Vacation reading

I have two books I'm reading right now  -- one is a fictional account of English department politics in a regional state university (Straight Man) that cuts a little too close to home. When it gets too depressing, I pick up the other book I'm reading -  a book of advice columns by Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things).

From Straight Man, writing about his colleagues:

...We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat, that we were made for better things.  If anyone had told us twenty years ago that we would spend our academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, we would have laughed... We hadn't, any of us, intended to allow the pettiness of committee work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and the increasingly militant ignorance of our students let so many years slip by.  And now in advancing middle age we've chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves.  We've preferred not to face the distinct possibility that if we'd been made for better things, we'd have done those things.

From Tiny Beautiful Things (a letter writer asks about how to get over her jealousy towards friends who have contracts for their books while she does not, despite her degrees from prestigious schools):

A large part of your jealousy probably rises out of your outsized sense of entitlement. Privilege has a way of fucking with our heads the same way a lack of it does. There are a lot of people who’d never dream they could be a writer, let alone land, at the age of 31, a six figure book deal. You are not one of them. And you are not one of them because you’ve been given a tremendous amount of things that you did not earn or deserve, but rather that you received for the sole reason that you happen to be born into a family who had the money and wherewithal to fund your education at two colleges to which you feel compelled to attach the word “prestigious.”

I will ponder this.

Intro to possible paper.

I've wanted to have a paper that describes the ideas that get developed in a unit of inquiry - highlighting how very deep these ideas go, even if the topic we cover in 5 weeks is one that most courses cover in 1. -- This semester had some really cool ideas; a few profound, some just cute -- so I thought I could draft a paper based on those. I'm imagining this for TPT. I could also make it a chapter in a book I want to write... but that's too daunting.  It already feels a bit smarmy (?) for TPT.


Wonderful Ideas about Optics:
Student Investigations into Light & the Eye


Writing of her experience as a developmental psychologist, Eleanor Duckworth (1996) describes one 7-year-old boy, Kevin, arranging straws. Upon seeing the straws he has an idea of how he wants to arrange them, struggles, succeeds, and is clearly delighted by the wonderful idea he had—the idea to arrange an assortment of straws in order by length. Reflecting on Kevin’s joy, Duckworth notes, “The having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development. And I consider it the essence of pedagogy to give Kevin the occasion to have his wonderful ideas and to let him feel good about himself for having them.” (p. 1) 

It’s tempting to believe that Duckworth is referring to childhood intellectual development and primary school pedagogy; that we cannot expect high school students or undergraduates to be delighted by the Krebs cycle or Snell’s Law in the same way that a first-grader enjoys arranging straws, or expect all introductory physics students to delight and feel good about physics (in fact, students’ emotional responses to physics are often quite the opposite). Reading this story, however, I was reminded of my first experience working in a physics lab as a summer REU student at the University of Washington. My task was tedious and rather mundane—aligning a laser with a mirror—but at some point I saw an unexpected, though easily explained, pattern of light.  I tentatively approached the postdoc to show him and talk through the mechanism behind the observation and was relieved when he shared in my excitement, saying “You have to show Eric! He will get a kick out of this!”  Though most of my summer research experience is lost to me, this event stands out— having and sharing a wonderful idea with a member of the physics community, witnessing his enthusiasm for it, and the sense was that this was the kind of thing that was to be celebrated and shared with the PI. It was striking not only because of the magical quality of that moment, but because of the absence of such moments from the rest of my undergraduate experience.  (“Hey professor! Look at this! I’ve found the eigenvectors for the del-squared operator!” said no student ever.)

Scientific lives are bookended with the having of wonderful ideas — children delight in falling objects, and practicing scientists- as part of their job description- have and share wonderful ideas with colleagues.  It is only during formal education that we find scant opportunities for students to have wonderful ideas and feel good about themselves for having them. Our exams and surveys ask students about scientifically correct ideas - that is, if they have learned and understood others’ wonderful ideas. In reform curricula, we walk students through steps by which they can re-create wonderful ideas. But opportunities for students to construct their own ideas from their own questions and to share these ideas as the raw material of curriculum, are rare.  Given that this is a hallmark of scientific practice - having and sharing novel ideas - its absence is troubling for those concerned with students’ conceptual development. Given the sense of joy, wonder and esteem that having and sharing novel ideas can bring, its absence from our curricula is troubling in an ethical sense as well.

