Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Dude...Where's My Lab?
So you may not know this, but Tuesday is lab day. Or at least it's supposed to be lab day for the kids in my honors chemistry class. If you weren't aware, don't worry...they typically don't either. The reason for this is twofold. First, the school district's zany schedule often results in lab day being preempted in favor of benchmark testing, assemblies, or other administrative antics. Second, despite my increased experience these past few years, I still feel a tad awkward bringing students into the lab because they refuse to treat it seriously.
Now they don't take me particularly seriously on a day to day basis, but this is generally harmless stupidity. Not paying attention on a lab day is a prime example of harmful stupidity, the kind that gets little Suzie's hair singed and little Billy's eyes burnt out with acid. (As the saying goes, Mary didn't like to wear safety goggles...now she doesn't need them.) But, these are honors kids and we are in the midst of studying chemical reactions, so a lab activity was inevitable.
My plan was to do a fun lab involving the "gold plating" of a penny, using a zinc chloride solution to basically bronze the coins. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against me. First, there was a building committee meeting with the principal ate up a great deal of time which could well have been used gathering chemicals and running the experiment on my own without pesky student-derived distractions. Then, a technical malfunction undermined the lesson setup in my physical science class. (Schools should have a reserve of rechargable batteries for DVD and VCR remote controls. Ok...maybe not all schools. I'd settle for just mine.) Upon returning upstairs to the lab, I was suddenly informed by the lab tech that despite Tuesday being my scheduled lab day, another science teacher had laid claim to the lab and I would either have to re-setup every in the lab next door or scrap the lesson. I had 10 minutes or so left before first period started and no backup plan.
This was not good, but on such short notice, it seemed logical to scrap the lab.
That does not mean that I felt comfortable with the decision and remained calm, cool, and collected.
Far from it...because I had not contrived a backup plan of any sort up to that point. So, I did the only thing I could. I improvised.
I passed on the lab worksheet and described what we will be doing (fingers crossed here) tomorrow. And then just as we finished the warm up activity on equation balancing in walked the vice principal to observe my class.
Great.
Just great.
No lesson plan. No data notebook. Disgruntled, labless students...
And yet things went ok on that front thanks to my latest innovation in chemistry education: The Two-Minute Drill. Students are sitting in groups. Each group has a whiteboard. I write an equation on the board and then start my stopwatch. They have two minutes to write the balanced equation on their whiteboard. Each team that gets it right earns a point. The team with the most points gets a homework pass (or some other prize).
Believe it or not the kids get into it. And the vice-principal even seemed to be enjoying himself as he helped the group where he sat balance equations. I heard later from another administrator that the VP had mentioned he enjoyed visiting my class, which confirmed this suspicion. So hopefully I won't be getting a negative performance review this year.
However, I still have issues with my lab being coopted by that colleague of mine. She has a tendency to do things like this...like when she made the bulletin board about this year's egg drop featuring pictures of the participants...all of whom were her students. Never mind who organized the whole thing or whose class had the most participating groups and unbroken eggs. Never mind that. I could post a rather lengthy discussion on the hilarity that was this year's egg drop, but for now I have to get to bed. We have a lab tomorrow and I can only hope it ends up going as well as my class today did...albeit with a slightly less stressful leadup.
And so to bed.
So you may not know this, but Tuesday is lab day. Or at least it's supposed to be lab day for the kids in my honors chemistry class. If you weren't aware, don't worry...they typically don't either. The reason for this is twofold. First, the school district's zany schedule often results in lab day being preempted in favor of benchmark testing, assemblies, or other administrative antics. Second, despite my increased experience these past few years, I still feel a tad awkward bringing students into the lab because they refuse to treat it seriously.
Now they don't take me particularly seriously on a day to day basis, but this is generally harmless stupidity. Not paying attention on a lab day is a prime example of harmful stupidity, the kind that gets little Suzie's hair singed and little Billy's eyes burnt out with acid. (As the saying goes, Mary didn't like to wear safety goggles...now she doesn't need them.) But, these are honors kids and we are in the midst of studying chemical reactions, so a lab activity was inevitable.
My plan was to do a fun lab involving the "gold plating" of a penny, using a zinc chloride solution to basically bronze the coins. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against me. First, there was a building committee meeting with the principal ate up a great deal of time which could well have been used gathering chemicals and running the experiment on my own without pesky student-derived distractions. Then, a technical malfunction undermined the lesson setup in my physical science class. (Schools should have a reserve of rechargable batteries for DVD and VCR remote controls. Ok...maybe not all schools. I'd settle for just mine.) Upon returning upstairs to the lab, I was suddenly informed by the lab tech that despite Tuesday being my scheduled lab day, another science teacher had laid claim to the lab and I would either have to re-setup every in the lab next door or scrap the lesson. I had 10 minutes or so left before first period started and no backup plan.
This was not good, but on such short notice, it seemed logical to scrap the lab.
That does not mean that I felt comfortable with the decision and remained calm, cool, and collected.
Far from it...because I had not contrived a backup plan of any sort up to that point. So, I did the only thing I could. I improvised.
I passed on the lab worksheet and described what we will be doing (fingers crossed here) tomorrow. And then just as we finished the warm up activity on equation balancing in walked the vice principal to observe my class.
Great.
Just great.
No lesson plan. No data notebook. Disgruntled, labless students...
And yet things went ok on that front thanks to my latest innovation in chemistry education: The Two-Minute Drill. Students are sitting in groups. Each group has a whiteboard. I write an equation on the board and then start my stopwatch. They have two minutes to write the balanced equation on their whiteboard. Each team that gets it right earns a point. The team with the most points gets a homework pass (or some other prize).
Believe it or not the kids get into it. And the vice-principal even seemed to be enjoying himself as he helped the group where he sat balance equations. I heard later from another administrator that the VP had mentioned he enjoyed visiting my class, which confirmed this suspicion. So hopefully I won't be getting a negative performance review this year.
However, I still have issues with my lab being coopted by that colleague of mine. She has a tendency to do things like this...like when she made the bulletin board about this year's egg drop featuring pictures of the participants...all of whom were her students. Never mind who organized the whole thing or whose class had the most participating groups and unbroken eggs. Never mind that. I could post a rather lengthy discussion on the hilarity that was this year's egg drop, but for now I have to get to bed. We have a lab tomorrow and I can only hope it ends up going as well as my class today did...albeit with a slightly less stressful leadup.
And so to bed.
