it for her. Once she said to herself as I was walking away, "See, I'm smart."
Boiling Point
As I mentioned in the previous post, I gave a presentation on the design of airplanes to all of Mr. Tuttle's classes a few weeks ago. As I also said below, it went really well in the first 5 classes, but the last class of the day was a different story. After discussing airplane design principles with the class, we built paper airplanes and threw them across the room to test out the concepts. Naturally this was a little chaotic, just as it was in all the other classes. However, when I asked them to take their seats though, they could not calm down. So much so that I felt compelled to say, “Look, we won’t have fun interactive lessons like this in the future, if this is how you behave.” They quieted down a bit, we talked about airplanes some more, threw the paper airplanes again, but by the end of the hour, the students started getting loud again. Through multiple waits for things to quiet down, along with asking specific students to stop talking, I got too frustrated to go on. In the middle of a sentence during my summary slide, a just stopped and said, “That’s it, I’m done.” I put about 10 hours into this presentation, so I was hurt by their attitude towards me. This stunned the class for a moment, and Mr. Tuttle chastised the class for their rudeness. Looking back, I think I handled this OK, but I should set my expectations at the right level so things like this do not get to me.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Presentations
Thus far I've given 3 presentations in Mr. Tuttle's class and I think each one has been an improvement over the last. I know other teaching fellows in Ypsi High who have given many more presentations than me, but I spend 8-12 hours preparing the powerpoint slides and visual aids for each presentation. This is partly because I am a perfectionist, but it's also because I've seen how displaying just the right diagrams and guiding the students through a certain progression of thought can make confusing concepts quite clear. Anyone who has taken a college class with me knows I hold Professors up to a high bar, and I've been dissatisfied more than once with the quality of teaching at U of M. This motivates me to try and live up to my own standards, and avoid the fumbles I've seen others make. I think the biggest challenge I face with each presentation is determining what level to pitch the material at. In my experience, it is the more involved topics in math, science, and engineering that are the most interesting. If I'm presenting ideas that are obvious then I'm not doing a thing to illuminate the excitement and beauty surrounding science. Presenting obvious concepts reinforces the viewpoint that students can get away with using their intuition on everything; that math and science are only academic constructs that have no place in their lives. Conversely, it is easy to be too ambitious and lose them with concepts that they just aren't ready for yet, which is what happened in my first presentation.
For my first presentation I decided to teach them about a material I study for my research: shape memory alloys. This material can be deformed at a low temperature, but when it's heated up it regains its old shape. So I wowed them with a few different neat demos of the shape memory effect, and talked about engineering applications of these materials. This all worked out pretty well and I got lots of excited looks and questions. However when I got into the science behind the flashy surface level stuff, I lost 'em. I knew this would be difficult so I tried to have lots of pictures, but it was just too much. I think it's still good for the top level students to see something impressive that they can't understand immediately, since it gives them a reason to continue to be curious. There was one girl who screwed up her face as she tried so hard to understand what I was saying, which was rewarding in its own way. Meanwhile the rest of the class tuned out and maybe thought that math and science really aren't their thing. Clearly something had to change.
The second presentation I decided to flip my last approach on its head: start with an interesting application and use it to demonstrate engineering principles, instead of starting with science and building up to applications. I gave a talk on design of submarines. I built a 3 foot long remote control sub for my senior project while I was in college, so I brought it in, talked about how it works, and demonstrated it's operation. This along with a short video about the majesty of nuclear submarines grabbed their attention. From here I could talk about how the bouyancy force has to equal the weight of the sub for it to be neutrally bouyant, how the bouyancy force can be calculated using Archimedes principle, and why you need to trim the ballast to make the sub stay level underwater. Judging from the answers to my questions, and the good questions asked by interested students, I felt like I reached the majority of the students.
Last week I followed the same approach and gave a full hour presentation on design of airplanes. I started off with a 2 minute video of all the failed attempts to fly before the Wright Brothers to illustrate the exploration process. After this, I went into the four forces in flight: weight, thrust, drag, and lift. Using the common experience of sticking your hand out the window of a moving car, I think they got a good feel for the lift equation from simple aerodynamics. Here I wanted to go beyond the traditional lecture format of my previous presentations and make it more interactive, so we threw paper airplanes. (I was amazed: a 1/4 of every class had never made paper airplanes before!) It was a bit chaotic as you might imagine, but we did three different trials with a paperclip in the front, back, and middle of the paper airplanes. From there, we talked about center of lift vs. center of gravity and why paperclip position matters. Then to improve the gliding we modified the design to improve the stability of the airplane and threw them again. With this hands-on feel for things, we talked about why real planes are designed the way that they are by drawing forces and moments (torques). I was really happy the way this turned out. Airplane stability was one of those good topics that wasn't obvious from the beginning, but with just a little analysis suddenly a lot of neat things become clear to the students. Afterwards, two different girls in different classes said that they really liked the presentation, which made me especially happy since I was worried that airplanes and submarines might capture the imagination of just the boys.
I'm thinking the next presentation may be on the design of bridges, but we'll see...
