Inquiry can be rough. It can be rough on equipment, it can be rough on students, and it can be very rough on the teacher. As I try to glue together experience with content, I often have wondered if things would ever get easier. Yes, they finally have. Some sort of chord has struck, and it sounds like this:

Turn your system all the way up. If you’re short on time, go to 7:27 and close your eyes: Baba Yaga and The Great Gate of Kiev, composed by Mussorgsky, directed by Dudamel.

I want to be the Dudamel of teachers.

I want to lead a fantastically talented group through a gauntlet of stops, starts, and stunning revelations. I want to coalesce a whole semester into a series of chord changes that leave the students primed for later resolution yet fundamentally enamored with the richness at hand. I want my physics class to feel like Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

My quest for this kind of classroom has created some fantastic investigations, as well as some that were rather pedestrian. Here’s a run-down of the current open investigations running in my room today. These were all primed by the simple tennis ball guided investigation. (Don’t know what I mean be “guided” and “open?” Read this primer)

Mass vs. Air Time From Trampoline

Students varied the masses stuffed inside of an eviscerated tennis ball. They dropped the ball about 40 feet onto a workout trampoline. They then measured the time from the bounce off of the trampoline to when the ball hit the ground again.

Speed Holes: An Air Flow Configuration Investigation

Students drilled different configurations of nine holes of the same size in blocks of 2×4′s. They then dropped their blocks to see if the average distance between holes or the distance from edges would affect the drag on the block.

Large Scale Rifling on Rotation

Students sliced a 5-inch PVC tube in half and scored the inside with a razor blade. They then launched a baseball down the tube with a slingshot apparatus made of physical-therapy bands. They observed the spin of the ball upon exiting with a high speed camera. (video forthcoming)

Surface Area vs Drop Time

Simple. Beautiful. Hugely varying radii of sports balls were dropped and timed. Brass masses (also what they called me in college) were duct taped to the balls to ensure controlled mass.

Matching Parachute Area to Mass of Parachutist

Students varied the mass of the toy parachutist and measured the final speed of the dropping parachute system. Extrapolations were made to the maximum amount of velocity sky diving schools advise as safe.

Mass of Projectile on Water Displacement

Students dropped varying massed objects into a perfectly filled bucket of water. The shed water was then measured.

Accelerometer Parachute: Wiimote

Students varied the size of the parachute attached a Wiimote. The Wiimote’s accelerometers were then synced with the Bluetooth of a MacBook and data was saved as .csv files. The collisions at the end were vary telling.

Chemical to Kinetic: Baking-soda-and-vinegar Cannon

The concentrations of both vinegar and baking soda were varied, and the times of flight of a cork projectile were measured. Super fun.

Propeller Ball!

The students drilled a 1/16″ hole and filled it a ping-pong ball with various fluids (water, oil, mercury, etc…). They then dropped their homemade propeller ball to see how rotation would affect the mass-doesn’t-matter-in-falling axiom.

Tail Dragger

Students attached long plastic bag streamers to masses and measured the effect of the tail length on drop time. Also simple, also quite interesting data.

The Ever-Beaten Drum: Mentos-and-Diet-Coke Rocket

Students fired a Mentos-pop bottle system — as a rocket — and measured how the thrust affected time to fall. Awesome.

The Final Movement:

If you needed evidence for students’ ingenuity and general curiosity, I hope this helps my case. These students were minimally directed. I used my experience in science to direct them towards more measurable techniques and away from some more obvious pitfalls. Otherwise these are all theirs.

I like to use the metaphor of aiming a cannon: Choose a good trajectory, measure your powder twice, then let ‘er rip and see what you hit. The target you miss isn’t as nearly as important as the target you hit.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been morally opposed to PowerPoint for most of my life. I think it had to do with a terrifying experience I had as a boy scout. I was earning future-corporate-whore merit badge, and the endurance test was to watch a crowded PowerPoint presentation for longer than any of my peers could stand. I won, but at what cost to my humanity?

