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.

Mystery in Mind

The last time I wrote, I talked about an algorithm for designing experiments - I hope to write another post about the algorithm soon.  In the meantime, enjoy the prototype as a Google Doc.  If you read it, you will notice the use of the phrase “mystery question”.  This is a reference to a lesson plan, which turned into a project, which turned into a key element of my teaching philosophy.

Credit for the science/ mystery collision in my life rests in two camps: My 12th grade modern fiction teacher who taught my classmates and me the rules of a mystery novel, and the promise of $50 check for curriculum services rendered. 

In 2007 I participated in a week long training with the Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute.  At the end of the workshop we were offered payment for designing, using and submitting a lesson plan based on the week of learning.  My classmates, a motley crew of veteran science, math and technology teachers, were basically done with their planning by the time they walked out the door of the training center.  I, on the other hand, was adrift in the swirling seas that were my first years of teaching.  With the check in mind I tried to come up with a lake lesson worthy of the prize.

It was close to a year later when the wheel of fortune that is my brain click, click, clicked onto Ms. Petrovich’s mystery unit on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and P.D. James.  The rules of a mystery are simple, and they flow through every crime show that airs on TV: In the beginning you are introduced to a mystery, throughout the mystery you are introduced to a range of suspects and a set of clues, then, in the end, the investigator solves the mystery.  In my lake unit, all of the pieces were there: The crime: a fish die off; the suspects: pollutants that affect lakes; the clues: the results of experiments and other scientific investigations; the investigators: my students. 

Over the last four years I’ve honed my lake mystery into one of my favorite parts of my school year, but sadly, because I didn’t send my plan in on time, I never got that fifty dollars.  Instead, my students are motivated to learn - now drawn in by the thrill of the mystery, they’re thinking more as they sort through possible solutions and I go to work wondering what conclusions my favorite investigators will come up with next.  I guess I’ll take what I can get.

The Fine Line

It's a new school year and I've made a resolution to ask for and listen to my students' perspective more often.  Listening is easy.  Bending your teaching to fit the desires of a fourteen year old is a little more difficult - especially when one of the first requests flies in the face of one of the key underpinnings of your educational philosophy.

One student's advice started like this: Maybe you could give us a step by step procedure to do labs, so we don't have to talk about it for so long. 

In my head, my years of training in experiential, constructivist, democratic education came to my defense: Good science and good education take time.  If my students want to learn what real science is like we have to wade through these ideas, so we can design labs rather than used canned labs, whether they be written by me, or the textbook companies.

The student goes on: A lot of us try to listen, but after the first time we hear the instructions we shut down and we're just trying to seem like we're listening.


Now the voice in my head sounds less like a defense, and more like defensiveness: Well if you just listened the first time, then I wouldn't have to explain how to do it again.



The student: It's just that, if you gave us those instructions, we could be more independent, and rely less on you to tell us what to do...

Voice: We have just lost cabin pressure...


While my brain tried to defend my actions, this kid was telling me exactly what I needed to hear: that the method I was using to offer them freedom and choice was having the exact opposite effect.  But what should I do?  Throw out all of my beliefs and training, and embrace the canned labs that I had always been warned about.  My grad school professors referred to a practice called algor-heuristic teaching - a blend of algorithms and heuristic learning.  At the time I envisioned the practice of this teaching style as the walking of a fine line between lock step movement toward a learning goal and the anarchy that results when you give 22 high school freshman complete control, but this conversation has made me reassess my understanding. 


In light of my new understanding I will be giving my students an algorithm.  Don't worry, I'm not jettisoning my educational philosophy based on a conversation.  Instead of trying to balance on that fine line,  I'm transcending it.  The algorithm will give them detailed, step by step instructions on how to design their own experiments.  Wish me luck!