The Long Game

My jaw clenched as I left the post-observation meeting.  Nobody likes negative feedback, but this was different - there was an agenda here.  I had taught a lesson on scientific consensus and climate change, and my assistant principal had taken issue with me pointing out the inherent bias held by the American Association of Petroleum Scientists.  Outwardly, I like to think I took the critique in stride, but inside I fumed.  In situations like these I tend to play the conversation over and over in my mind.  For the first several hundred replays the verdict was the same.  I was right and she was clearly wrong.  Eventually, my focus started to drift to the most important words said in that meeting, “Let the data speak for itself.”  And that’s when I realized my assistant principal was right.

Four years later I was listening to a radio show called This American Life and an Episode called Kid Politics.  The episode discusses a sharp decline in American belief in climate change between 2006, the year Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth came out and 2009, the year Climategate erupted.  As I listened further I started to realize how important my assistant principal’s advice was.  The radio piece featured an educator trying to convince a student that the Earth was warming as a result of humans, with each argument falling flat.  The student, entrenched in her own perspective and bolstered by research done on the internet held true to the same belief she had going into the conversation.

This year I have students who are similarly entrenched in a belief that doesn’t match my own, but I’ve given up convincing them one way or the other.  Instead I try to give them tools: I teach them to look for data that is close to the source, I have them conduct experiments that test the physical principles that are central to the debate and I give them a forum to make arguments in front of their classmates, then I argue against them, whichever side of the debate they fall on.  I’m not sure what impact this unit will have on these students’ views on climate change, but I am confident they will come to rely on science more when they make their arguments than they did when they started.  This has two effects: First, these students will be less susceptible to the winds of change borne of propaganda that will be placed in front of them from both sides of the debate.  And second, while our beliefs may still differ, my assistant principal and I will have found common ground.

The Information Economy

Wednesday, February 15th
12:54, My Classroom - I ask a student to put away his cell phone

I certainly see why teachers have a distaste for the use of some technologies in the classroom.  One of the major behavioral issues I run into as a classroom teacher is students surreptitiously texting under their table or behind a book.  This distraction mentally takes them out of the classroom and away from the subject at hand.

1:17, My Classroom - I take away the cell phone because the student was using his cell phone, again.

While using technology in class is a choice for students, it’s also a habit.  Students reach for a cell phone as naturally as they might tap a pencil on their table.  To them, their phone is like an appendage and some students react as such when it’s taken away.

2:48, Science Department Meeting - A coworker breaks the news to another: There is a new iPhone app that allows people to identify tree species by using the camera to take a picture of the tree’s leaf.  The second coworker expresses concern that students don’t have to think anymore.

I’ve put my time in with a dichotomous key.  I can identify most New England trees without an iPhone app.  If I had the app, I would have saved countless hours deciding whether a tree’s leaves were double serrated or just serrated.  Of course I could have spent the saved time texting my friends or I could have used my time analyzing forest structure or predicting a tree stand’s future.  After using the app often enough I probably would have memorized the trees anyway. 

6:22, My Car - I hear a radio piece on Facebook going public claiming that we are not just living in an information age, but an information economy.

In education, one of the current buzz phrases is “21st Century Skills”.  The radio piece reminds me that we live in a different world than the one in which I went to high school.  In the information economy, information, like that which Facebook, Wikipedia or countless other website collect, is the raw material.  One of the key 21st Century Skills we need to impart to our students is to learn how to process all of this freely available ore, into something more valuable.

The default setting of technology is to be a distraction.  Without much work it becomes a cheat or crutch.  As educators, we have two choices: We amputate the diversions that have become an extension of our students’ bodies or we turn these tools into something even greater.  Let’s turn these technologies into the calculator of the 21st century, saving time rather than eliminating tools.  I say we use technology as spring board, catapulting students into deeper thought and broader accomplishment, leaving the simple math to the machines.