So, I’ve recently embraced Keynote as my way of sticking it to the Man while still getting to do all of the cool things the Man does on the weekends. That, and I would get too excited, off track, and otherwise pumped about storytelling, that I would often forget crucially important administrative announcements during class (read: Cornally is not a good teacher)

Here is my presenter’s modus operandi: (Mostly shamelessly stolen from other blogs and better presenters)

1.  Font Size > 30pt. No exceptions.

Seriously. I’ll find you.

2. Paragraphs are for writing. Presentations are not writing.

People can read faster than you can talk. Don’t let them read.

3. A picture is worth 1,000 6.022 x 10²³ words.

That’s exactly one mole of words. Which, in their gaseous form, would take up about 22.4 L, consequently the amount of mustard gas your audience will want, if you forget pictures.

4. Slides should make almost no sense without the accompanying speaker’s audio and/or video.

In other words, is your blabbing really necessary? I should hope so.

5. Transitions & Builds are cheap parlor tricks.

No one has actually come to your presentation with a quarter in their ear. They are not going to find anything enjoyable after the 3rd time some text box takes 2 entire seconds to materialize as if an alien was beaming it down onto your slide. Stop it, for the kids.

6. Do not pretend that your audience will tolerate bad layout.

There are a few elementary rules for layout that make the human eye love looking at it. The rule of thirds, golden ratio, gestalt principles, etc . . .

7. Minimalism

We’re talking early-Philip-Glass minimalism people.

As a Teacher:

I try to model these principles during direct instruction, which is only one of a slew of techniques good enough for teaching our youth. I spend about 20% of my total class time with my students in direct instruction. Which means 80% is split between inquiry, students teaching each other, assessment, and whatever else.

When my students present their findings to me, I want that time to be as instructional as possible, and nothing kills that faster than a shabby PowerPoint presentation.

So, model I must. Hey, maybe my modeling career would take off, if only I had Kate’s skin.

My heart doesn’t shrivel nor my soul distend because I hate parabolas, not even because I’m morally opposed to plurals that end in “i,” no, it’s the lack of a grand narrative that causes me unrest.

I’m now enjoying the true luxury of having a blog; I can review my own posts about lessons from previous iterations and revise them for lessons that I’m currently teaching. This post extends the post previously written about the limit definition of the derivative.

We started with one of these:

Slides.

<Socratic Dialogue>

How does it work? Yea, but how does it know how fast they’re going? What math does it do? Did some archaeologist find this in the dirt and reverse engineer it for all other radar gun manufacturers? Who programmed the math?

We then attempted to make it work. A running human? Not fast enough. A wavering hand? Too jumpy.

Interesting.

We took this to the streets. They radar-ed cars, trucks, bikes, birds, & each other. Turns out 7 mph is really as low as the thing goes. Hmm, it must not be able to do the math below that number.

Interesting.

</Socratic Dialogue>

Let’s rewind. Why did I bring a radar gun to school? Well, last year I just didn’t feel like my students had a handle to hang their understandings of infinitesimals on. The idea that something can come as close to zero without being zero is central to understanding calculus, and I was doing a poor job of teaching it. Sleep has been lost.

I firmly believe in context before content, whether that context is something from the “real world,” or just an infuriatingly curious problem. The words “Ok, so, today we’re moving on to parabolas and their foci. I know yesterday we were talking about proofs, but trust me, you’ll need to know this for some class later” make me die inside like the rose from Beauty and the Beast. (Yikes, I google-imaged “Dying Rose” for a picture. Mistake!)

My heart doesn’t shrivel nor my soul distend because I hate parabolas, not even because I’m morally opposed to plurals that end in “i,” no, it’s the lack of a grand narrative that causes me unrest. I want my students to feel immersed. I want them to love the characters. I want them to care when we can’t do something, because dividing by zero is keeping us down.

<Socratic Dialogue>

The radar gun sends a wave packet out at some microwave frequency. When that wave bounces off of an object (say, your car’s bumper) that wave returns. If it returns as a replica of itself, the gun interprets that as rest. If the car was moving, the wave will be smooshed or stretched as the car bounces pieces of the wave back. This is the Doppler effect, holmes.