For my first presentation I decided to teach them about a material I study for my research: shape memory alloys. This material can be deformed at a low temperature, but when it's heated up it regains its old shape. So I wowed them with a few different neat demos of the shape memory effect, and talked about engineering applications of these materials. This all worked out pretty well and I got lots of excited looks and questions. However when I got into the science behind the flashy surface level stuff, I lost 'em. I knew this would be difficult so I tried to have lots of pictures, but it was just too much. I think it's still good for the top level students to see something impressive that they can't understand immediately, since it gives them a reason to continue to be curious. There was one girl who screwed up her face as she tried so hard to understand what I was saying, which was rewarding in its own way. Meanwhile the rest of the class tuned out and maybe thought that math and science really aren't their thing. Clearly something had to change.
The second presentation I decided to flip my last approach on its head: start with an interesting application and use it to demonstrate engineering principles, instead of starting with science and building up to applications. I gave a talk on design of submarines. I built a 3 foot long remote control sub for my senior project while I was in college, so I brought it in, talked about how it works, and demonstrated it's operation. This along with a short video about the majesty of nuclear submarines grabbed their attention. From here I could talk about how the bouyancy force has to equal the weight of the sub for it to be neutrally bouyant, how the bouyancy force can be calculated using Archimedes principle, and why you need to trim the ballast to make the sub stay level underwater. Judging from the answers to my questions, and the good questions asked by interested students, I felt like I reached the majority of the students.
Last week I followed the same approach and gave a full hour presentation on design of airplanes. I started off with a 2 minute video of all the failed attempts to fly before the Wright Brothers to illustrate the exploration process. After this, I went into the four forces in flight: weight, thrust, drag, and lift. Using the common experience of sticking your hand out the window of a moving car, I think they got a good feel for the lift equation from simple aerodynamics. Here I wanted to go beyond the traditional lecture format of my previous presentations and make it more interactive, so we threw paper airplanes. (I was amazed: a 1/4 of every class had never made paper airplanes before!) It was a bit chaotic as you might imagine, but we did three different trials with a paperclip in the front, back, and middle of the paper airplanes. From there, we talked about center of lift vs. center of gravity and why paperclip position matters. Then to improve the gliding we modified the design to improve the stability of the airplane and threw them again. With this hands-on feel for things, we talked about why real planes are designed the way that they are by drawing forces and moments (torques). I was really happy the way this turned out. Airplane stability was one of those good topics that wasn't obvious from the beginning, but with just a little analysis suddenly a lot of neat things become clear to the students. Afterwards, two different girls in different classes said that they really liked the presentation, which made me especially happy since I was worried that airplanes and submarines might capture the imagination of just the boys.
I'm thinking the next presentation may be on the design of bridges, but we'll see...
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Small Improvements
Remember the student that just stared at me when I offered him paper to take notes on? (http://umk12tfs.blogspot.com/2008/10/imperfect-interactions.html) Well, last week things were different with him. I said hi to him on the way into the classroom, as I often do, and he acknowledged me this time. Then when it came to the work period, he went up, grabbed the worksheet, went back to his desk, and before he could begin copying from his neighbor like he usually does, I sat down in front of him and offered some help. He actually accepted and we started going through the algebra homework. I gave him more help than I do with other students (I usually make them struggle a bit if they want my help.), but overall I was happy that he knew what to do about half the time. We were productive for a good 20 minutes. I imagine it helped that I had become familiar to him over the course of the last few months, but primarily, as Mr. Tuttle agreed, this student was just in a good mood that day. Whatever the reasons, it was heartening to see that even the most troubled students can shine on any given day.
Later that day, in 6th hour, I had a different experience. During lecture, several students were yelling across the classroom and being very disrespectful. Mr. Tuttle stopped class twice to give them a talking to, and I kept walking around putting out the smaller fires. By the beginning of the work period, I was about to tear my hair out in frustration, but I kept it together and sat with the most distruptive students. After a few minutes of trying to get them to do their work, I could feel my frustation level growing again. Then, one student pointed to my shoes and said, "Those are old man shoes!" This got a little chuckle from the others, and I was about to say something very adult-like back to him, when changed my mind and said, "Well, you've got little boy shoes on." This loosened things up a bit and we got to talking about being old versus young and how I'm still in school even at 29 years old. I told him that I'm still in school, because I'm scared of the outside world. He asked, "Are you scared of being on the streets?" I explained that I was scared of being stuck in a dead end job, that I worked for a while and it was boring. He couldn't understand how school could be better than a job, since you get paid in a job. Luckily, one of his friends backed me up and said, "Man, I've worked and it sucked. It's the same thing every day. Even if school is boring, at least it's different every day." Not surprisingly, the other student stuck to his initial assertion that any job is better than school, even after I explained how you can make more money and get a better job with more schooling. In the end, I only got 2 minutes of actual math homework out of this student, but at least we made him think about taking school seriously. Who knows, maybe he'll slowly change his mind someday...
