End of the school year

Before I write my reflections on this year's experience as a high school teacher, I write one comment on Internet dialogue. Recently I checked two posts one on nuclear fusion energy research and another on global warming. The first comments on digg.com were civil and I felt like adding my 5 cents. The comments for the second post were virulent, I did not write any comment. I see the difference this way, the first one is not controversial because the fusion nuclear plants are not ready, maybe a few negative comments on the billions of dollars already spent. The second set though, is different. Vice President Al Gore is asking all of us to do something. There are worrisome signals we can choose to look into or just ignore. I assume the negative and emotional comments against Mr. Gore are a good thing, whoever is writing with so much passion must feel something, maybe when the time comes she or he will do what is necessary.

There are strong opinions on high school science education also. I just read in the New York Times, that the twelfth grade science students performed worse this year than a few years back. I teach eleventh and twelfth grade physics students. These are my opinions and reflections on my year's work.

I was surprised the first day of classes, I gave them a pretest on physics concepts. I did not find a good grasp of physics concepts. Today was my last day before finals next week. I am not very happy.

There is a part that is my fault, and another one that I believe is the fault of the students. I only talk bad about me. This is what I did wrong; at the end I write what the students did well. By the way my son is in middle school and I am not happy about that either.

After the physics concepts pretest I should have had one on mathematics skills. After the results I should have spend two or three weeks on stating and practicing the mathematics that we need for a high school physics class. That would have set the tone, we have to get this right guys, so we can move on. I treated the high school students as if they were in college and self regulated besides. This method only worked half way, I explain at the end.

Since I myself did not spend time doing many problems, the students did not do many problems either, only the problems assigned. I did not do many lab sessions, so the class was abstract, and I believe outside the radar screen of some students, the ones that did not do the problems in tests well. You see, I know how to do the problems, so I did not notice that the students could benefit a lot from seeing somebody doing the problems. I emphasized the ideas behind the course, the important ideas of physics, and did not spend enough time with the nitty gritty, which is the bread and butter of novices.

The worst aspect of my teaching practice was the follow up and students wrong work. Next time around most of my time will be spent on working with students work. Good work and bad work. Now I finish this post with a positive note.

I was flabbergasted by the quality and originality of the final presentations.

Once I saw that I was doing all the talking and many students had lost interest, I decided to change course. Let them do the talking. I gave a list of special topics in physics and the students chose from it, or requested to speak about other topics. After considering whether or not we were going to learn some physics I let the students go ahead with their presentations.

We had a flash animation on the laws of motion. When my daughter was in high school, she made a movie every year, this presentation reminded me of her. She would take her camera and shoot very interesting stuff around town or at school. There were good power point presentations by the students from roller coasters to nuclear reactors, passing through elementary particle theory. There were two poster presentations on the Big Bang Cosmology of Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker-Hubble-Gamow-Guth; one on the Illinois State Energy Program, and one on Einstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis. I felt like crying; it felt so good to see all the extra work the students put on expressing themselves; they talked about thermodynamics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and special reltivity. It was exciting.

I asked around after the presentations, talking to students one on one, to find out how much physics they know. I finish this note with a bitter sweet comment.

I am afraid that not all the students would do well in a regular standarized physics test. Some are brilliant and will do well in almost any test that may come their way. I know they want to learn physics, I just hope that I started enough curiosity for some of them to look deeper into physics in particular, and science in general. I hope they find relevant science.