We stopped just short of dissecting the gun — which I had just received — and hooking it up to an oscilloscope to see what was happening. My legal and accounting team wouldn’t authorize that one.

Here’s my Doppler slide (I’m not very good at Keynote, sorry)

A problem arises when the car changes speed while the wave packet is in mid bounce. The wave comes back all wonky, stretched here and smooshed there. This is no good.

Let’s attack this from a different angle. We then get to graphing. What does a car look like on  graph of d vs. t when standing still? moving? Any of these following situations. The kids graphed these, and made up some of their own.

It’s the changes in speed that give the gun fits. It’s the curvy parts of the graphs. Ah-ha. I win. Calculus wins. Society wins. The hulk has been abated.

In short, the makers of the gun need to create a wave packet so short that it almost has zero length. Luckily, this is easily obtainable with the kind of GHz radiation used in these guns, which can provide thousands of oscillations in even the shortest of wave packets.¹ The motivation for that sentence is what I want from my kids. It’s the motivation for the limit (There’s a sweet slide with Isaac on it, if you want to see the all the slides. Link at the top.)

The lesson at large then begins. A night separated these two sessions, and I had all sorts of fantastic questions come in from students via email and conversation. They had looked things up on their own. I knew I had them, and that’s all it takes for some direct instruction to be meaningful.

See: the Limit Definition of the Derivative

1. Yes, I know, there’s a lot more going on inside of even the chintziest radar gun, relax, it’s the go-to-zero I wanted out of them.

I’ve just spent my pre-school professional development time with a team of fantastic educators that are also my colleagues. We represent a fantastically diverse cross-section of experiences, which always leads to fantastic ideas.

The genius of this professional development — which lies in stark contrast to the usual drudgery we’ve been dragged through in the past — was that it has been almost entirely led by teachers for the improvement of very specific parts of our school that we will be held accountable for (read: have to deal with on a daily basis).

We’ve been given control of a fairly plastic period of time during the day called, “Seminar.” This is just another word for “that time where students do whatever they can get away with.” It’s nominally a study hall, and more commonly a time for socializing. What’s worse is that a few students choose to abuse the freedom of the system by staying in the hallways, often intimidating other students.

My team was given the task of fixing this system for our sophomores.

How it was: A group of ~20 students was assigned to a teacher and reported daily for a half-hour period of nebulosity. Students often needed to go to other rooms, which lead to all sorts of crazy logistical and trust issues. (not good)

Our new plan: Students can go to whatever room and participate in whatever activity that they choose. The assumption here is that most students will go to the room where they need the most help, or feel the most welcome. We want learning to increase (and, secondarily, grades to improve). We want students to feel they own their educations, and that free time should be spent to their advantage, instead of for “getting away” with something.

Discussion ensued. I wouldn’t call it heated, but it there was worry. Will the students be productive? Can we force students to go to rooms where their grades are the lowest? Is it sad and atrocious that we are even in this situation? What has our culture’s obsession with grades (not learning) done to these students?

In other words:

Can we trust our students to want to learn?

I landed on the side of, “Hell Yes,” but I’m scared of what we have branded into them. These are great kids who like the rules and generally benefit from them. Will this become freedom or freedumb?¹

You can assume we’re not stupid and have thought through the basic logistics, but I’d love to know what you all think. Our team is a little afraid of looking like trusting fools in front of the rest of the school.

1. I even developed some software that helps teachers keep track of where students are at any given time (basically the Marauder Map from Harry Potter). If you’d like to use this on your IT architecture (I will not be hosting this one any time soon), feel free to email me, and I’ll get you setup with the source code (PHP and JS)

Remember, our goal is to prompt with something that just shouts out a question worth shouting.

I don’t know what you all think of me: Hipster? Fat, Jolly Midwesterner? Gamer-cum-Rico Suave? Anger-Management-Group-Therapy Participant? Let’s just put it this way, my wife and I have spent an unreal amount of time watching LOST this summer, and the cool kid in me wishes that I didn’t like it so much.

