Like most American high schools these days, my school has a detailed set of rules including several zero-tolerance policies, and we have perhaps a stricter-than-average set of consequences attached.  What my school does well is that the staff are extremely consistent about enforcing the rules and applying the consequences when indicated, and the consequences are not applied in a way that makes them personal.  Students understand that this is the case, and we have very few misbehaviors from students testing the limits.  That aspect of the system works well, and is not something I would make substantial changes to.  From what I gleaned from the article about Lincoln High School in Washington, I don’t think they made any substantial changes to their rules, consequences, or consistency of enforcement either.

The change I would like to see is to treat the students with more compassion during the process.  I’m sure this is the change that made such a difference at Lincoln High School.  Several teachers and  administrators at my school tend to take a confrontational approach when students misbehave.  While this reinforces the hierarchy, it often creates the “flight, fight, or freeze” response described in the article.  If the students have a meltdown and respond with fight or flight, the consequences escalate.

Some kids, particularly juniors and seniors, recognize when they’ve just had a meltdown, and have the maturity to not blame the staff member for the additional consequences.  Other kids, particularly the freshmen and sophomores who have a little less maturity and life experience, tend to build resentment toward the staff and the school.  I remember an incident last fall when an administrator had a confrontation with a student in the hallway.  An uninvolved student was at her locker nearby.  After the vice principal escorted the student to his office, the student slammed her locker door and proclaimed, “I hate this school!”  I had not met this student previously—she is a tenth grader, and I teach almost exclusively twelfth graders, so she was just another face in the crowd.  But I walked up and asked her why she felt that way.  She indicated that the confrontation that had just happened more or less summed up her reasons.  I replied that I didn’t like that aspect of the school either, and in fact, I found it just as frustrating as she did.  I told her that I dealt with it by reminding myself that I wasn’t going to let anyone who treated people badly determine for me what kind of day I was going to have.  I think she learned right there on the spot that she actually had the ability to exercise that kind of meta-level control, in order to distance herself from a situation instead of getting caught up in it.  I don’t know how much of an effect that teachable moment may have had on other aspects of her life, but at that moment it completely turned her mood around.  Since then, every time she sees me in the hallways of the school, she smiles and says “Hi.”

Whenever possible, I try to be proactive about being compassionate.  When I walk around checking homework, I try to notice any students who seem out of sorts.  If they are, I take a moment to ask if everything is OK.  If I get a negative response, I gently ask what’s wrong, and whether he/she would like to talk with me after class, during lunch, or after school.  This might add half a minute to a homework check from time to time, but it makes the student feel like someone genuinely cares about the human being inside.  It also sends the message to the rest of the class that I care about them, that I’ll find time for them if they need it, and that I recognize that some things are more important than teaching physics.

There are several payoffs, which match the ones described in the article.  My students trust me.  They work hard when I ask them to, and they will more or less do anything (reasonable) that I ask of them.  I have no behavior/discipline problems in my classes.  Both times I’ve been absent this school year, the substitute teacher raved about how easy my classes are to work with and how well-behaved they are.  One substitute remarked that my kids were eager to learn, and that it was her most enjoyable day of subbing all year.  (In fact, my most recent absence was a planned absence for a personal day.  When I told my students that I was going to be absent, quite a few of them were genuinely disappointed.)

All of this may sound obvious to most of the people who read my blog, but there are plenty of people out there who think most of the problems in our schools come from a lack of control, and that the lack of control comes from being too “soft”.  These are the people who push for harsher punishments, and for teachers to have less discretion in how we treat students.  These are the people who elect (and serve on) school committees.  These are the people who are not swayed by data or case studies, because they already “know” what works.  These are the people who marvel at how well my students behave and keep on task, and in the same breath tell me that I’m doing everything wrong and that I need to change my entire approach or I’ll never be able to get my students to behave and keep on task.  These are the people who say “That’s not the way they did things when I was in school.” and in the same breath say “I want my kids to have a better childhood than I did.”

In fact, I also want my students to have the best childhood they possibly can.  In a perfect world, everyone would treat each other with compassion, and my students would never know anything else.  The next best, and what I actually hope for them, is that I can help them experience a world that they want to adopt for themselves and give to their children.  A generation from now, I want my students to be saying, “That is the way they did things when I was in school.”

