Unit 1 Reflections: Worksheet 1 Mass & Change

Ay caramba, it's going to be a long semester...

My students... not getting the "particle" thing.  Just when I think they are beginning to understand, they prove to me that they don't.

My students... not motivated.  Well behaved?  Yes.  Motivated?  Not even remotely.  So when they don't understand this whole particle thing that I keep babbling on about, they don't care.  No motivation to even attempt to understand.  This junior class is collectively terrible about just wanting to be fed the answers and not think for themselves ever-- something I noticed last year as well.

Yesterday, I was debating if I should go into further detail on matter & particles.  I decided, yes, absolutely, I definitely need to address this NOW.  So I did a little demo I like to call "Dot In The Box."  Actually, my high school physics teacher used to call it that.  That is probably one of maybe three things I remember from high school physics.

Dots in a box.  You literally just shake the box to show the changes in particle movement for the different phases of matter.

I wanted to do the demo, then have students whiteboard a consensus model for matter and particles.  For the sake of time, it was more teacher-led than I would have liked.  We basically defined matter and said that all matter is made of atoms.  Since these atoms can be arranged different in different substances, we are calling these atoms the broad term "particles" instead.  Then I demonstrated how they move in the three states of matter.

While this definitely helped my students understanding, I could still see a HUGE disconnect in their answers for Worksheet 1.  We completed the worksheet in class, then whiteboarded the answers.  Some of my whiteboards from 4th block:

The brown is what I added as the class was discussing ways to uh, "fix" the answers, because I strongly disliked almost everything on this board.
On a side note, not a single group in any of my 3 classes gained mass when burning the steel wool-- they all lost mass.  I'm assuming it was from carelessness and lack of lab skills.  Since we didn't have the data to support the idea that the wool should have gained mass when burned, I did not even dare to introduce that concept.  I just kept driving home the idea of conservation of mass- if the mass changed, it was because particles either entered or exited the system.

Probably the only board even close to being on target

Their key was awesome, the details were less than awesome

Rewriting the law of conservation of mass in their own words proved to be the hardest thing in the world.

At the moment, I'm in the process of grading the individual worksheets.  I'll confess, I'm a lazy grader.  With this being their first "real" assessment, I'm trying to go hard on them and be picky.  The quality of work is dreadful right now.  I'm hoping this will provide a wake-up call.  Being hard on them at the start is actually the opposite of how I usually teach chemistry-- they are so scared of it, I usually try to build their confidence slowly.