A course on scientific inquiry taught at CSU, Chico, seeks to remedy this. In this course, students examine complex phenomena and construct ideas and representations that account for these phenomena. We use neither textbook nor lab manual. Instead, students work in groups with everyday items, sharing ideas and findings with other groups as the class moves towards consensus models of phenomena.  The syllabus describes the goals of the class as follows:

This is a class on Inquiry — not a class on Light & Color.  (Just like a drawing class might spend time drawing flowers, but the class is not a class about flowers.) You are not assessed on how accurately your ideas mirror the ideas of scientists, but on how accurately your activities mirror the practices that scientists engage in when they study light & color— problematizing phenomena, creating careful definitions, constructing models of phenomena that are consistent with evidence, designing tests to further test those models (particularly competing models), using those models to explain and predict, reading and following the ideas of colleagues (your classmates), critiquing and improving ideas over time, and sharing work via writing.

Despite the emphasis on inquiry (rather than the products of inquiry), student ideas from this class - semester after semester - not only recapitulate major ideas from geometric optics, but they go well beyond ideas from introductory physics, asking questions, devising experiments and developing representations that address core issues in physics. 

In other descriptions of the course (cite) we have described students’ understanding of the nature of science and their engagement in scientific practices, consistent with the goals of the course. Here, however, we emphasize the scientific ideas that students generated during one month during the Fall 2012 semester. The ideas are intriguing in their own right and may prove useful for conceiving of problems and investigations for instruction; more importantly, however, we wish to demonstrate the kinds of ideas that students generate, and that the call by Duckworth for pedagogy that allows students to have “wonderful ideas and to let [them] feel good about [themselves] for having them” can be consistent with the development of deeply scientific ideas - often ones that far exceed goals we might have set for an introductory-level course.




The ideas:

Using gelatin to visualize a focused image
 - by J. Cerdo, N. Etchison, E. Johnson, A. Lerner 

The index of refraction of a contact lens
 - N. Cassel
(why do my glasses keep getting thicker and my contact lenses don't?)

The Schachar mechanism and human lenses
 - E. Honeycutt, M. Gonzales
(we expect that straining our eyes would mean tightening muscles that control the lens; and we expect that tight muscles would flatten out the lens. But we strain to see up close (rounded lens) not far. Why?)

The Cardinality of Infinite Sets: Magnifying Images
- K. Mulhern
(how can we magnify an image without "gaps"?)

Depth perception and virtual images
- D. Barrett
("virtual images" suggest that a magnified image is located behind the actual object - but it doesn't look like that - looking through binoculars doesn't make objects look realllly big and reallllly far away. why?)

Limits of perception: viewing cells
- K. McAtee
(you can't see the resolution of a high def tv when you're viewing it on a low-def tv screen)

Ho Ho Ho! plans for the winter break

I hope to will get the following work-related items accomplished over the next 4 weeks:

1. Submit the revision of the CBE/LSE paper.
2. Have a signed contract with Its About Time for our LSET book.
3. Submit a TPT paper on the concepts developed in Inquiry.
4. Have edited NOS paper and sent back to Irene, ready to submit.
5. Fully planned the Adv. Inquiry class, prepped the iPads and have an iTunes U course ready to go.
6. Cleaned up the office, reorganized the filing cabinets, and ready for Sci Inquiry (IRB printed, syllabus printed, tapes and research ready to go, etc.)
7. Get reimbursed!  - I've actually made some major purchases on grants that I keep forgetting to reimburse. Yikes.
8. Draft a white paper for the dean/provost/president. -- As of Fall 2013 our department will have 2.6 full time faculty.  And, with buyout and chair responsibilities, that means a department with just 1.5 teaching faculty.  We (the 2.6 of us) want either a commitment from the President and Provost, or we want a plan in place to shut the department down.  I'm actually really glad that we're realistic about those as two options-- limping along in the status quo is not a fun way to live. We want to create a clear vision for the department and a strong rationale for that vision to make our case. 



Notice there's nothing about my grants on that list... hopefully clearing everything else off the list will leave time this Spring to accomplish grant-related research and writing.