I recently participated in a discussion/debate on a friend’s Facebook page.  Another teacher in the discussion, who was arguing against grade inflation, pointed out that in one class, he had an unusually high incidence of failures during the most recent quarter—more than 50%.  He was dismayed by this, but held his ground, calling it “tough love.”  I don’t doubt that this teacher loves his students, and I don’t disagree with his message—that you can’t earn the grades if you don’t do the work.  The problem is that his message is lost on his students.

The phrase “tough love” entered the mainstream English language in 1968 via the book of the same title by Bill Milliken.  Milliken used the phrase to mean refraining from engaging in enabling behaviors when dealing with loved ones who had substance abuse problems.  However, in many people’s minds, the phrase has evolved to mean standing firm while dishing out some sort of punishment.  Over the course of the four decades since the book’s publication, “tough love” seems to have mutated into “Tough shit!”

Tough love is, by definition, an act of love.  It carries the intent of helping the recipient improve his/her life by forcing the recipient to go against the status quo.  Simply kicking your drug addict child out of your house is an example of “tough shit”.  Tough love is packing a suitcase for him, dropping him off at a rehabilitation center, and saying, “I’ll pick you up when you’re clean.  In the mean time, call me if there’s anything from your room that I forgot.”  Tough love includes an ongoing commitment to helping the recipient, not letting him/her give up.  Tough love is supportive, and is hard work.  By contrast, “tough shit” is easy.  “Tough shit” has no commitment beyond the act of punishment.

In the classroom, the teacher’s ultimate task is for their students to acquire the skills and understanding needed to master a given subject area.  Almost all of us use some combination of presentation (often lecture and/or demonstration), exploration (often hands-on activities and discussions), and practice (problems for students to solve that require the newly-acquired skills).  Once our students are expected to have mastered a topic, we measure their understanding through some sort of assessment (usually a written test).  As teachers, we understand the connection between all of these.  If any of the presentation, exploration, or practice pieces is left out, the student fails to master the content.  In a high school, there is generally enough class time for two of the three pieces.  (In college, there is generally enough class time for only one.)  Most teachers choose to do the presentation and exploration in the classroom, and to assign practice for homework.  (There is an idea gaining popularity called the “flipped classroom,” in which the presentation piece is done through videos, which are assigned as homework.)  Unfortunately, in both the traditional and flipped classroom, the homework piece is essential, and students who omit it fail.

I agree that all three pieces are necessary for mastery, and I agree that students who do not master even the rudimentary aspects of a topic (or course) should receive a failing grade as a result.  Otherwise, the grade is meaningless.  However, one of the problems that seems to be endemic in our schools is that students do not believe that they can ultimately succeed.  As soon as they believe that success is impossible, they shut down and don’t do the homework.  As a result, they fail, which reinforces their belief that they cannot succeed.  To be successful with these students, teachers need to find a way to break the cycle, which requires a sustained effort against a kid who wants to give up at every step of the way.  This is where the teacher’s efforts go from “tough shit” to tough love.

One of my students, “Loretta” (not her real name) suddenly gave up on herself last quarter.  She did nothing for about a month, racking up a string of zeroes and missing a test on thermal physics.  One day after school, she had detention for being tardy.  I sprung her from detention to talk with her, trying to find out what might have changed.

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you.  If you don’t want me to pry, I won’t.  But I suspect you want me to know, but you don’t want to tell me.  Is that right?”

“Maybe.”

As soon as she said “Maybe,” it was clear what she wanted.  She wanted me to know.  She wanted me to help.  She wanted out of her dilemma, but she had no idea whether it was possible.  She knew that it wasn’t her place to ask for help, but I had shown her that I wanted to anyway.  Having me pry the information out of her was a test she had unconsciously devised to see whether I was determined enough to provide the amount of help that she knew she was going to need.

