Today I tried an experiment with grass clippings where I heated the grass in a covered pot to convert the clippings into charcoal. This conversion is called biochar. The idea is that by turning the carbon in the organic material into charcoal the charcoal can be buried and prevented from gradually turning into carbon dioxide or methane.  Figure 1: 1.8 (+/- 0.2) pounds of Dried out grass in a 5 gallon steel pot My initial test run involved leaving the grass clippings in a pile in the yard for a week. This dried them out which removes water from the grass. I assume this will lead to more ..read more

On a Saturday in late fall we held a follow up to our modeling workshop. One of the participants brought a colleague along with her. During one of our discussions she mentioned that she had been having students do a daily recap of the previous lesson. I thought the idea was brilliant and so I started having my IB chemistry HL class do it. I recently expanded the recaps to my chemistry classes. There are multiple benefits to doing this and I wanted to put them together and encourage teachers to try using this tool in your own classes. 1.  Students listen differently to their peers. When I ..read more

Going grocery shopping can be quite obnoxious for a chemistry teacher. It’s not just the chemical-free labels but rather an overwhelming amount of misleading and deceptive marketing. It is a stark reminder that there are relentless forces pushing back regardless of how hard I work to teach science, evidence-based thinking and chemistry knowledge. For every time a student learns how to predict the products of a chemical reaction they will be inundated with non-GMO labels. Every particle representation that pushes their thinking will be countered by claims that only ingredients with names that c ..read more

I had a moment several years ago where I was reading about a terrorist attack where someone had shot and killed people and based on the race of the shooter media had begun reporting about mental illness.  Reading the response immediately brought to mind that I had done the exact same thing when I was a new teacher at my first teaching job. I had had a white student go on a swearing rampage and storm out of the classroom.  I remember thinking that he had lost control of his emotions. Later in the year a black student had a similar although lesser violation. This time I asked two other ..read more

Weekly thoughts to consider about learning, thinking and academics that will continue to be updated throughout the year. 1. Getting an answer correct doesn’t mean you understand something, getting an answer wrong doesn’t mean that you don’t understand something 2. Our goal in discussion is not for 1 of you to say the right answer or give the correct explanation.  Our goals are to have as many of you think and have as many of you communicate your thinking as possible.   3. Trying to do a problem you don’t know how to solve is one of the best ways to learn new information for retention ..read more

If you are unable to attend conferences for any reason here is an excessive amount of information that gets conveyed during conferences: Chemistry Philosophies of the class The typical progression of a unit in chemistry starts with gathering data and experimental evidence.  That evidence is compiled on a whiteboard and discussed in a large group. From that discussion students construct new ideas while improving their previous knowledge about the topic being studied.  We do a lot of thinking at the particle level for what is happening. These two videos (1 and 2) reflect a lot of how I ..read more

Three years ago was a very busy time in my teaching career.  I had just attended a three week long workshop on teaching chemistry using modeling pedagogy.  I walked away ready to completely overhaul my teaching methods and even institute standards based grading in my chemistry class.  At the same time I was teaching IB chemistry HL for the first time ever. I had a group of seniors in their second year and a group of juniors starting the course.  Today we received our third set of data and the 2018 group is our first group of students to have been taught using modeling pedag ..read more

It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times….. Teaching is really hard the first few years.  I was good at about 20-30% of all of the components of teaching and a mess for the rest.  But when I would talk with other teachers, students, parents, administrators they would always focus on the things I did best.  I was exciting, gave good explanations, motivated students, had good relationships. They would avoid looking at the amount of student engagement I had, how I ran discipline, how I graded, what instructional methods I used.  And deep down I always knew th ..read more

Considerable time and effort are spent evaluating teachers without much to show for it.  Rarely does a teacher excel in teaching and credit their evaluation system for helping them to get where they are.  Evaluation systems rely on overworked administrators that nearly always end up accomplishing compliance rather than effective feedback, evaluation and improvement.  This causes the administrator to rely on a rubric that often is inappropriate. For example, our district uses the same rubric to evaluate my chemistry class as well as physical education, elementary, special educati ..read more

I hate grading.  Grading takes so long and marking wrong answers for hours on end after spending so much effort on teaching is an emotional drag.  Grading isn’t just obnoxious because it is redundant, length and often mindless. For high school teachers it can often be used as a tool to shame students, to make them feel bad about themselves and that blame is tough to share and unhealthy to deflect to students and their parents.   I was listening to a podcast about how we do not remember our memories correctly.  We replace our memories with what we currently believe as ofte ..read more