"Real world"

A few recent thoughts.

1. When thinking about TE, there's a clear description that these are experiences in one's "everyday life" - which implies that school is not part of that "everyday life." Brian and I have been looking at Engle et al's work on expansive framing to better think about how it is that school can touch on "everyday life," and Engestrom's work on what the object of study is (are you studying the textbook or studying the moon?).  But this also got me thinking about how my friends with private sector jobs - jobs with billable hours and mission statements and branding seminars - things that strike me as silliness arising out of a wacky context - nonetheless talk about their work as the "real world." One friend comes to mind who complains about how coddled undergrads are and that they wouldn't last for a day in the "real world" -- meaning: her/the workplace.  What's bizarre about this isn't that my friends consider their workplace part of the "real world" (they spend 8 hours a day there - it is quite real) but that school is not.  It even got me to thinking that the whole term "real world" - if you tried to explain it to a 14th c. (?) person, or a nomadic tribe - what a weird concept it is.  Like, the term "real world" must have evolved right along with compulsory education.  The correlation is there...

Real world:

Compulsory education:

(1.5 Also interesting is that I *love* thinking of things to feed into google's ngram - the presence of this tool makes me seek out ways to use it. I wrote a paper on this once, about how kids with thermometers  can't help but do science.  The same way that kids with scissors can't help but do damage.  That's how I feel about ngram.  There may even be a message for the gun lobby in that idea.)


2. That actually relates a little to point #2, which has to do with this book that I haven't yet read because it's not yet printed.  The premise of the book - how to walk around a city with the eyes of a ____ (urban sociologist, artist,  geologist, physician, sound designer) - touches on things like professional vision, but not quite. I'd like for my students to walk around the world like a physicist, and I think TE is about that idea. I think inquiry introduces students to how *I* walk through the world -- obsessed with shapes of shadows, excited when I find color in colorless things, thrilled to see the moon doing exactly what I predict it will do, and when I see CMYK dots on something it's like running into an old friend.

3. Final exam in inquiry was yesterday. Students first answer individually and then must collaborate with their lab group to construct their final paper, addressing what was wrong in their initial ideas and how they came to the final idea. The assignment (after doing pinhole theaters and the eye) was to explain how an overhead projector works. They - without asking permission - got  up and grabbed whiteboards, rules, lasers, lenses, mirrors, etc. - One group even saw something cool with the lens + mirror set-up and showed it to other groups. It felt very "real world." :)

4. Thinking about shame and vulnerability conversations... I am a very earnest teacher, and that feels like a very vulnerable thing at times. You can not be cynical when teaching inquiry. You can when teaching a lecture.

5. And Kim - of stronger constitution than me - watched the video from the icky day in inquiry. She says it's not nearly as bad as I remember. I am relieved, but not wanting to revisit it yet!

what it means to be at an underfunded university

Here is a true story: CSU-Chico is broke but not allowed to raise tuition. So we levied a Student Learning Fee (SLF). Because it is a "special fee" it has its own committee. I serve on the SLF Committee, ranking proposals from all the departments who need to purchase materials. I am reading a proposal to purchase chairs right now.  The nursing department literally does not have enough chairs.  The math department has also requested chairs.

To summarize:
(1) There are two departments in my college in need of chairs.
(2) Departments have to apply to a committee to get money to buy chairs.
(3) Part of my job is determining which departments on campus are worthy of chairs.

I found this line in the nursing proposal oddly heartbreaking: "They offer an easy-to-clean vinyl fabric and seem ideal for use."  (As if the statement "it is a chair and we do not have chairs" is not justification enough.)

The real story I'm trying to say is: I'm not working on curriculum, instruction or research - the things I'm pretty highly trained to do and the things that I think need doing - because I'm busy trying to figure out which departments will be able to procure chairs - a thing that should be non-negotiable: students get to sit in chairs. I actually spent a few hours tracking down enrollment statistics and funding history by department to help make an informed decision about who gets chairs.  (I have pretty graphs now that indicate math is, indeed, underfunded.  See below.  My data shows physics to be relatively over-funded; this does not win me friends in physics.)