However, I think I finally understand why Dan Meyer won’t stop talking about story telling.

In case you were wondering which one was the correct choice.

I’ve always been a storyteller in class. I love the setup, I love embellishing, I love the power of the anecdote, but I’ve never once considered harnessing it and distilling it down into fairy dust that I can systematically pepper over each and every lesson. To me, that’s really what the whole WCYDWT/Hook thing comes down to: Can you get them to jump out of their seats with the question by telling a good ‘story’?

That’s pretty much all the J.J. Abrams has tried to do with his show, LOST. I’ll admit that the show sometimes lowers itself to Dan-Brown techniques; you may smack your forehead, but the eyes go right back to the TV, and that’s all that matters. How does LOST do it? Why have I watched 6 seasons of a bygone television show in 3 months? Really engaging storytelling, that’s why.

Your kids know bad storytelling when they see it (see: dog bandanna). They know that the text book is plasticine and serves a purpose much akin to the role of the bench press for a football player. However, the job of motivation and exploration is what requires a human in the room. An insipid story about camping and tin foil rationing (albeit lame) is enough to make my kids launch into an optimization frenzy. If I had story lines like LOST, I can’t even imagine the fervor:

Hmmm, what’s the hook? The plane crash? Maybe. Medical drama? Sort of. A conjecture-soliciting-supernatural-formless murderer? Yup, that’s the hook that has caused me to spend nearly an entire week of my life in front of my TV.

Let me ask you this: How can I introduce a conjecture-soliciting-supernatural-formless-murderer into each of my lessons? Or, how can I make the students throw the question at me?

Dan has done a fantastic job of explaining the storytelling/WCYDWT aspect for math ed., and I’d like to do the same for science. Here are few examples of lessons I’m going to try this year that have a CSSFM component (I hope the edu-jargoneers take a hold of that acronym):

Physics/Physical Science:

Energy conservation for both Physics and physical science. Gravitational potential goes to kinetic:

Hook? I won’t tell you, but whatever was the first question was that popped into your head, that’s where you start.

Think about the understanding of energy conservation that this game’s programmers are using (and assuming that the player will command)?

Biology:

Remember, our goal is to prompt with something that just shouts out a question worth shouting. For science courses, this can be a plethora of questions that vaguely hover around the same idea:

Jurassic Park clip. This was a YouTube video, but NBC/Universal objected to my fair and educational use of their product. Thanks.

This video ties a whole bunch of content together. But the obvious question is, “Why is she elbow-deep in Triceratops poop?” However, my wife and I came up with a slew more while I was editing the scene:

1. What makes lilac berries poisonous?
2. Are they poisonous to humans? Birds? Just dinosaurs?
3. Why are dilated pupils an important symptom?
4. Why are the sicknesses periodic?

These are all the kinds of questions I would want my kids spending their time researching and designing investigations around.

The content that would probably arise:

1. Evolution of some dinosaurs to birds.¹
2. Rock-gizzard digestion (other digestive system standards)
3. Environment and evolution (lilac-berry poisoning)

All from poop, I like that.

Chemistry:

Here’s an example of a topic that was trendy a few years ago, but hasn’t lost its magic: Sulfur Hexafluoride.

A lot of science — especially chemistry — gets turned into Gee-Wizz science; that is, the student is impressed by an explosion, and then that’s it. Not too valuable, really. The goal here is to immediately identify a question, and for those questions to attack content standards:

Did that video piss you off? “Extra Credit,” indeed! I’ve scoffed myself into a tizzy

Assessment quibbles aside, what questions did that raise?

1. How is any of that possible?
2. Why does my voice change at all with different gasses?
3. Floating a boat?
4. Sinking the boat?!