Later that day, in 6th hour, I had a different experience. During lecture, several students were yelling across the classroom and being very disrespectful. Mr. Tuttle stopped class twice to give them a talking to, and I kept walking around putting out the smaller fires. By the beginning of the work period, I was about to tear my hair out in frustration, but I kept it together and sat with the most distruptive students. After a few minutes of trying to get them to do their work, I could feel my frustation level growing again. Then, one student pointed to my shoes and said, "Those are old man shoes!" This got a little chuckle from the others, and I was about to say something very adult-like back to him, when changed my mind and said, "Well, you've got little boy shoes on." This loosened things up a bit and we got to talking about being old versus young and how I'm still in school even at 29 years old. I told him that I'm still in school, because I'm scared of the outside world. He asked, "Are you scared of being on the streets?" I explained that I was scared of being stuck in a dead end job, that I worked for a while and it was boring. He couldn't understand how school could be better than a job, since you get paid in a job. Luckily, one of his friends backed me up and said, "Man, I've worked and it sucked. It's the same thing every day. Even if school is boring, at least it's different every day." Not surprisingly, the other student stuck to his initial assertion that any job is better than school, even after I explained how you can make more money and get a better job with more schooling. In the end, I only got 2 minutes of actual math homework out of this student, but at least we made him think about taking school seriously. Who knows, maybe he'll slowly change his mind someday...
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
North Campus Tour
Two weeks ago, after much planning and lots of help from Carol Crammer and Angela Dixon we finally had an after school tour of U of M's north campus. The tour was totally voluntary for the students in Mr. Tuttle's class and being after school (they only missed their last hour of class) we had a group of 11 students who had a real interest in engineering, math, or science. The tour went through a number of research labs where graduate students generously gave their time to explain the neat robots, experiments, prosthetic limbs, and designs they were working on.
Looking back I'm very happy with the way the tour turned out. I think the Ypsi high students did a great job of listening and striving to understanding things. It was always a challenge for the graduate students in each lab to cut down on the scientific jargon and describe things in an accessible way to our high school students. A number of times I jumped in asking the graduate student to define terms like center of gravity, camshaft, and leaf spring. It was a real charge for me every time the Ypsi students expressed further interest in an area. One student, who often checks out in Mr. Tuttle's class, after inspecting a prothetic foot asked an insightful question related to designing the foot with more flexibility. Another student got excited by some of the demonstrations in a lab, wanted to know what sort engineering this was called and what all kinds of things in the lab did. A different student said, while we were walking between labs, that he wanted to be a biomedical engineer. This was great to hear, since he had never heard of biomedical engineering until I described my job at Medtronic in front of Mr. Tuttle's class a few months ago.
During the tour I saw some areas for improvement for future tours. We went from 2pm to 5:30pm, which was about an hour too long. We didn't really have a choice about this since the buses could only pick us up and drop us off during this time frame, but the students were understandably dragging their feet at the end. (We did have a snack break in the middle of the tour and this probably helped a lot though.) Some labs probably could have used more than 15 minutes to demonstrate things and get the students involved in a short activity. I was trying to impose as little as possible on each graduate student's time, but some of them were more than willing to create interactive demos if they were given more time. In total, we visited 7 different labs. I was trying to keep things moving in case a lab wasn't all that exciting, but I think I underestimated their attention span and it might have been better to visit 4 labs for 30 minutes each instead.
Once again, it was a good experience for everybody, and I certainly hope to find the time to plan another tour next semester.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Adults?
This happened a few weeks ago, but it sticks out in my mind. At the beginning of fourth hour in Mr. Tuttle's class, I was sitting across the way from two students. One had a pack of gum and Joe, the other student, wanted a piece, so he was offering 50 cents for a single stick of gum. The guy with the gum kept refusing, but then he slyly took the 50 cents right out of Joe's hand, put it in his pocket when Joe wasn't looking, and didn't give Joe any gum. Obviously, Joe was upset and demanded his money or a piece of gum. This wasn't banter between two friends: Joe felt bullied by this guy. I tried to step in, but it soon escalated to Mr. Tuttle's attention who asked Joe to move seats. Joe wasn't willing to let it go and the other guy just denied anything had happened. He claimed he didn't have Joe's money at all. Mr Tuttle decided to deal with this after he was done lecturing, so he made Joe move seats. For the next 20 minutes of class, Joe repeatedly made gestures and faces across the class towards the other student. Several times Joe asked for his money right in the middle of Mr. Tuttle's lecture. It finally got resolved when Mr. Tuttle went over during a work period and got the guy to cough up the money he stole.
Stealing someone's pocket change very clearly a display of power that could have easily come to blows had Joe decided to take his money back. On the other hand, Joe could have also gotten up in disgust, said, "You can have my measly 50 cents," and walked off. That would have ended it, with Joe taking the high road.
I know this sort of thing happens all the time in high school, given the headlocks I see in the hallways, and other heated exchanges. It's just amazing to me the way that these students so desperately want to be treated like adults, yet still do things like this. Don't get me wrong though, overall these are good kids that should come along fine. They just have plenty of growing up still to do.
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