So then this-- a friend who teaches philosophy at Amherst posted this on his facebook page today:

So, Amherst gives me a 'student entertainment' budget that if I don't spend they take back. And so office hours this week are at the local coffee shop. Amherst will be spending hundreds of dollars on cappuccinos.

Meanwhile, at Chico, 4 students have died this semester from alcohol and drug related incidents - and just this week a 5th student was legally drunk when he stepped out in front of a car, driven by a student who was driving drunk.  He is not likely to live. The administration came to the chairs council to discuss solutions -- and as far as I can tell, everyone was more or less saying "we need to let students know this is unacceptable" .  I think we need to raise taxes and fund higher education, so that I can spend my evenings in coffee shops with students instead of weighing the merits of vinyl fabric while they drink themselves to death.

Why can't we see cells?

You're looking at the world USING cells, so if we want to SEE cells with those cells (assuming cells are of comparable size) we MUST using magnification. Otherwise the cells will necessarily not be resolved by our eye.

It's like when you see a video for an HD tv on your crappy tv, said Daniel.  You can't hope to see HD on a low-def tv.

Just another brilliant idea from my inquiry class!

Describing the large pinhole

Students are writing about why a large hole makes a blurry image. This one knocks it out of the park:

You can think about this in a couple ways. I think about it by saying the larger hole is made of of many small pinholes. In each small pinhole there is the image. Since there are many of them, they overlap [when they reach the screen].  When light overlaps it gets brighter, therefore the outside edges that don't have quite as much overlap look dim.  When this happens, our eye perceives the upside down and flipped image as  blurry. In actuality, each single image is not blurry, it is crisp, but the more light you have overlapping, the brighter it gets.  The most overlap happens in the middle, so the edges are dimmer.

I can't wait to see her paper that describes what the lens does for these tiny images.
(I'm up late grading old assignments - they're mostly good but this one makes my day.)

Going "off book."

A radiolab episode some time back was about "games" and talked about how chess records all the plays from major competitions and calls this the "book" -- and every new game begins in a way that has already been tried before, but a few plays in and there's a moment in all games when the players go "off book."  It's a cool metaphor for lots of things.

I've been thinking about how fun it is when my class goes "off book" -- they throw out an idea or question I had never considered.  And I don't mean the somewhat frequent instances in which students throw out something that takes me a while to figure out how they are thinking through a problem (which is also interesting) but the actual chance to do science with them -- they ask a question about the physics that I hadn't considered. Sometimes I can easily answer the question - but sometimes it's way cooler and I *really* feel like we're doing science together. (I wonder if they can tell these moments are different than every other moment? - like, can they tell that this is uncharted territory for me and them?)

There were three such events in the past week: one about the way a magnified image is not one in which the points in an image get bigger, just farther apart - and yet without gaps.  One about contact lenses - a student said that over the last few years her prescription has changed a lot and her glasses are really thick but her contact lenses haven't changed thickness. (I don't know if that's true, but if so, we decided it must be that the lenses have a different index of refraction.)  And then one that I'm still thinking through - again with magnification; I blogged his question recently - he looked up diagrams and we were looking at a picture of a virtual image and he points out that, looking through the magnifying glass, objects look CLOSER and bigger. Not farther and bigger.  And it got me thinking about how the virtual image wasn't what I always thought it was.  I'm going to sketch out some ideas and then post. I was thinking of having these students write up small papers with me for The Physics Teacher -- but I'm wondering if it would be interesting to write up a more formal paper about these instances and their role in teaching & learning.  (I have another example from Lambertian surfaces a few years back that still haunts me - it's a paper I need to write!)

But in other news...

The student who doesn't like the class is not just vocal about it with me, but with anyone who will listen - other science ed faculty, veteran affairs on campus, the counseling center, and other students.  Last Friday's debacle, I suppose, was the final straw for her. She came by today to talk about it.

The vet affairs group thinks she should go to the president. Other science ed faculty want her to "write letters." She wants to get out of taking my physics class in the Spring and so is going up the chain of command to do that.

Surprisingly, J. and I still have open open lines of communication and mutual respect - we talked through it for another hour + today; I know enough of her story - which is a life of enormous responsibilities and tragedies and service to others - to empathize and I do still love her, but her way of handling it is the biggest nightmare.

Student - TE?

