Unit 3 Reflections: Icy Hot Lab Results

This is becoming the semester from h*ll.  Seriously.  Between implementing the chemistry modeling curriculum for the first time, the exceptionally unmotivated group of students, and the ridiculous number of interruptions, I'm ready to throw in the towel.

The good news:  my students' data came out better than expected.  Even in my first class, students were able to note a difference in the shape and slope of the heating and cooling curves at different points.

Some of their curves:

The bad news:  everything else.

I think maybe a handful of students at best understood what I think is a pretty easy concept.  A heating/cooling curve will have parts of the line that show little rate of change (flat) because the energy is being used to "break" the forces of attraction between the particles and change the matter into a different phase.

I don't know exactly what it is that I'm doing so terribly wrong, but I cannot get these students to care for the life of me.  I can't even get enough intrinsic respect out of them to try for me.  Two of my students today told me they hate everything about science.  I can't even fathom having the lack of respect to say that to my teacher when I was that age.  And all of this because they were asked to graph some data... which took nearly all of the 90 minutes to do, and do poorly at that.  Not that I told them that last part, but sheesh, look at those graphs-- do they look like work products that should have taken an hour to produce?!?  Notice there isn't a verbal conclusion or a particle diagram on any of them.  Let me just say there was supposed to be each of those as well.

I'm scared for the lab reports.  They are not going to be good.

Today really got me thinking about another teacher from my modeling workshop.  She mentioned that a constant problem she has with "inquiry" type labs, is that the students mess up, take away the wrong idea, and don't care enough to change their thinking.  That's very much what I saw with my students today.  I asked me students how they thought their graphs were going to look-- most said heating ice would be a straight increase, cooling the lauric acid would be a straight decrease.  After they (finally) plotted the data, I asked if that's what they saw.  Yup, they told me.  I asked about the flat areas and the zigzags-- it must have been the hot plate.  Or *maybe* it was human error.  They don't care, the line went up at a point, so they were all correct in their minds.

Can I just get a do-over on this semester?  I think if I had to do it all over again, I'd start WAY easier on this group and build up a better relationship with them.  I set the bar high and was hard on these students from the start, and they have now shut down on me.