A better use of time

I thought I lucked out this year by being assigned lunch detention as my duty.  This would be a great opportunity to sit in a room by myself and grade papers.  Sure, once in a while some student would get detention, but that shouldn't happen that often.  

Well, except for the first 2 days of school, there has been someone in there every day with me.  Still, not so bad and can still get a lot done.  Then the rules came out.

http://goo.gl/3AJQo

No cell phones

No talking

No ipods

No sitting near each other

No sleeping

Students are to do school work or sit quietly

Students are expected to have the same behavior as found in your classroom

I had been struggling with some of these rules as I see the fact that the students are being pulled away from their friends and put into a room with no windows for 52 minutes as punishment enough.  But the last comment is what was really bugging me.  If you are a reader of my blog you know that I encourage collaboration, cell phone use, iPods every single day.  My students are encouraged to make the classroom as comfortable a learning environment as possible.

So Thursday comes and a student walks in absolutely radiating anger.  This was now his 7th day of detention out of 10 days of school.  He had no school work so he spent about 10 minutes muttering a stream of very unpleasant phrases while he colored on scrap paper.  He put on his iPod at some point when I wasn't looking and I only noticed it because the music was loud enough for me to hear.  I told him the rule on iPods, but since it calmed him down (music soothes the savage beast?) I let it slide.  But this angry teenager got me thinking:

1. If detention is designed to be so miserable that no one wants to come back, why is this student back for the 7th time?
2. This student is going to sit in a room for 52 minutes and fume over the fact that he is there.  Now he is going to be released to a classroom for 80 minutes where he is likely to lash out at another student, or worse the teacher, and get suspended for some new infraction.

On my drive home, I decided that I didn't want lunch detention anymore because it went against everything I believe in.  Isn't the point of being an educator to develop relationships with the students and to find innovative ways to educate them about the world around them?  So as I am discussing my day with my wife a thought popped into my head:

If a student was found to be on drugs during school, the school would find ways to help the student get over the addiction and rehabilitate his/her life.  Why don't we do the same thing with lunch detention?  If a student is being assigned to multiple detentions, shouldn't we be taking steps to stop the bad behavior in the first place?

Here's my idea:  develop a character building program within lunch detention.  We have different punishments for different offenses so we will develop a tiered system depending on what the students have done.  If a student is 1st time offender and is only given 1 day, they may get nothing.  A student who has received several days or is returning for a different offense might have to watch a TED talk and complete some critical thinking questions.  A student like I mentioned above might have to read a thought provoking book, again with guiding questions, and discuss what his thoughts were with the lunch detention proctor.  In all of these, the students would report back to the administrator who assigned the detention to build that relationship, measure growth and understanding, and have meaningful conversations about the behavior.

Doesn't this approach make a lot more sense?

If your school is using something like this, I would love to hear about it.  All thoughts/comments are welcomed.

Flipping over assessment

Not to give away part of my presentation for the Flipped Class Conference in June, by I have to talk for a minute about how assessment has changed in my class.  While there are still the typical assignments (HW, quizzes, tests, labs) I have tried to not only make everything objective-based, but also put some sort of inquiry into as many as possible.  This has been the most fun in my recent 5pt quizzes.

I have always used my quizzes as a way to do a quick check for understanding and to keep the students studying the material throughout the unit instead of the night before the test.  When I started the last unit I was looking at the typical problems I put on the quiz and decided that it bored me to even type them up in the first place.  The problem was a Boyle's Law problem (Pressure and Volume are inversely proportional) and I remembered I had this great demo involving shooting a slug of potato across the room.  So, I told the students to take out a half sheet of paper, did the demo (spraying potato everywhere) and told them to explain the demo using what they knew about gas laws.  The entire class got a perfect score.  But the best part was they had fun for that quiz.

So we are now in the Solutions unit and I needed to come up with a good quiz question.  I focus heavily on making solutions and what better way to demonstrate that you can make a solution than by making pink lemonade.  I told my students they were to calculate and write out the procedure for making a solution that was no less than 1.0 in concentration (Molarity or molality was up to them) and then make the solution.  They jumped right into it and immediately did it wrong.  They didn't know they were wrong when they did the calculations because everything looked perfect.  It was when they went to make the solution and overflowed the cup that everything became clear.  What students typically forget is that when you add solute to solvent the volume increases.  Easy to say, but better to experience.

One of my best students gets a 4/5 because of this and begins to negotiate with me on how he can earn back the lost point.  So I looked at him and said that if he can figure out the concentration of a solution made from directions on the back of the container, he could have his point back.  And off he went.  15 minutes later he is back with all of his calculations.  The reason this was challenging is the measurements are in fluid ounces for the total volume and tablespoons for the powder (which we assume is just sucrose), neither of which are units of measurement we use.  I look at his calculations and notice that he had converted everything to grams and milliliters.  As soon as I open my mouth, he interrupts with "I Google'd the measurement conversions that I didn't know."  Well, it turns out that pink lemonade has a concentration of about 0.237M.

The key to this story is that when you move to the Flipped Classroom everything is about the conversations. There is no question that this student understands the material.  Sure I could have given him a traditional written quiz and he probably would have earned the same grade.  But he was far more engaged and will probably remember what he learned from this experience far longer than doing some problem from a textbook.