Unit 1 Reflections Continued...

This is how I feel about my current chemistry classes:



"I take two steps forward, I take two steps back..."  <--- STORY OF CHEMISTRY THIS SEMESTER!  Just when I think we're beginning to make progress, my students lock up the brakes.

I don't want to blame my students per se... but they are beyond unmotivated.  Not poorly behaved, just unmotivated.  I cannot get any effort out of them.  They want to be spoon-fed the answers and that's it.

Friday beginning of the period:  we white-boarded Worksheet 3 Mass, Volume, and Density.  It shouldn't have been as hard for the students as it was, but they are still really struggling with the idea of a graphing mass vs. volume.  We've gone over line graphs, we've gone over slope, yet they still can't seem to make the connection that density = the slope of the line on a graph of mass over volume.

Friday/Monday:  We trudged ahead anyway and deployed our density model with two problems in the laboratory.  One was the thickness of a think layer of aluminum foil activity in the modeling curriculum:  students had to mathematically determine the height of the aluminum foil using the density.  The other problem was the creation of a "rainbow" using a density column of liquids.  I gave them 4 liquids and food coloring and told them I wanted a rainbow of red/yellow/green/blue.  For each problem, I gave them no procedure.  I had materials that may or may not be appropriate in the room, but they had to develop their own experimental plan to solve the problems.

Friday = brain dead students.  I got zero productivity out of them in time we worked on the activities.  Monday, on the other hand, they worked quite well.  I thought we made real progress and got some great results:

Part of one group's successful "rainbow" density column (missing the blue layer)

White-boarding the density column:  Verbal, Mathematical, and Particle Diagram.  I was pretty happy with this particle diagram-- while all the particles are the same size, they at least tried to show differences in spacing, showing some level of understanding.

White-boarding the thickness of a thin layer- I like how I just now noticed the error in their equation

I chose to skip over worksheet 4 due to time.  Today, we took Quiz #2 on density.  I haven't graded it yet.  I'm a little scared...

We also attempted to learn the factor-label method of metric conversions and dimensional analysis.  I skipped over Worksheet 5 due to lack of time, lack of computer availability, and troubles with the website it links to-- maybe that was a mistake...

Teaching unit conversions has never been my strong point... but talk about a colossal fail today.  Part of the reason was this dang sheet of notes:

While these nice, pre-made notes looked good in theory, I had a few issues with them.  Firstly, there's a typo I didn't catch on the example problem.  It should convert to meters, not centimeters.  Secondly, my students struggled with the factors being in scientific notation.  It was just too much for their math-phobic brains.

We only really used this sheet in my 1st class of the day.  In my other classes, I gave them the traditional equalities and showed them how to make conversion factors out of them. (1 kilo "unit" = 1000 "units", etc.)  That went slightly better.  Worksheet #6 was still too hard for my low-performing students to jump right into with all of the scientific notation.  Too much math for one day.  Next time, I definitely need more scaffolding.

Our Unit 1 test is supposed to be Thursday.  I may push it back to Friday, because we are NOT proficient in unit conversions.