Daniel, on Wednesday, was curious about how magnifying glasses work. (a pic of his whiteboards and notebook are on an earlier post)
Specifically, he wants to show that the image on the retina gets bigger.
He emails me tonight:

Subject:     Magnifying glass

I've been searching the internet all afternoon trying to find a good explanation for how a magnifying glass works and I keep finding the same explanation; every article I read, or video I watch on youtube just say "light bends when going through a lens, and that is how a magnifying glass works." Its pretty whack. I have taken to my own white board trying to find an explanation, and so far I'm stumped. I am starting to think that the answer is very simple, and I am just over thinking this. Is there any way I can get some guidance here so I can sleep tonight. also I will email you pictures of what I got so far

-Daniel  



This makes my day.
(ps - we hired him to work for us next semester)

I have been trying to write up "standards" for the inquiry class. Not b/c I want to use SBG, necessarily, but to be articulate about what it is I'm looking for.

Here's the attempt I will share with students - I'm not crazy about it, but it does get at some of the things I'm looking for in their work.:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxjZyKrJC9FhQUZIVXVDdl9kSVU

Why not share it with them at the start? - because I want them to realize that, in trying to explain the eye, they have to be clear on what an image is, how l light travels, what blurriness really means, what focus means, what lenses do to light. -- I worry that handing them this sheet would say "the class is not about figuring out what this eyeball is doing, but checking boxes on another stupid worksheet."

Points to areas

Two groups today were intrigued by the question of how lenses lead to magnification. As Kristin sketched the diagrams, she felt certain that what was a point of light on an object must be magnified to encompass an area if we are to magnify an object. How else could you make the image bigger?

She draws this as putting the screen somewhere beyond what we've called the "jellyfish point" where the rays from one point on an object all intersect:

But someone from the other group - Daniel - is really clear that this would lead to blurriness. The "areas" would start to overlap. And magnified images aren't blurry, so this can't be what is going on. But then how can images be bigger if a point is not expanded to an area? 

What a genius of a question - the problematization that Brian and I are talking about as a prerequisite for authoring ideas.

(Daniel is also interested in the question of magnification and is drawing these images of magnifying glasses + our eye lens that get the right idea but don't really engage with this great question of Kristin's. - Daniel's drawing is below. I look at that  picture, actually, of Daniel's sketches and notebooks and think "I'm doing something right - that there looks like science.")

This question came up with Irene a few semesters back (not students) - and we really wrestled with it - I had a hard time convincing Irene that you can magnify an image and still maintain a 1:1 ratio between points on the object and points on the image. I wanted to argue it mathematically and she wasn't buying it. (There are as many points between 0 and 1 as there are between 0 and 10, so you can magnify one stretch of the number line and not get any gaps!  This is Aleph-One and Cantor has a really cute proof of it - and that's about as much as I know about that. And it's really cool to me that thinking about magnification will lead to this kind of thinking about sizes of infinite sets - you know?)


Kristin compared it to zooming a digital picture and it starts to look pixely - one pixel (a "point") becomes four pixels (an area). And if it didn't, then you would get gaps between the pixels if you zoomed out and kept a 1:1 ratio. She even drew it this way - that our magnified image should be dots separated by space.  I LOVE that argument! To me it is like saying if we stretch the number line from 0 - 1 so that it is now the number line from 0 - 10, shouldn't there be some "holes" between the points that made up a line? Don't we need ten TIMES as many points in a number line that's 10 times as long? So we thought through why there wouldn't be gaps, and thinking about the idea that points are infinitesimally small and squished up against each other without gaps - and infinite in number.  It's hard to describe, but this conversation felt so deep - like, we could both identify this as a really profound and subtle idea about space and dimension and image and magnification -- "images are like stretchy sheets" she said.  "Like inflating a balloon!" I said - "points on the surface get farther apart without opening up any gaps in between!"

It makes me think about the universe expanding and how every point is getting farther from every other point, but points aren't turning into volumes.

It's not on tape - it was off to the side of the room and after class. It was delightful.

Mostly just venting.

