Progress

We only had a four day week, and I'm really glad to have no school tomorrow.  I could use the break to catch up on my planning and catch a breath, so I was really glad when the bell rang at 2:30 this afternoon.

Unfortunately, having a day "off" from school means you have meetings scheduled from 8-4 at a different school in the district.  I had really been hoping for a day to work in my classroom, plan full units ahead, make copies, and collaborate with my team.  Instead I get to go to trainings on how to use the online gradebook and how proficiency grading works (I am so sick of talking about proficiency grading). 

We will get some good work done tomorrow, but we won't get all of our work done.  We will still have tons of grading to do and lessons to plan when the day is done.  So it feels like I still have a full day of school tomorrow, even though there are no kids in the classroom, which makes it worse because teaching is my favorite part of being a teacher.  Which is pretty obvious if you think about it.

That rant aside, I feel like I am really making progress both as a teacher and with my students.  I have settled into the routine of the day, and I can really direct my energy to planning more fun and engaging activities with my students.  It is really hard to be creative and innovative when you have so many other tasks to take care of.  I did a better job this week of following my CT's advice, which was to plan around the question: "What are the kids actually doing at any given moment in your lesson?"

Yesterday, for example, I had the kids in the science lab working with density blocks. The blocks come in 9 different substances, but they are all the same size and shape.  The students' task is to calculate the densities of the blocks and then match their densities to a table I provide.  Some of the time it is pretty obvious what the block is made of (steel), but other times you have to use the formula to figure it out (oak vs pine, for example).

What I saw was pretty amazing.  The kids loved using the scales and the rulers, and it amazed me how little experience they have using measurement tools.  I thought that the lab would just be an easy exercise for the kids - we have been talking about density for about a week, and I have modeled repeatedly how to use the measurement tools.  I was quite mistaken.  Using a triple beam balance is no easy task for some kids, and some of the things you assume are obvious are not obvious to everyone.  Some students were unable to understand that when the big slider is on the 100, the middle slider is on the 50, and the little slider is on the 4.5 that you have a total of 154.5 grams.  I saw her write down 100504.5.  She then got the most gigantic density you can imagine, because she messed up her volume calculation, too.  She thought you could just measure the side of the cube, which was 2.5 cm, and multiply that by 3 (there's three dimensions, right?).  Unfortunately, she did not realize that 3 times 2.5 is 7.5, and 2.5 * 2.5 * 2.5 = 15.625. 

Every step was written out on the lab sheet.  I pre-taught all the procedures.  We had talked about the concepts for a week.  Yet, somehow, these kids managed to find unique and creative ways to get lots and lots of wrong answers.  Perhaps the art of teaching is understanding why kids make the weird mistakes they make.  We didn't even finish with Activity 1 of the lab, which is the calculating mass part, and I had thought that we were going to finish Activities 1 and 2.  In Activity 2 they get to see if the individual blocks will sink or float after making predictions based on the densities.

Even though so many students failed in the lab, I think that their failures are what made it a worthwhile lesson.  They were engaged and actually doing science for a change, rather than reading about it, hearing me talk about it, watching me demonstrate it, or watching a movie. They were touching and seeing objects and using scientific tools (mostly) appropriately.  And they really need the practice.  It is really nice to plan lessons where the kids do more work than the teacher, because the students don't realize how much they are learning.  Students are too passive too often in the classroom.  I need to remember that learning really is doing, and that experience is more important than recitation of facts.

I try to remind myself that nobody really remembers what they learned in their 7th grade science class, but they may remember a few cools labs or projects that they did. What is really important is that the kids are safe and that they are engaged and focused on learning something.  Even if they fail at something, there is a way that failure can be progress.  If my kids aren't failing, that means I am not challenging them. On Monday we will go back to the lab to fail again, and hopefully we will make some more progress.