You have them. The video even provides data. Here’s how I might address any of those questions with inquiry:

1. The content here is as deep as electron bonding regions and, which predict the inert behavior of SF6, to the simple idea of density and atomic weight (N2 has 28g/mol, SF6 has 146g/mol).
2. “Why is this safe to inhale at all?” is an even better question. Inertness is a fantastic physical property that seems to be almost overlooked entirely in the standard chemistry curriculum. Question of sound waves, the speed of sound waves and their propagation through matter all abound here.
3. Density! Who knew? The idea here is not that this is the greatest video ever, it’s that it raises the density question in a natural way.
4. See response 3, but nevertheless this unintuitive act is generally enough to get kids crankin’.

Geology:

Again, the question for the instructor: what questions does this immediately draw out of you? If it doesn’t draw any, then this picture isn’t good enough.

How is this different than any other geology slide? It’s not, except that it will be shown on day number 1 and will be constantly referenced for an entire semester.

There are two central questions:

1. What bent the rocks?
2. Why don’t the layers match?

Constraints are a huge issue for success in this kind of lesson. Are they obvious and clear. With a math problem you often have to measure things like the total length of a ladder. With a science question you’re often left assuming things like the forces of erosion and deposition have been constant over time (oh, did we accidentally author the law of uniformitarianism? Aw, Snap!)

What this simple image really does is frame the important questions of geology without having to tell the students: “Here are the important questions of geology: One is — are you writing this down!? — Central Question One is . . . ”

Unconformities, Stratigraphy, the Rock Cycle, the plasticity of the lower crust, it’s all here in one image, and you don’t have to open your mouth. Hopefully the kids will ask.

Foundations/Intro to Science:

In courses like this, the content generally doesn’t matter, it’s the process of science that we’re interested in. For me, nothing is more scientific than cooking. It’s messy, organic, and full of recording data. (Note the lack of “scientific method” references from that list).

So, let’s make some bacon. Canadian Bacon!

So, is the question obvious? Maybe not, but what draws my curiosity is “What makes it Canadian bacon and not just regular bacon?” Or, the secondary question, what’s the difference between “pork center loin” and Canadian bacon?

Many students have no idea where their food comes from, let alone how basic raw ingredients, like pork loin, become spice-rubbed, roasted entrees or deli-style, cured fare like our Dearborn Bacon here.

The ingredients list is the data. What about salt makes this bacon? What is it about sodium lactate, brown sugar, or any of the other additives that raise this above simple “pork center loin?”

I imagine freshmen with food service storage containers. I imagine measuring concentrations of salt, sugar, water, and additives. I imagine researching safe levels of all of those ingredients. I imagine students learning basic food techniques like brining and curing.

Finally, I imagine science happening. I also imagine making pizza with the results.

What’s it all mean, Basil?

Science is different than math in that we’re not always trying to frame a calculation or the impetus for a theorem. We often just want to point a shotgun and let the student’s spread hit somewhere near the vague content standard at hand. Math tends to use rifles (key non-committal word: “tends”). I don’t necessarily care if the students are interested in the poop or the berries, I just want them asking a question about digestion that will probably lead to a deeper understanding for the evidence that dinosaurs and birds are, like, totally besties.

When something is engaging and obvious, it stops being “school” and just becomes interesting. When a sentient pillar of black smoke kills a bunch of people, you don’t stop and ask, “what was the pressure difference between inside the smoke monster and the surrounding air?” You ask, “WTF was that?” and the investigation naturally falls into place.

1. While Triceratops is not in the Maniraptora group, which is the most likely predecessor to modern birds, sure this digestive adaptation can draw up discussion.

Inquiry is an important part of my classroom, and, when I say important, I mean like spinal-cord important. It lets students feel out how science works while simultaneously generating context for me to teach content within. I like that.

I’ve also mentioned before that the faux-grant is something that’s very integral to maintaining order in this kind of classroom. That is, students need to have a logical plan showing me some serious planning, or at least vision for where their question might be taking them.

It’s kind of like aiming a cannon. Once you light the fuse, there’s little going back, and you’re not guaranteed to hit the opposing galleon; but hey, you at least aught to try to measure the angle and amount of gun powder, right?