Some time back I received buyout from a grant and was being arm-twisted into teaching an overload -- with the guilt-trip of "we have no one else who is qualified to teach intro physics." And it's true. And I decided that could not be my problem to solve. But it does bother me. This semester is particularly bad - we're a department with 3 tenure-track faculty, and one is on maternity leave, I'm serving as chair and have buyout so "only" teach two classes, and the third faculty member has $2M in grant funding buying her out of half of her teaching.

Our department teaches future K-8 teachers. They take physics, biology, geoscience, inquiry, and a "capstone" class (in which our students lead 4th grade students through 6 cookbook labs in an hour). Physics is taught by someone with a biology degree (undergrad) and a Master's degree in "science teaching." Biology is taught by someone with an undergrad degree in geology from Chico. Geos lecture (one hour a week) is from a tenure-track faculty.  The labs are taught by a geology consultant (master's in environmental engineering). Then they have me for inquiry. Then the capstone class is taught by someone who was herself a K-4 teacher (very classic I-R-E teaching and very little content knowledge of science).


The final assignment for the intro physics class (which uses PSET) is to create a poster tracking energy transfers through a day. The instructor created a "model" assignment (heating water for coffee using a bicycle generator) to show students what she expected. It is shown below. This kills me.

Monday's goose-bumps.

Kim isn't in class this week - which is fortunate. There's a landmine there between Kim & J. that I don't want to deal with.  At the start of class I acknowledged that Friday was awful, that J. was treated very disrespectfully and that I apologize for not intervening and saying something earlier. But I also don't want to continue to engage with this question and want us to just do some science. This was primarily met with relief. J. spent class in the back corner, arms folded, and spoke not a word. Yeesh.

I began with each group diagramming an eye that is focused on a maglite. With very little variation, they drew the same thing: rays starburst out from the maglite in straight lines; they bend upon entering the cornea, bend again entering the lens, bend upon exiting the lens, and all the rays come together just before reaching the retina.

Why just before reaching the retina?
1. because they need to be concentrated on the macula
2. and they need to have "flipped" because we know images are upside down on the retina.  We know flipping has to do with rays crossing (b/c of the pinhole camera) and so they just extended this idea to the lens situation.

I had them all go back and consider TWO maglites.  I said to the class - should we look at it first, or just diagram? The class voted to just diagram it- and one group protested... so

Three groups went totally bananas with this question:
1 - Andy, Nicole, Bessie and Jose built the thing - a lens, a screen, held two maglites, and then put some jell-o in between to see what's going on. They had it all set up to make things easily adjustable and on the same plane, etc. They image the maglites well enough to see little filamenty things on their screen. I don't have a great picture of the two-maglite scenario, but with one you see this:

it was AWESOME.  (I used some photoshopping to make it easy to see - we had to have all the lights off and it is fainter than that makes it seem... but we really could see two "cones" of light creating two separate spots on the screen.)  I *know* this is what you should see, but this is the first time I've seen it and it just gives me goosebumps. It's just so cool to really see it!

Even cooler? They then looked at two lasers:

The lasers are taped together so that their beams are parallel (why? I don't know - but it means that they are finding the focal point of the  lens.)

2 - Daniel's group (okay, just Daniel... G. is absent, J. is totally done with us, and Danielle is very much caught in the middle of all of this) creates this diagram - Daniel is the author of the "overlapping venn diagrams" theory of large-pinholes, and he can now explain how the lenses un-overlap the venn diagrams -

3 - Sam, Emma and Kayla got to a place where they could explain that there are two "kinds" of crossings - the "jellyfish" crossing (one group described how a maglite-through-lens looks like a jellyfish when it all comes together at one point) and the fry-an-ant spot (where parallel rays all cross and the image gets inverted). They did this mostly theoretically and it was super cool.


Other groups were doing great stuff too -- we'll need to pick up on Wednesday with those groups.

one thought. We have a new major - the BA in Natural Sciences - that's supposed to be the track for people who want to do middle school science. With little exception, these students are not doing as well in this class as students who don't think of themselves as science-types. I think that might be related to how students find their way into the BA in NS: they are elementary ed majors who like science (which often means that they like doing demos and creating worksheets) or they are pre-med/nursing who were "counseled out" (failed one to many courses) of that track and looked for a major/career that could still use these courses they've already taken.

Friday's disaster.

