Fool's Gold, Rotten Eggs, and Engaged Kids

Thursday and Friday were probably my best teaching days of the year so far, and I felt really comfortable with the class. On Thursday, I was telling the class about a geology field trip I took over the summer where I broke off a piece of fool's gold with a hammer at an outcropping on the side of the McKenzie River highway near the town of Nimrod. Back in the Oregon gold rush, miners would search for precious metals by blowing a big hole in a rock outcropping with dynamite and just seeing what pops up.  If they got fool's gold, there was little chance that anything valuable would be nearby, so they would move on. Right on the side of the highway near Nimrod there's a outcropping that had been blasted, which was one of our first stops on the field trip.

We have been studying characteristic properties of matter, and we were talking about how miners used characteristic properties to tell the difference between fool's gold and real gold.  The miners used the density of gold to separate it from all the other lighter materials by swirling it around in water in a pan.  The denser gold sinks to the bottom while the lighter dirt, sand, and other material is suspended near the top.  When the miner pours the water out of the pan, the lighter junk falls out and the gold remains in the pan. 

I have been trying to get the idea of characteristic properties to stick in their heads for weeks now, and I thought that this was a great example.  A characteristic property is always true for a substance, regardless of the size of your sample.  It is something that helps you identify what the substance is, thus it must always be true for the substance.  What is cool about the panning and density is that even little bits of gold dust will sink to the bottom because they are denser.  It's not just the big nuggets that sink, its all of the gold.

The great thing about fool's gold and middle school science is that fool's gold is made of iron and sulfur.  Almost every kid has heard about fool's gold, and a lot of students had heard of sulfur.  When I asked them how they can identify sulfur, a few kids started to giggle.  Those who had heard about sulfur knew that it stinks like rotten eggs.  There is no better way to get a room of middle schoolers to pay attention than to say that something smells like stinky farts.  Now there's a characteristic property for you.


I'm excitedly explaining this to the class when a girl in the front raises her hand. 
 "You're pretty into all this stuff.  You should have been a... like..  science person or something."
"A scientist?"
"Yeah, totally.  That's it."

She was right, I am pretty into all this stuff, but not enough to be a professional scientist.  I'm nerdy enough to want to learn about everything, but I don't have it in me to study a topic for hours, weeks, and months on end.  I get interested in the next topic too easily and I can't stay focused on one problem for too long.  What was great about this little exchange was that she was actually paying attention, and the rest of the class was engaged, too.  When I'm nerding out about a topic, it is more engaging to the students because it is more engaging to me.

One of the biggest lessons I'm learning this year is how much of teaching is like show business.  You need to constantly be moving around the classroom, telling stories, showing videos and pictures, writing things on the board, varying the mode of presentation, and entertaining.  In a way, I have a full time job keeping twelve and thirteen year olds entertained, and I have to try to teach them some content along the way.  Sometimes I wish that I could just present all the ideas up on the board in a logical order and have the kids learn but it just doesn't work that way.

It's an incredibly simple concept: your lessons are engaging only when you are engaged teaching them.  Students feed off of your energy, and half-assing a lesson only leads to students half-assing their work.  On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult to be fired up about ratios 5 times a day, every day.  It's a balance I'm still trying to strike, but I feel like I'm getting closer.