Sometimes students write excellent grants, and then their implementations fall a bit short. There have been grants I’ve nixed that seemed like fantastic ideas, but I couldn’t fully imagine what the students were trying to describe. I thought that perhaps these travesties could be averted with a little technology.

Enter: Google SketchUp

If you’re already using this program, congratulations, if not, and you teach physics, I would seriously consider scheduling an hour to get your feet wet.

Here’s a representation of a student sketch. I wasn’t prescient enough to keep copies of this student’s work, so you’ll just have to trust me that is pretty much what it looked like:

Click for larger image

This student had developed a question about starting a fire by spinning a stick (friction). He devised a contraption that had a spinning peg attached to a cord that was unwound by a weight on a pulley. He used an IR thermometer to measure the temperature change where the peg was forced into the base by a weights he placed in a hole on the top of the contraption.

He was changing the normal force and measuring the heat generated. I loved it, but I also put the brakes on the project until he drew me this (well, something like this). SketchUp gave me a clearer picture that the student knew what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it. Trying to explain that verbally was very hard; looking at this picture was super easy.

How do my students learn SketchUp? The Google tutorials are the best way, but I use it during direct instruction, too. I often draw things and “animate” them with SketchUp. They get used to how I draw things, and then they can take it from there.

Discussing center of mass and the way things fall.

For those of you interested in inquiry, but scared by the logistics, embracing SketchUp is a fantastic way to ease a whole lot of worry (not to mention introducing some modern drafting techniques, which are oh so important).

Oh, yea, SketchUp is free.

Recently, I asked the question, “Is it ok to employ the grading practice of dropping the lowest score?” Many of you responded with eloquently worded comments. It’s pretty obvious that we’re all over the board on this one, and I think you may find it surprising that I am not wholly against the practice (as perhaps I led on), but to me it’s more about being Picard, not Data.

The goal of this blog is to force myself to think cogently about why I do the things in my classroom that I do. Last year I came to the terrifying realization that teaching matters and can actually permanently affect other people’s lives. I’m sure I acknowledged this fact from day one, but I don’t think I truly had the fear of the power then. This is why I must agonize over the things I do with my students. This is why I must come across as a bit too intense.

For those of you who are assuming I’m always being a jerk about the traditional system of assessment, I’m sorry that I’ve come across that way. All I’m trying to do here is make sure you and I actually believe in what we’re doing and aren’t just dropping lowest scores or giving random tests because, well, that’s what was done to us. I’m sorry that I make some of you feel defensive; I just want you to be absolutely sure that what you believe in is worth defending (read: good for your students) and not some crusted ideal curve handed down from the great Statistics Perverters of yesteryear.

Here’s the recap:

Most of you espoused the “bad days” argument, wherein the teacher acknowledges that some days a student may screw up and that may inaccurately reflect their true understanding due to a breakup or illness or whatever. Problem: What if that low score is not the result of a bad day, and is in fact a giant flaming red flag indicating that the student needs some serious help on this concept?

Dropping the lowest score can lead to:

… When I was a student I would use it [dropping the lowest] as an opportunity to skip a class (or not learn specific material).

-Zach Shiner

Thank you, Zach, for rocking the anecdote. This is the problem that prompted me to post this in the first place. A clear dichotomy is starting to form…

And then, like Tyson in the fifth:

The drop-the-lowest-grade idea might help give students hope, so that they don’t give up early on.

- Dan Greene

So, we recognize the need for students to be allowed to improve, and for their final grade to reflect that. Hmm, there must be something wrong with summative obsession and averaging…

The underlying, pernicious assumption, alas, is that the “average” is a suitable indication of overall student understanding.

-Tim Erickson

Wha, what, what?! Averaging isn’t sufficient? Who knew!? What I think we’re getting at here is that when you say, “I want you to get better at that,” the traditional assessment scheme undercuts you by implicitly saying, “oh, but I really don’t want you to get better, I want you to follow my arbitrary schedule of topics, and I want your grade to reflect every horrifying and embarrassing mistake you ever make.”

Oh, did that offend you? Well, that practice offends your kids, but they usually don’t verbalize it. That’s scary.