With careful prying and intuition, I eventually figured out the main problem, which was that she hadn’t applied to any colleges and she had no plan in place for her life after graduation.    She had started the application process, and has good SAT scores, but she has a low GPA.  (She had spent part of last year hospitalized for depression and ended up with poor grades to show for it.)  The killing blow was that one college’s application asked for an explanation for every suspension.  My school suspends kids for all kinds of relatively minor infractions, such as getting caught with a cell phone anywhere on their person, being tardy to school more than six times in a quarter, or any kind of arguing or back-talking to a teacher.  She decided that she didn’t have any chance of getting in, so she dropped the application process and went into a tailspin.

She stayed in my room for half a hour longer than the detention.  In that time, she had made up (and aced) the test she was missing, had gotten the data for the lab write-up she owed, and went home with copies of her missing homework assignments.  More importantly, we agreed on a couple of colleges that I would help her apply to after April vacation.  The next day, she came to class with all of her missing work completed, and she ultimately earned a B in physics for that quarter.  I asked her how her other grades had turned out.  “Not so good. I don’t have a Mr. Bigler for any of my other classes.”

Loretta desperately needed some tough love.  She didn’t need someone to remind her, “If you don’t do the work, you’ll fail.”  She already knew that.  But she didn’t need or want someone to excuse her from anything.  What she needed was a path to success that required her to earn it.  She needed someone to say, “I’m not giving you any option except to succeed, because I know you can do it.  This is your path.  If you falter, I’ll pick you up, but you will make it to the end under your own power.  What I won’t do is to stand aside and let you fail.”

In schools, whether we like it or not, grades are used to define success.  This means that attempts to make success more attainable amount to adding pathways for students to demonstrate mastery of the concepts and earn good grades.  (Note that this does not mean grade inflation or meaningless extra credit.  If grades become meaningless, students will not do meaningful work to earn them.)  So one of the things I do is to give students additional opportunities to practice and demonstrate mastery.

I allow students to turn in late homework for 70% credit.  70% is enough credit for them to believe that it’s worth bothering after the fact.  (This actually has a long-term benefit.  About half of the students who turn in most of their work late at the beginning of the year are turning in most of it on time by about mid-year.)  I let them retake tests (same breakdown of topics; similar-but-not-identical questions) for up to 90% of the original credit (the better grade replaces the worse one), provided that they’ve turned in all of the homework that relates to the test.  (Also provided that I think they’re ready for the test.  If they come in after school and they’re not ready, I’ll say, “I don’t think you’re ready for the test yet.  How about if we review for it today and you come back and take it tomorrow?”  A few who know they won’t come back the next day will opt to take the re-test then and there anyway.  Most take my advice and end up doing well on the re-test.)  My belief is that learning something and demonstrating mastery at any point is much more important than doing so according to my somewhat arbitrary schedule.  (The realities of assigning grades to specific quarters of the school year already imposes some hard deadlines.  I think those are enough.)

When I want to stretch my students, I give them more challenging tasks, but allow them to collaborate.  One of my favorite ways to do this is through what I call “open friend” quizzes.  These are “challenge” problems—much more so than the ones I would normally give on homework or tests.  I allow them to work in groups of up to three (plus help from me if they need it), and the result counts as a quiz grade.  Another strategy I’ve used successfully is to have groups of students make up problems for each other to solve, with some sort of recognition for groups that come up with particularly clever problems.  Both strategies have a built-in means of getting recalcitrant students to participate, and give me as the teacher an opportunity (as I circulate among the groups) to make sure every student feels like he/she contributed something worthwhile and got something out of the process. The strategies create an environment where a successful outcome is guaranteed (because I’ll help them as much as they need, but no more than they need), and where the problems are challenging enough that none of the students starts the process already knowing the answers. The solutions end up being combinations of ideas and skills that reward the kind of intuition that can be (and often is) provided by a student who might have a good high-level grasp of concepts but be lost in the details.  The ultimate message is that success takes some work, some brain power, and working through some frustration, but everyone can attain it.

Whenever I’m in a one-on-one conversation with a student (even if it’s just while I’m checking homework), I try to notice which students look like they might be out of sorts and ask them if things are OK (which they’re usually not).  If there are circumstances that might warrant it, I offer them extra flexibility.

“You look really stressed. Is there something in particular that you’re stressed about?”