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

I can’t recite my school’s shared vision from memory, but I remember the first half of the first sentence: Gray-New Gloucester High School is a student-centered...  It seemed strange then that students would vote overwhelmingly that they did not feel like they had the opportunity to make choices regarding their learning.  Or, that more than 80% of teacher respondents said they didn’t have sufficient training to help students own their learning.  After a staff meeting regarding these and other survey results I started thinking about my own classroom.  How much choice do my students have in their learning?  How much ownership?  How much did they really want?  How much do they need to be successful in the “real world”?

In my classroom this year I have tried to give students more choice when it comes to how they do experiments, but outside of this small concession I haven’t really given them that much choice in how they learn.  For instance, when studying rock formation, everyone saw the same sediment settling demonstration, everyone read about the Naica crystal cave in Mexico and everyone saw the same slide show.  It seems obvious then that everyone’s response to the unit question would be very similar.  Is this student-centered? Certainly not to the degree I’d like it to be. 

In my next unit I’ll be teaching astronomy with the essential question “Will humans ever meet an alien?”  What if I give the students the reins?  They get the unit questions and enough data to figure out the answers.  Then, they map the path to figuring out the solution.  As an example, the first unit question is “How long would it take to reach your star at the speed of light and at the speed of the fastest human-made space rocket?”  The students would be given the parallax angle of a star.  With the question, and the available information at hand they would be responsible for 1) creating a plan of action to find the solution and 2) setting out to figure out the solution.    Of course the students wouldn’t know that a parallax angle is the distance a star appears to move as the Earth revolves around the sun or that light moves 186,000 miles per second, but the internet does and it is right there at their fingertips.

In my mind I can picture it and it seems wonderful, but I have been warned.  I surveyed 2 classes worth of kids and asked them if they could have figured out a similar question from last unit without the direct instruction I offered and got mixed results: some were confident, others not as much.  I’ve also asked fellow teachers their advice and they responded in warning tones: students  don’t want that type of choice, high school students don’t learn that way.  There is the voice in my own head, too: You’re veering too far from traveled ground.  So maybe the vision is as reachable as the stars my students will soon be studying, or maybe I’m just interpreting it wrong.  Or maybe, just maybe these students will reach for the stars and arrive at their destination.

Crystalization

This quarter I took a different tack with my geology unit.  This means new lessons and new labs.  This process of change is exciting and reinvigorating, but it also leads to a lot of frustration.  Frustration, however, is the father of learning.

One lesson I wanted my students to learn was the relationship between temperature and crystal size in igneous rocks.  As igneous rocks (rocks that form from magma or lava) form, they develop crystals.  If you’ve looked closely at a stone countertop, you are familiar with the large multicolored chunks (crystals) that make up granite.  If you’ve seen a piece of volcanic glass (obsidian) or regular glass (glass), you have seen crystals so small that they are indistinguishable from their neighbors.  This range of crystal sizes is an effect of the temperature at which minerals in a liquid cool.  This is the process I hoped my students could experience first hand.

Melting down rock in the classroom was out of the question.  The obvious alternative was salt, and this is where the problems started.  Every salt crystal lab on the internet starts with putting salt ions into solution by mixing the salt into water.  A metaphor my friend Walter used echoed in my mind.   Imagine the relatively large water molecules as basketballs in a box.  While the box may fill with basketballs there is plenty of space between the balls.  The salt, made of smaller molecules (golf balls, perhaps), fills the spaces in between.  This is where the similarities between labs end. 