Bethea then raises some pedagogical issues:

Above all, it [dropping lowest] lets the teacher off the hook. No need to meet with a student and explain material that you won’t be going over again, when you can just say “don’t worry, your lowest grade is dropped.”

-Ms. Bethea

Stop reading, go get some coffee and think about that one for a long time. Really turn it over in your mind. Spend some time slumming in the seedy underbelly that Bethea is trying to expose with that quote.

If you read the rest of the comments (which I strongly encourage) you’ll get a healthy conversation about averaging. Which is really the underlying assumption for many grading schemes.

What I want is for us all to see this dichotomy to its natural maturity. We have a rift going here between those of us who want to consider ourselves “progressive” and those who are willing to work within the traditional system to try and get some learning done. Obviously, there are great teachers on both sides, but I think we’ve finally touched upon something that cannot be agreed-to-be disagreed.

Learning Indication vs. Points Accumulation:

As usual, the state of Iowa shows up in spades:

Dropping the grade doesn’t mean the info was ignored. Just means that grade was dropped.

- Russ Goerend

What does Russ mean? The “info” he refers to is called feedback. Think about the assumption Russ is making here, and how those assumptions indicate that he must be a badass teacher. He assumes and practices feedback with grading, and can’t even seem to imagine a system where the points matter this much to be even having this conversation. Perhaps Russ has already left us for the Elysian fields of assessment, but he makes a fantastic point: who cares about the points, if the student got the information about how you think they’re doing? Awesome.

The fight here is really about what you want to communicate with that grade, and you have to think about it, for the sake of your students. Do I want them to accumulate a grade all semester that will either be a monkey on their back or a soft padding to ease end-of-the-year lallygagging? Or, do I want them to know that their grade reflects what they know, how well they improve, and how well they retain?

Here’s how I see dropping the lowest grade from a student’s standpoint:

1. Collect as many points as possible in whatever topics you want, often never knowing what you know or don’t know, and hope test questions will be about topics you’ve managed to “get.”
2. Dropping the lowest grade means I can ignore important material altogether, if the teacher chunks assessments like most teachers do.
3. Dropping the lowest means that points have no connection to learning and really are just an accumulation game.
4. If I have more than one bad day, I’m totally effed.

Obviously, this blog is in the what-they-know camp. This is also why I had to switch to a dynamic standards-based system:

1. In SBG, lowest grades represent the current level of the student, dropping them destroys important information.
2. In SBG, lowest grades can be erased from the grade calculation when a student demonstrates higher proficiency. (This satisfies the “bad day” argument.)
3. The only way to “collect” points is to know something; points map to learning targets which in turn map to a final grades.

So, do I agree with dropping the lowest score? Only if you’re using a dynamic system that has replaced that lower score with a more accurate picture of how that student is now doing on that topic. This is of course impossible to do if you’re not mapping your assessments to specific standards, and are instead just giving random numbers of questions just to fill the 20 minutes a quiz “should take up.”

Breaking News! They let me talk to a real reporter! Like, someone who works for a real news outlet, not even a blog!

If you’re arriving here from The Gazette or KCRG links, welcome! If not, welcome, too!

If you’re interested in standards-based grading, click here.

A few clarifications from the article:

• I absolutely do want this idea to spread, but I don’t want it to spread into classrooms with teachers who don’t see a need for assessment reform. (see: fundamental problem with professional development)
• The “adversarial” quote was taken out of context. I was referring to the relationship between students and their grades, not the normal curve, as some have assumed from the wording in the article.
• As a teacher, I care about students at a level that goes beyond money and power. I simply love being a part of the generations-old traditions of passing on knowledge and having a community raise its children. If you’re assuming anything contrary about me, perhaps you’d like a date with Cornally-Hulk?
• Finally, I’d like to say that a terse, 500-word article can barely begin to describe the complexity that is instruction and assessment.

