Meet Me In The Back of the Room; Bring Nothing

I am forgetting to take pictures! Aargh! We started by playing with tuning forks, seeing them splash in the water, and how the tines feel very weird when you touch it to your nose. I showed them how to get from s = d/t to the wave equation. We played with beats, which I taught without giving them any reason to believe it. And we modeled the Doppler Effect with this Desmos graph. I also learned how to make a Desmos gif today, so that was cool.

Today was also a day where my class felt comfortable. We're coming together as a group, and for me, that often happens when we move being silly to being serious quickly.

Yesterday was the test, and today, I passed back the test. I didn't write a blog yesterday, because I sat there writing an answer key for the test, organizing my desk, working on orders for the science department, and writing reassessments for my AP Physics C class. And today, I passed back the test, and I asked them to spend 90 seconds looking at the test on their own looking at their comments before looking at someone else's test. I gave them some time to look at their tests (and the cool spreadsheets I made for them). Then we whiteboarded some questions, and it was good. I had to bring up Clever Hans again. Students get shaken up when you ask them a question; they're sure they are wrong.

I felt that we can sometimes think that every day is so cool when we look on line, but one of the best things of a #teach180 blog is to realize the pedestrian days are just as needed and useful. Students really understood the difference between propagation velocity and velocity of the particles. They asked questions about transverse versus longitudinal waves. And we talked about how converting from grams to kilograms is so useful.

Today we spent the day reviewing for tests, and I realized that my advice for studying is probably different than that of their other teachers.

One, I realize I do not like answer keys for review problems. Your friends should be enough to check to see if you're doing the problem correctly. Also, ask me if you're not confident. And, if you have an answer key, you ruin the precious resource of questions. There are only so many questions I can ask, and if you just read the answer, you ruin the chance for your mind to make its own connections.

Two, reading isn't studying. Only answering questions is studying. Challenging yourself is studying. Checking whether you did it right is studying.

Listen, I know I still taught AP Physics 2 on Friday. Yes, I know it was boring. I sped through so much vocabulary that I know most of my students knew from middle school. It's about mechanical waves, which we are using as a stepping stone to take our ray model of light (test Tuesday!) to a wave model of light. So I felt like a boring biology teacher just throwing out so many words that were new to 10%-20% of my class. 

I've spent much of my time today making a new spreadsheet to do SBG grading when I can't use an outside program. I hope my spreadsheet helps you; if want details about how I give access to each student--well, you gotta use the IMPORTRANGE() into a new spreadsheet so your student can't see the grades of every other student.

I want to shout out this blog post that helped me think about how to design my spreadsheet. I would give you the name of who wrote the blog post, but I can't find it. Thank you, blogs, for keeping information out there written by humans for humans to help us solve our problems. I hope my blog can do the same thing. 

We whiteboarded some problems on lenses today. Students asked good questions, and they seem to be in a good place with the ray model of light.

And my students wanted to see how happy am I, using the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire. The other class had a student who was sure he was cooked because he was upset his ray diagram, which was not drawn very well, wasn't giving the same answers as his calculations. I gave off grumpy man vibes.

Fair enough. I didn't get enough sleep, and I'm trying to rewrite the best software to use for standards-based grading since I can't use it do privacy laws in my state. Also, copies don't seem to being made in the copy center that they absolutely say we should do all of our copying. It looks like it might now take a month for copies to arrive?