[Student briefly explains issues going on at home that are the source of the stress.]

“I want you to ask me right now if you can postpone tomorrow’s test for a day or two.”

[Student asks.]

“Now that you’ve asked at least one day in advance and provided a good reason, I can let you take the test a day or two later if you need to.  Tomorrow, you can decide whether or not you need to take me up on the offer.  If you decide not to take the test tomorrow, I’ll send you to the library while everyone else takes it, and you can make it up after school.”

Sometimes, when I know a student needs to come to my room to make something up but won’t remember after school, I’ll hand the student a Post-It note and a locker pass. “Write yourself a reminder on this Post-It right now and go put it on the inside of your locker where you’ll see it at the end of the day.”  Sometimes, I’ll drop by the detention to see if there are students who owe me work.  If there are, I offer to retrieve them so we can spend the time catching up on their physics.

Tough love, the way I try to implement it, is a combination of compassion, flexibility, and unrelenting insistence on success.  My students need to believe that I’m a good person, that I’ll make their time worth their while, that I’ll do what it takes to help them succeed, and that I won’t let them fail.

It works, at least for me.  Every quarter I have one or two failures, and more often than not one student does end up failing for the year.  I appreciate the years when my students attain a 100% pass rate.  The years when it drops to 99% are a little disappointing, but I guess I can live with 99% tough love and 1% “tough shit,” in order to maintain the standards that enable the 99% to take pride in their success.

I have several demonstrations that can give students mild electric shocks.  The van de Graaf generator and Wimshurst machine are traditional physics classroom gadgets.  With the Wimshurst machine, I came up with a diabolical plan.  I suggested that if one student held each electrode, and they placed their fingertips about an inch apart, when enough static charge had built up, a spark would jump from one to the other.  Two girls jumped up to try it, giggling and shrieking predictably.  When they were finished, I wrote on the board: “Girls 2.  Boys 0.”  That was enough to get half the class to try it.

After the Wimshurst machine, I hooked up the van de Graaf generator, which turned out to be powerful enough to make their hair move a little, but not enough to make any of it stick straight up.

Next was a plasma globe, which was fun to look at.  I pointed out that it “finds” their fingers because even though glass is an insulator, some charge does get through.  I proved this by putting an aluminum foil tent over the plasma ball, which gave them noticeable shocks.  Some students clearly were conflicted—they wanted to experience the shocks, but were also afraid of them.  Of course I let them decide for themselves, dissuading their classmates from applying peer pressure.  In the end most of them decided to try the demos, but what I found fascinating was that a significant fraction of the most fearful, once they had experienced the shock, were the most eager to do something to increase the effect!

The other interesting revelation with the plasma globe came when a student accidentally leaned on a metal object when she had her hand on the globe (sans aluminum foil).  She discovered that a lot more charge was passing through her body than she had realized!  What I found more interesting was that after she shrieked and pulled her hand away, several other students wanted to try it.

I also have an induction coil, which I used to make a Jacob’s Ladder.  (No, I didn’t let them give themselves shocks with the induction coil!)  The arcing was not hot enough to ignite paper, or even to light a match.  However, on a whim I decided to see what a lit match would do.  It turned out to be interesting—the arc moved toward the flame.  This makes sense; a flame is a redox reaction between molecular oxygen and some sort of fuel.  Because the reaction involves electron transfer, it served as a source/sink for electrons jumping from one electrode of the induction coil to the other.  It made a nice connection between physics and chemistry.

After I was finished with the demos, I told my students that I was the envy of the entire faculty—I was sure that most of their teachers would love an opportunity to apply electric shocks to just one of them, and I got to do it to half the class!

To most adults, and certainly to those of us who are teachers, kids fighting is a bad thing.  But there is a time and place for lecturing a student, and there is a time and place for listening.  I decided that this was the latter, so I prodded her a little.  The girl told me that things had been tense between her and the other girl since early in the school year, and they finally came to a head.  “But we’re cool now,” she added.  “It cleared the air between you?” I asked.  “Yes.”