A few of you have expressed concerns (which are repeated anytime a new educational idea is covered by the media) that SBG is just another way for teachers to become lazier (I assure you, I’ve worked as much if not more during my unpaid summer than I do all year) or that this is just another way to inflate students’ grades; please read this FAQ on standards-based grading.

Aside: This kind of negativity is rarely helpful, and I’d kindly ask you to stay away from America’s classrooms and Newspapers’ comment forums: Teachers have the nearly impossible job of educating every American student. We don’t get the benefits that Japan, Korea, or Germany have; we don’t track the majority of our students after eighth grade.

I’ve had more than a few requests for sample parent communication, and again, I hope you’re not underwhelmed.

When communicating some newfangled education idea to parents you must first ask yourself the following questions:

1. How am I going to vet responses from people who are resistant to (any and all) deviations from their status quo?
2. What bare-minimum philosophizing they need to be affronted with?
3. How can I emphasize that this is sincerely about learning, and not an attempt to make my job easier (re: not grading homework)?

My answers go like this:

1. Don’t write for the naysayers. Believe in what you are doing. Keep examples of student work on hand, and stand up for your philosophy. Parents may be the largest stakeholders in your school system, but most of them don’t have degrees in education, and they haven’t (most likely) spent blood-shot-eyed hours reading edu-blogs just to figure out how best to teach parabolas.
2. Don’t use f-ing edu-jargon. Just typing the word causes me to punch the keyboard and spit black goo from my eyes. (it’s an evolutionary defense mechanism) Tell them in plain language what’s going to be different, and in one sentence why you’re doing that. This is hard, and I haven’t quite mastered this.
3. Be clear about the new expectations for reassessment (the work that replaces grading homework) and how homework is now about building genuine responsibility (stakeholders like that word).

I decided to go with a minimalist approach. I assumed that both parents and students won’t really care until their grades begin to suffer (a vestige of the horrific scars from their summative-obsessed past), so they probably won’t read any of my two-thouasnd-word, blog-o-rific diatribes before then.

These are the messages I shove into a glass bottle and set adrift in the ocean that is parent-teacher-student communication:

• Here’s my syllabus for calculus (.pdf)
• Here’s my syllabus for physics (.pdf)
• Here’s my welcome message for calculus
• Here’s my welcome message for physics

Again, minimalism is key; people don’t love reading these types of documents. Get your point across, and then put your pedagogy where your mouth is. What you do day-to-day is the only thing that matters. Don’t waste your precious inservice time drafting giant syllabi or lengthy send-home letters, they won’t read them anyway.

I’ve received emails like this in response:

I’m sorry I missed you at conferences last night but I completely understand that you were feeling ill.  I may stop by another time to talk to you about Gwendolyn. I know she’s doing fine in your classes. I think you are doing a great job exposing her to what college courses are going to be like. She was used to the “organizational fluff” credits helping her grade. You are challenging her to really understand the material and that’s great.  So keep up the good work!

I would like to point out that, without any prodding, a parent came to the realization that SBG promotes college readiness naturally. That makes my eyes half close like a purring house cat listening to this:

Happy school year, everybody: Toot! Toot! All Aboard the SBG Express!

It’s no secret that being plugged-in to a healthy network of teachers online is akin to having all of the best and most critical minds in one place fighting for your students. I have never been as impressed as I am now by Ms. Bethea at TEACHING|Chemistry. She just gets it right, and does so in less words that I ever could.

Ms. Bethea gets assessment:

4. “Sucks for you!” zeroes

In a points system, a zero can mean that a student has absolutely no understanding of the material, failed to submit work for any number of reasons, or a penalty for some sort of academic dishonesty. Regardless of the cause, zeroes, even on small assignments, can have detrimental effects on a student’s grade, in many cases causing irreparable damage.

Agreed, in a system where the 50% mark usually implies an F, zero has a thermonuclear-weapon effect. She has way more where that came from.

Oh, and get this, she’s a science teacher. A chemistry teacher, even. Here’s her post on SBG in chemistry. It might as well be written in iambic pentameter.

Needless to say, check this blog out, aggregate it to your reader, and let the SBG Express melt the tracks.