Toobers and Tacks

The conversations today centered around foam coated wire and colored push pins as the students created short amino acid sequences.

Students built and rebuilt the sequences using a loaned kit from the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

As I walked around the room, bending and twisting of the toobers created a variety of shapes of polypeptides. It was a great visualization of amino acid impact on protein folding.

Cool stuff.

A folded protein

Walk Off 4

I've been interviewing students as a means of formative assessment.

The topic has been water: polar covalent bonds, unequal sharing of electrons, hydrogen bonds.....all good stuff. Maybe...

Yesterday, during the questions I was asking, a student (Mason) walked away with a 2.5. He was not at proficiency yet. That would have been a 3.

Today, he sat down and without my prompting or asking a question. He unloaded the bomb. He drove one over the fence on a line. He thoroughly and completely explained the polar covalent nature of water.

BOOM....walk off 4.

Joel had been waiting his turn. He scored a 3.5 in the interview from yesterday. I watched as he studied his notes, watched the screencast again and then approached the chair to talk about water. He sat down and I asked about explaining water's polar nature. Immediately, he knew that he didn't have the answer.

He got up and went back to the screencast (again). In a few students, Joel bounced up and nailed the explanation without trouble.

Joel didn't need to turn the 3.5 into a 4, but he did.

That was cool.

In both cases, students moved themselves and the class toward the two sigma result. That was very cool.

Although it is not the beginning, it really is.....

I wrote this back in June 2012....

I've been watching, listening and following #flipcon12 and feeling overwhelmed. Oh, yeah, and I got the book by Bergmann and Sams, just to push me over the deep end or into the deep end or deeper into the deep end.

There was a time when I was kid and we went to the old pool in Mason City. It sat on the flood plain of the Winnebago River, east of "the high school, across the bridge on US Highway 18. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. I don't know when the last time it had been used, but there it sat in all it's green-ness. Full of rainwater or  whatever it was full of....it was not a safe place to be for a bunch of 8 to 12 year old boys.

I got to close, fell in, got pushed....I don't remember, but I was in the deep end of a slime hole. I was in over my head and in a panic. Thrashing about and probably close to death (or not) one of the guys pulled me out with a stick.

So, that is how I feel right now. Panic stricken and waiting for someone to hold a stick out to me.

I've followed the tweets and been thinking that would be really cool to be there in Chicago, but at the same time, I don't know if I'm ready for this.

Can you be ready? It seems like you need to get pushed or slip or whatever and away you go.

Guess I gotta take that first step to the deepend of the pool.

Informative Assessments of Water

I've spent the past couple of days doing some informative assessments about the properties of water. This is the first real look into standards based grading that deals with content in science. So far the year has been about the process and getting good at the business of science: investigative questioning, hypothesizing, analyzing, concludzing. I know that the last word is spelled poorly, but it just seemed to fit with the other prior....to a certain degree.

Here's what I've started to find out:

1. Students are nervous in the service when I ask them to come and sit to talk.
2. They are genuinely confused about a lot of science topics like atoms.
3. We think we've taught those concepts.
4. I really like talking to students about what they know and don't know.
5. They are suspicious of my motives and not very trusting....I don't think.
6. There are major holes in background knowledge that I need to fill

It has taken a long time to interview the students. The rest of the class has been watching screencasts that I've put together about macromolecules and also doing so background research into their structure and function. The students are well behaved and for the most part don'd need me to hound them about staying with the job at hand.

The big issue is getting them to demonstrate what they know in a non-threatening environment. When we talk science, they get feed back and increase their understanding. I'm seeing that.

Moving to the Two Sigma Solution is going to be hard work for all involved.