Another student I spoke with a few months ago was quite concerned about one of the grades on her report card, particularly about what her father’s response would be.  I asked, “What do you think will happen?”  She replied, “He’ll yell at me.  He’ll tell me that I’m a huge disappointment to my family.  I wish he would just hit me.”  I responded with “I understand—words hurt for a lot longer.  However, for good or for ill, it’s not considered OK for parents to hit high school students.”  And then I went on to explain how yelling at her was probably something her father felt that he needed to do, and that her job was to make it clear that she was listening and was appropriately contrite.  But the important thing was that she could respond appropriately without internalizing the harangue.

I recall a chapter from Herman Wouk’s novel, The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder, which I had to read a chapter of in middle school.  In the excerpt, the main character, Herbie, steals money from his father to build a ride at his summer camp.  The ride becomes the hit of the camp, but the owners of the camp talk Herbie into donating all of his revenue to charity, leaving him unable to pay back the money he stole.  When he owns up to his father, he gets a beating, but in Herbie’s words, the beating made the whole thing OK.

There is a common thread in each of these stories.  The teenagers had unresolved emotional conflict.  In two of the stories, there was a physical confrontation, and the confrontation brought about an abrupt end to the conflict.  In the case of the girl with the report card, she genuinely wanted the abrupt end to the conflict, but there was no way for her to get it.

Children live in a world where they have very little control.  Most decisions are made for them, with little or no opportunity for their input.  When they want something, they pour every ounce of energy into trying to convince the other people involved.  Eventually, they either get what they want or they don’t.  If they don’t get what they want, they escalate the situation, often continuing until they receive some sort of punishment.  At some point the moment arrives, the decision is made, the metaphorical reset button is pushed, and life goes on.  Small wonder these children pick fights with each other.  If they feel that a situation is untenable, the only means they know of bringing about a change is to escalate the situation until a confrontation becomes the only option.

This happened to me in my first year of teaching—a girl came in after school to discuss her grade on a test.  She argued her point, threw a tantrum, yelled, cried, and finally, when she didn’t get what she wanted, stomped out of the room.  The next day, she greeted me with a smile and a cheerful “Hi, Mr. Bigler!” as if the whole thing had never happened.  She had put all of her energies into getting the resolution she wanted.  Although the situation didn’t work out the way she wanted, the confrontation pushed her reset button.  I see similar situations every day.  Often I’ll watch as a student escalates an argument with a teacher or administrator, earning a detention or suspension in the process of pushing the reset button.  All the while, I can’t help but wonder whether we can teach these kids how to de-escalate a situation—how to push the reset button without having to go through a conflict to get there.

When my older daughter was about five years old, I explicitly taught her how to negotiate.  I taught her how to ask for something from an adult who might be reluctant to say “yes,” and how to inquire politely and start a discussion if she didn’t get what she wanted.  Many parents told me this was a bad idea—that it would result in her trying to negotiate everything rather than just accepting it as parent-dictated inevitability.  In retrospect, I don’t think she pressed any harder than her peers, but it did make it a lot easier to have a rational discussion with her when the response needed to be different from what she wanted.  It’s a choice I’ve never regretted.

I think this is something all children need.  They need to be taught how to negotiate, and how to de-escalate.  When situations come up in schools or at home, rather than being quick to hand out consequences, it would make more sense for the adult to pause the conversation long enough to have a meta-conversation about how the negotiation could proceed in a way that de-escalates (or at least refrains from escalating) the situation.  I.e., the adult needs to be the one to stop and press the reset button before the conflict occurs.  The first lesson for the child is that it is possible to push the reset button without a conflict.  (Too often, adults expect the child to be the one to press the reset button, even when the child doesn’t realize that this is even possible.)  Then, the adult needs to give the child a chance to practice de-escalating from that point.  If the child de-escalates successfully, the second lesson has been learned and the reward is that the child successfully avoids the negative consequence that might otherwise have come to pass.

This is not an easy task, especially at first.  Like so many other lessons, it requires the adult to be patient, keep the child on task (or get the child back on task), and offer up helpful comment after helpful comment while the child tries and fails to make the right thing happen.  However, like so many other lessons, with practice the child will eventually learn the process and become adept at it.  And as I think about this generation who will be running the country when I’m in a retirement home, I really want them to have finely tuned de-escalation skills and a multitude of graceful and socially acceptable ways of pushing the reset button.

