My learning experiences, how I teach and what I hope to accomplish with BL this year

Daniel TerBush

High School at Lapeer East High

My high school experience was pretty old-fashioned and traditional except in science and math.

Most classes were lecture style.

Science was my refuge. In science classes there was always something to do other than just sit and listen.

English at Lapeer East High

Science at Lapeer East High

Beaker and Erlenmeyer flask Microscope

Doing an experiment

Cattle prod

The fume hood (with me inside it)

Science (and math) were a blast

Mr. Gormley was my chemistry teacher. He used to drop some chemical (yes, I should know what it is but I don't know for sure) on the floor that when it dried became unstable so when you walked into class small explosions would happen as you walked into class.

Science (and math) were a blast

Mr. Brundage was my biology teacher that I loathed as a person even though I learned a lot.

The cattle prod is actually something from my biology class.

Mr. Brundage kept it in class and would challenge the boys to the "test of manhood" to grab the cattle prod (I'm not kidding).

Science (and math) were a blast

Mr. Rezelman was my algebra teacher.

Once a year in every class he would jump into a trash can, pull out his black comb and hold the end of it under his nose making it look like a mustache and spout off something in German from an Adolf Hitler speech.

No one ever missed his class. You never knew when he was going to go crazy.

Mr. Brundage was fired, Mr. Rezelman wasn't, go figure.

I became a high school lab rat

I actually did extra credit work with my physics teacher.

He was into astronomy and I spent an entire semester doing independent study that mainly consisted of grinding lenses for his homemade telescope.

It was actually pretty fun.

No, I didn't actually live in the fume hood. It just seemed like it.

Common features

Seriously though, there were several common features to my high school science and math classrooms.

They were interactive. There were things to do even if they were not always

appropriate. I learned how to stack a deck of cards as an extra credit project in algebra for instance.

They were engaging and fun and sometimes scary.

How I teach

I am organized. I typically list an agenda for the class and have a posted objective and a warm-up activity.

The warm-up typically requires the students to answer a "Why" type question and explain or a "How" type question and solve something quantitatively.

Demos and Models and Labs

Demos and models play a big role in what I like to teach.

I like the kids to get involved in demos and to touch and do things hands-on as much as possible. Demos are used to set up the labs. labs are designed for students to figure things out on their own as much as possible.

This isn't always possible, but I try.

Student Thinking

I also work hard to elicit student thinking.

If they are solving a problem, I like to walk around the room and look at what each student is doing and to ask them "Why" if I see something that isn't being set up correctly.

I like to have my students evaluate themselves and self-correct their mistakes.

Multiple chances

I also like to give my students multiple chances to answer things.

I'd rather redo something, especially early in the year, than lose a student for the whole year as they never learned the building blocks that they need for later growth.

I care about my students

I try and get every student to come and get help.

I try and show them that I really care about whether they understand or not.

I want every one of my students to leave my class at the end of the year as a chemist, not as a person that grows up hating chemistry.

What's missing

What I am missing is the ability to offer multiple ways of learning something.

One of my goals in taking a BL course is to learn how I can incorporate BL elements into specific topics to help my students learn when I am not there for them and to present different ways of approaching a problem than the way I present in class.

What I want to try

I want to try and add a 1 week unit to my honors course this year in the chemical reactions unit since combustion of hydrocarbons is part of that unit.

I want this to be a BL mini-unit on how to evaluate literature sources using global climate change as the topic with data obtained from the UN IPCC and from a review article published in the Journal of Physicians and Surgeons about global climate change.