Pi, Insomnia and Moles...

WHAT AM I DOING TO HELP KIDS ACHIEVE?

HOW DO I KNOW WHEN THEY ARE THERE?

WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE?

  I have been officially diagnosed with insomnia...no kidding.  I usually wake up at 2:30 A.M. and spend the next 2-3 hours rewriting my lesson plans in my head...crazy..I know.  So here is what I came up with.

 I was feeling really frustrated.  I felt like I was not doing nearly as well as many of the other TIMU teachers and I should be.  O.K....maybe I cannot control every piece of curriculum.  But what can I control?  I have decided to place my desk in groups.  Second, I am going to use my TIMU money to get some small whiteboards for each pod of desks.  Now when I do the problem of the day, instead of calling on one or two people, I am going to call on desks or groups.  Every group will have to whiteboard the answer and one or two groups will have to defend their answers.  My accelerated kids seem to have a tired look when we get started..hopefully this will force them to interact more.

Next...raspberry pi.  Mike got me thinking about this.  It is really cool so I got one with my TIMU money.  As I was tossing and turning I was thinking about all of the extra work this would take to get up and running....learning a new program language..getting everything to work, etc.  Then it dawned on me.  Why am I doing all the work?  So when I got to class I told the kids that their second quarter extra credit project will involve the raspberry pi.  They have to put it together, get it running, and hook up a sensor that can somehow detect one chemical.  Funny thing happened...by 6th bell I had 4 kids show up in my study hall with ideas and supplies.  One kid even called home and made his mom bring in some programming books he had.  This is the Maybe there is something to making things more student centered (see the redoing the desks in paragraph 1).

I should have known better...We were doing dimensional analysis, measuring and converting.  So we figured we should do some easy mole conversions so we could get ready for mole day fun.  There is a lab we have where they measure the mass of some elements (macroscopic) and then convert to moles and atoms (symbolic).  Guess what happens when you leave out the particulate?  When asked, "Which has more atoms, 2 moles of copper or 2 moles of iron?"  Number one answer (paraphrase) "Iron.  It is more dense.  That means that for a given volume or amount, you can squeeze in more atoms.  After all, we saw a picture of this in the density lab."...Ouch....We will revisit moles just before stoichiometry.  If anyone has a way to do it without dimensional analysis, I would like to give it a look.

I fully expect this process to have a nightmarish look to it when you walk into the classroom.  To respond to a professor's comments...yes..this is going to be harder and crazier.  However, I would rather try and fail than continue something that I know is not what might be the absolute best for students.