“I’ve never felt the need to ‘entertain’ students by making things ‘memorable’. Chemistry is a serious business, not a magic show”

I got interested in Chemistry in high school because of the magic. not necessarily specific demos, but the different labs (probably using very dangerous chemicals at the time) and intimate participation in the magic. Chemistry (and science) is magic and a mystery. We don’t truly know why anything does anything, but trying to find that answer (and thousands of “smaller” answers along the way) is a great journey for any scientist.

I think the distinction between entertainment, demonstration, and experimentation is important.

A pyrotechnics show that is not connected to anything the students are currently learning serves only to entertain. Entertainment can serve a useful purpose, but anything that is purely entertainment is time not spent on the things you’ve actually decided that you want your students to learn. In my opinion, if you find yourself wanting to do a lot of demos that don’t have an obvious connection to the curriculum, you should seriously consider starting a chemistry club. Kids can come to your room after school and play with the magic of chemistry to their heart’s content without costing you any class time.

A demonstration can be entertaining, but it needs to be connected in a tangible way to something the students are currently studying. I do a lot of small demos. I use concentrated HCl and baking soda to demonstrate a spontaneous but endothermic reaction. I demo the aluminum and copper (II) chloride reaction in chemistry I to introduce chemical reactions, and I do the same demo with measured quantities to demonstrate stoichiometry and limiting reactant. I use an ice cube to boil water in a sealed flask to demonstrate the connection between temperature, pressure, and phase diagrams. I do a spectacular demo to show how forming bonds releases energy. (See for a write-up with pictures.) [Discussion on the ChemEd-L list suggests that my explanation has some inaccuracies, but I think it does a great job of making the point in a memorable way that forming bonds releases energy, thereby undoing the damage caused by their biology
teachers.]

When I do demos, my students always demand to know why they work. For demos that appear to have an element of danger, quite a few students visibly express concern for my safety until I explain exactly how I make the demo inherently safe while still giving the illusion of risk that’s not really there. I would never do a dangerous-looking demo without including this discussion. Besides allaying the concerns of some of the more sensitive students, it teaches students valuable lessons about experimental design (adjusting conditions to ensure safety while still giving a spectacular result) and lab safety (risk assessment and elimination). It also allows me to reiterate the message that I would never do a demo unless I was confident that I could do it safely and I understood the science behind it.

Lab experiments serve yet another purpose. They give students an opportunity to connect what they learned in the classroom with something they can manipulate themselves. They also teach and/or reinforce lab techniques that will be useful in later experiments, as their knowledge of the connections between theory and experiment continues to grow. I believe that the best experiments have an inquiry component with clear connections to the curriculum. Because labs are part of how my students acquire their working knowledge of chemistry, the students’ understanding may be still be weak when they do the lab. For this reason, these experiments are usually a lot less complex than the demos.

Flame tests can work as a demo or as a lab. Like many chem teachers, I have my students do the experiment when they’re studying electron configuration, and I insist that their lab reports discuss the energy transitions that produce the colors. I find it unfortunate that some teachers save the flame test lab to use when students’ interest in chemistry is flagging, almost as if to say, “The stuff we’re studying right now is boring and not relevant to anything you might find useful, so we’re going to take a break from the drudgery.”

As for the procedure, I put a little of each powder in a separate test tube. Each lab station has the test tube of chemical, Bunsen burner, some cotton swabs, a mini Erlenmeyer flask full of water to wet the swabs (so they hold more powder), and a 250 mL beaker with water in it for disposing of the used cotton swabs. The only problem is that some of the powder inevitably gets spilled into the Bunsen burners. (A colleague uses candles instead of Bunsen burners, in order to avoid contaminating the burners. I’ll try that next time I do the lab.) The powders produce colors that are just as spectacular as the ones I got the one time I did the experiment with alcohol. (This was in my second year of teaching. One student lit his arm on fire when he poured alcohol on a flame that he wasn’t able to see. His lab partners smothered the fire right away and no one was hurt, but when that happened, I swore I’d find a way to do the lab without the risk of using alcohols.)

Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.