Several friends on Facebook have asked me to comment on the article entitled Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%. What the article describes is more or less exactly how I treat my students, and more or less exactly for the reasons given in the article.
The lesson from “tough love” teachers is that if you don’t do the work, you can’t master the subject and you fail. Most kids have already learned how to fail. What they need to learn is how not to.
Electricity & Magnetism is a fun topic, especially for teachers who enjoy watching teenagers act like themselves.
On Friday, while I had cafeteria duty, I noticed a girl with a bruise on her face. I asked her what had happened. She said with a sheepish half-smile, “I got into a fight. But don’t worry. It wasn’t on school grounds and no one videotaped it.”
On 3/25/2012 11:03 PM, Drew Melby posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list
“I’ve never felt the need to ‘entertain’ students by making things ‘memorable’. Chemistry is a serious business, not a magic show”
I was talking with some of my colleagues yesterday about classroom management, and about a colleague of ours, a second-year teacher who is struggling a little with finding that magic balance.
To demonstrate the power of hydraulics, some of my students and I built a hovercraft out of plywood and a wet/dry vacuum cleaner. Continue reading
When I’m teaching, I live for teachable moments. Right now, I’m teaching my physics students about fluids—pressure and hydraulics, to be followed by buoyancy, gas laws, and Bernoulli’s Principle. However, today one of my students innocently asked, “Maybe you can explain something I’ve never understood. How can a boat float if it’s made of something denser than water?” So I rearranged the schedule on the spot.
Isaac Asimov once quipped, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it), but ‘gee, that’s funny …’ “ The phrase is exciting because it means the scientist noticed something and realized that it could be significant. When it doesn’t happen this way, the dialogue sounds more like, “Nope. That didn’t work either. Maybe I should try this… Nope, but a little closer. Now I’m going to try that… Not much different. Maybe I’ll try the other thing… Possibly better. Let me try it a few more times… Oh, what if I try something else?… Yes, I think that mostly worked…”
I’ve always wanted to build a bed of nails, especially since I started teaching physics. Now I’ve done it.
