Jack Dunitz on the Nature of the Chemical Bond by Linus Pauling - "At the time when I was reading that book I was wondering whether chemistry was really as interesting as I had hoped it was going to be. And I think I was almost ready to give it up and do something else. I didn’t very much care for this chemistry which was full of facts and recipes and very little thought in it, very little intellectual structure. And Pauling’s book gave me a glimpse of what the future of chemistry was going to be and particularly, perhaps, my future."1  I have been teaching high school chemistry fo ..read more

Novice vs. Expert learners When students are tasked with solving novel problems they tend to miss deeper structures that experts notice while over-emphasizing surface details. This has led some within the Abstract Reductive Teaching with Cognition (ARTC) philosophy to present worked examples of algorithms for students to replicate. Students repeat these problems with minimal thinking in an effort to overlearn. These jumps are justified using cognitive load theory which says that our short-term memories can be overwhelmed by too many things at once.  The issues with the above approach wil ..read more

The first book I’m choosing is How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram Kendi. The reason I’m choosing it is because too few people have spent time constructing a productive definition of racism. Many know extreme examples of bigotry as racism, but struggle when things becomes more grey. Kendi defines racism by an action that has a negative impact on a race or because of race. This may even seem silly to many of you. This would mean that a disease could be racist, or that a well-intentioned comment could be racist. But this allows us to evaluate the impact of our actions in a meaningful manner. Withou ..read more

Many years ago I used to grade while students took a test. But over the past few years I had to stop doing so because the only effective method of preventing cheating has been to watch students test for the majority of the exam. If students use watches, phones, their neighbor’s paper, or any other means I can tell when I watch them. It is a tiring game of cat and mouse and I dislike it very much. One thing that has worn on me recently as a teacher is the mounting pressures for students to find a way to get admitted into a University. That pressure is often an unhealthy one that stems from a va ..read more

When I ask students I am surprised at how thoroughly students would be able to explain to me why teaching was not an option for them. It is not a decision that they have made lightly. They know the projections of pay, the direction of legislation and the costs that they would need to input. But there are also good reasons to go into teaching that they are not aware of.  Unsettled research The access teachers have had to cognitive science research and how learning works has been limited until recently. As we continue to improve our understanding of learning, the research connecting that cognit ..read more

The cognitive science behind teaching science shows that abstract ideas should be connected to concrete examples to maximize understanding. Energy is an abstract concept, yet little analysis of how to best connect energy to concrete examples exists. The experiences of teaching both chemistry and physics have provided me some insights into what teachers should do to help students understand scenarios that have traditionally been analyzed using energy.  Motion, position and force are more concrete (less abstract) than energy. Whenever possible energy should be removed from the explanat ..read more

Physics is often considered to be a challenging subject because of mathematics, but the problem with physics is that people have incomplete or wrong ideas that they build their mental models from. Incomplete ideas are made worse when we give students phrasing that allows them to build around incomplete ideas.  There is gravity in space. There is a lot of gravity in space. The International Space Station (ISS) is about 400 km from the surface and the radius of the earth is about 6400 km. The gravitational force is about 90% of what is experienced on the surface of the earth. So when w ..read more

This is where I hope to track all of the lessons that arise during my first student teacher's time in our classroom. Every week I will add the new lessons at the top and the following week I will organize them into categories at the bottom. By the end of the semester we should have a complete reflection on these topics. New Things this week Week 2 1. Don’t answer student questions during the test. They can figure out the answer from the information on the test. By answering you are either being unfair or you are cementing in a wrong thought. Better to always shrug and explain ahead of time w ..read more

I just returned from ChemEd 2019 and I could not be happier. I had a four hour drive to think about the conference and about teaching. The complexity involved in teaching is overwhelming at times. But as I improve in teaching the complexity becomes such a joy and conferences are a huge source of that emotion. Being around some of the best chemistry teachers in the world is so intellectually stimulating to me. Teaching is complicated. You have to understand some information, deliver that information to a novice learner and work towards their brain changing in a meaningful manner. Their brains w ..read more

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 effi ..read more