In my first attempts, my wife was subjected to bowls of salt water with toilet paper rolls towering out of them like cooling towers on a nuclear power plant.  The bowl/ tube creations littered our kitchen - the refrigerator, the window, the oven - for a day before I realized the technique wouldn’t work.  In this process the crystals were forming as a result of evaporation.  The cardboard drew the water from the bowl causing it to evaporate.  With each drop of water that evaporated, the salt held within crystallized.  As I mentally consulted Walter’s model, this process had little to do with the cooling mechanisms that form granite or obsidian

As is the custom in modern times, when faced with lack of information I consulted the all knowing internet.  In my search I found resources that seemed great, but lacked critical details (But how do I get the seed crystal to form in the jar? And, what is a seed crystal?). Finally, I came across a description that fit Walter’s model and my understanding of igneous rocks.  It encouraged heating the water (imagine spreading out those basketballs), adding in more salt (filling the new spaces with additional golf balls), putting in a string, and then cooling the water  (shoving the basketballs back to their original spots).  It was like Christmas morning when I reentered the kitchen after an hour or so to find that those water molecules had pushed the salt crystals out of solution and an into a coarse coat on the string.  The next day I charged into the classroom and showed the students what I’d done, with one change - the crystal didn’t grow. 

Once again I consulted the internet -  the resource I found this time told me that Borax (sodium tetraborate, available in the laundry detergent aisle of your grocery store) grew larger crystals, more reliably and that they could be grown on a pipe cleaner cut into the shape of a snowflake (apropos, given the season).  Once again I returned to my home lab/ kitchen to test it out.  It worked perfectly, producing a beautiful white crystal boraxflake.  Again, I eagerly set out to replicate my success at school.  Again, I met with failure.  After waiting the requisite two hours I was left with nothing but a soggy pipe cleaner, bent into the shape of a snowflake.  Was something wrong with the water at school?  Was I doing something wrong?  Was I destined to fail in my epic quest to teach my students about crystals?  With the countdown to Christmas break nearing, I dropped my pipe cleaner back into the water and went home to consult my last hope - Facebook. 

The conversation that ensued provided as many questions as it did answers.  Like each roadblock before it forced me to think about my model and clarify my understanding of how the world works.  My setbacks provided more learning than my conquests, but the hope that these elements might crystalize drove me onward.

The next morning I got to school ready to try any or all of the advice I’d received, but first I checked the beaker I’d left the night before.  To my surprise and relief I was rewarded with a fully formed crystal snowflake.  Since that time I’ve run the lab with all of my classes.  Like myself, they had successes and failures but I felt comfortable telling them, that if nothing else science is a learning experience and you don’t always get what you want.  At least on the first try.

The McKin Site

One day I hope to begin my freshman science class with the following paragraph:

“Reports of groundwater and soil contamination began in 1973, when residents in East Gray reported odors in well waters and discoloration of laundry.”  Over the next three years your task will be to figure out why and to develop a plan to prevent future residents from encountering these same problems.

As we walked back from a potential field trip location a coworker and I were batting ideas back and forth.  My coworker, Pete, knocked one out of the park.  His idea was that every student who passed through our high school science program, at the end of their experience visit some location and conduct a complete analysis of the site using knowledge from all of their science courses.  As an example he mentioned the McKin site.

Between 1964 and 1978 the McKin Company operated a petroleum/ chemical waste disposal site/ transfer center in Gray.  Throughout this time the company stored, buried, incinerated and dumped waste on its property.  In addition to the problems mentioned above, these actions resulted in a whole host of other problems many of which may fall in line with state science standards.

From an Earth science perspective, the problem is a watershed issue.  While the company may have never set foot (or toxic waste) off their property it didn’t stop people from needing to hold their nose while they drank their tap water.  How might the water move from ground to well, and through what does it pass to get there?

From a biology perspective, the problem may be fish or soil organisms.  Chemistry may look at it from the vantage point of the hydrocarbons that were dumped there decades ago, but still remain a concern.  Physics may study the effects of density on the pollutant plumes movement across the landscape.  The possibilities are endless. 

The idea may be great, but of course the devil is in the details.  It’s possible that the science is too advanced for high school students, or the topics are not sufficiently aligned with the standards, or that we’ll never be given enough time to coordinate the effort amongst all of those teachers.  Over the next week or so (if we have the time) I hope to collect information on a few other sites that might fit the requirements of a high school science capstone.