Friday we discussed the first four chapters of Gallas's book - Talking Their Way Into Science. I was nervous going into it and have been putting off meta-discussions like these about the class itself because - really for the first time - there is a vocal and upset student for whom this class isn't working. But we had a long day on Friday (because I gave them a day off before Thanksgiving break) and we're near the end of the term, so it was time to discuss.

As predicted, when the time came for J.'s group to share their chapter, discuss quotes they found intriguing and implications, things turned to why this class isn't working.

What I wish I had done: made the conversation about the book and been explicit that this is not time to critique our own experiences of the class or even critique the author of the book.  And I wish I had stopped the conversation earlier.

Why I didn't do that in the moment: I really do believe that J. is a puzzle to solve and want to hear more from her and so I was just mostly caught up in the conversation. - her reaction to the class is one that I can imagine physics professors having ("they're just talking in circles and they are SO VERY WRONG"). -- I once showed a video of inquiry students in Paul & my's class discussing how electrons might move in conductors and their arguments were about the density of the material -- are the atoms of the material stepping stones across which electrons move, or are those atoms road-blocks that impede the motion of electrons? (and the students, of course, were less clear than I am right now - they probably got the terms mixed up and weren't sure about what is an atom, molecule, charge, or electron. and they weren't sure if styrofoam or metal was more dense - but they were talking about particle density, not mass density!) -- This was at Haverford - a small, expensive private school. When it was time for discussion, there was shock at how little the students knew -- it was as if the point of my talk were to introduce them to this weird culture of undergrad girls with their wackadoo science ideas.  I felt indignant for the students and depressed by the faculty response.

J. is reacting like the faculty -- I would pull out quotes but I haven't had the stomach yet even to download (let alone watch) Friday's discussion.  (Really, the camera - with its 2 hours of video - looked toxic to me on Friday!) One of her claims is that this class doesn't match her learning style - she is really good at learning and memorizing facts and then sharing those ideas with others, but when we just sit in a circle and talk all the time she doesn't know what she's supposed to be remembering and when she goes home to look it up she finds out that all our ideas are wrong. But more than that - it's not just about learning style - it's that there are so many right ideas to learn why waste our time on these wrong ideas?  (She's not asking this as a question - it's just critique.) (I will add that I don't think she is understanding what the ideas she looked up are all about, and doesn't know how to productively critique others' ideas because she doesn't know exactly why they are wrong.)

What happens next: Students take up defense of the class. Kim sees herself as another student in the class, and chimes in -- "okay - that right there, though? - 'learning style'? - that doesn't really exist. Research shows it doesn't exist."  J. digs in - Kim pushes back. It got emotional and J. - who has vented about the class with others in the class - starts calling them out on not backing her up now. It was ugly. :(

Yuck. It was really yucky.

Two thoughts that I have right now:

1. Part of it is a framing issue: the class is no more about acquiring canonical scientific knowledge than an art class is about recreating the Mona Lisa. And that's weird (relative to all other science classes  - even ones that I teach) and not obvious enough.  I think SBG could help with this. I think a better syllabus and continued emphasis and conversation about this would help.

2. Part of it is a vulnerability issue: it is really vulnerable to share your ideas in class - the dismissiveness J shows towards her peers' ideas is - it's almost cliché to say - evidence of the dismissiveness she has towards the value of her own ideas. And I haven't done enough (though I do a LOT!!) to make it safe to share ideas. There's a real safety and lack of vulnerability in following procedures/memorizing others' ideas - so if I'm going to pull that safety net away I need to make it clear that you're still safe.

And one other thing:
I can appreciate the fact that this class evokes strong emotional responses, and that the classroom is a place where we can share and discuss those responses.

Two nice things that happened in the conversation:
Andy described our ideas as "definitions without terms" - he said in most classes you memorize the term "photosynthesis is how plants make food" without actually knowing anything about what photosynthesis does. And in this class we have all these ideas and just don't have the names to go with them. (I agreed - noting how this 'ray crossing' spot we were talking about is what physicists call the focal length.)

Ali said something about how you have to have a passion for something if you're going to really understand it - you have to love it. The way she said it made me really happy.

Private blog

I've thought for a bit that I should make the blog private - after a really miserable class on Friday, and wanting to blog about it, I'm making this a private blog. I added the emails of those who I know regularly read and comment.