"McKin Company Superfund Site." Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Providing Information about Innovative Treatment, Characterization, and Monitoring Technologies While Acting as a Forum for All Waste Remediation Stakeholders. Web. 01 Dec. 2011. <http://www.clu-in.org/products/costperf/THRMDESP/Mckin.htm>.

Stratigraphy

There is this road cut on the Windham/ Gray border that I drive by every afternoon and I can't stop thinking about it.  The rock face is a puzzle.  With three rock types, spanning hundreds of millions of years of time, it has taken me awhile to figure out the geologic history that lead to the formation of the object of my perseveration.  I'm hoping it will offer my students an equivalent feast of thought in our next unit on plate tectonics. 

There are a couple principles of geology that I had in mind as I sorted through the history of the site.  The law of original horizontality told me that the sedimentary rocks that flank the site were not always askew, in that unsettling way that many New England rocks seem to be (can't geology be flat and straight forward like it is in the Midwest?).  The principle of cross-cutting relationships told me that the foot-wide basalt dike that cut through the center of the site was younger than the granite that it bisected.  The granite, in turn, was younger than the sedimentary rock that it split.

While no laws lay out the order in which I teach geology, the puzzle creates its own structure: series of sub-questions (mystery questions) the answer of which everyone must know to arrive at the next step of the mystery.  In its current iteration, my unit is made up of the following questions:

1. What types of rock make up the road-cut rock formation?
2. What order were the rocks lain down in?
3. What processes led to the formation of each type of rock?
4. At what time period in geologic history was each rock lain down in?
5. What was the arrangement of the continents during the period that each rock was formed?

An understanding of each question is necessary to answer the question that follows it.  This stratigraphy of unit questions was the foundation for my lake mystery unit (stay tuned for my students' solutions to these questions) and unless my next unit fails will continue to serve the role in all of my units for the school year.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated Equilibrium

One of the critiques of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection is the lack of transitional forms.  While plenty of previously missing links do exist, the fossil record shows that changes seem to happen all at once after long periods of stasis.  The forces that explain this punctuated equilibrium are at work not only at the grand scale of evolution, but play a key role in the stasis that we have seen in our educational system over the last century and will have an equally crucial role in overturning that stagnation, if my principal has his way.

The forces that cause stagnation run parallel.  Evolutionarily, it’s sexual selection and genes.  In education, it's resistance to change and previous experience.  If one human has a mutation to grow a third eye, is there anyone who would want to breed with that person?  Change, no matter how useful, is not often welcome.  I have heard the conversation in more than one teacher room:

School Initiative
by: jhhaley


The last comment embodies what a former boss referred to as the great pendulum of education.  In my short tenure as a teacher I have seen ideas come and go, or at least get watered down, so I empathize with the chorus, but why does it happen?  In evolution, even if the third eye becomes valued, it can’t last long.  Within a few generations it’s drowned out by all the normal genes.  In author Kim Sterelny’s words, “Lineages do change. But the change between generations does not accumulate. Instead, over time, the species wobbles about its phenotypic mean.”

These wobbles are the biological embodiment of our educational pendulum.  Change occurs, but there’s nothing worth posting to Twitter.  It’s in our genes.  Where you went to school, where you trained to teach and where you currently teach are more than likely institutions based on the status quo.  How does a new idea survive when everything around it says, “Foreigners Not Welcome”? 

The punctuation in a biological system has many stages, but first, a small group of organisms, isolated from their fellows, transcend barriers to change because there are fewer voices shouting for them to stay the same.  Stranded on a desert island, the third eye starts to make sense.  A small school, like mine, might be just this sort of paradise.  The genes seem to be in place.  The superintendent, the principal and many of the teachers have embraced student-centered, standards-based teaching.  Speciation, however, is not complete.  There is both subtle and overt resistance among some staff and the superintendent is about to retire.

In the last stage of punctuated equilibrium, the new species takes its show on the road.  Should we make it that far, the new form of education will have to compete with what has been in place for generations.  Let’s hope we’re up for the challenge.