The Engaged Learner

One of the reasons I like guided inquiry labs is it inspires my students to ask more 'What if...' questions. I tried a new lab this year for Stoichiometry in which the students mixed different amounts of baking soda with vinegar. A balloon was placed on the top of each test tube and the students got a great visual for the amount of gas produced.

One group finished the lab and I noticed they started to fill another balloon with a very large amount of baking soda.  When I inquired about what they were doing, they said they wanted to figure out if they could pop a balloon only using baking soda and vinegar.  With wry smile, I told them they could do it, but only if they showed, using Stoichiometry calculations, how much vinegar they would need based on the amount of baking soda they had already weighed out (28g).  

After some Internet research and a bunch of calculations later, they figured out they needed nearly 400mL (for the non-chemistry folks, that's A LOT) which is more than would fit inside their 25 mL test tube.  I happen to have a giant test tube and the experiment was off.

Here is what the face of an engaged learner looks like:

The balloon didn't pop, but it got really close.  When doing these labs, sometimes you just need to let the students' run with their ideas.  It's amazing what they will come up with and what they will learn (about science and themselves) in the process.

The fun projects

I am in meeting and the discussion turned to how to incorporate STEM activities into our classes.  One teacher commented that she would live to do more but our new schedule doesn't allow for it.  She said, "I don't even have time for all my fun projects." 

I agree that the move this year to block scheduling has made it very difficult to get through the district curriculum.  This block schedule contains nearly 90 minutes LESS per week of time in science classes.  Over the course of the year we have lost weeks of time which has forced all of us to cut activities in order to cover more material.

But it was the fun projects comment that got me thinking.  What is the purpose of projects in my class?  Are they simply there to add a level of fun to the learning? If that's the case, why is the rest of my class so boring?  Why are the projects the only way to have fun in an academic class?  Or, maybe even worse, are the projects the only part of my class that the students find any meaning in?

When I started teaching, I definitely used projects as the fun part of my class mostly because I didn't know how to make the rest of the course entertaining without literally putting on a show.  But as my teaching practice has changed, projects are used to get the students to use critical thinking and creativity to find novel solutions to problems.  

As I working through this, I am having a hard time determining if the problem is that projects represent the only fun part of our course or that the rest of the course has been weighed down with too much mundane.  I know it seems like the same thing, but if the rest of the coursework had greater meaning and engaged students, projects could be used simply as fun learning.  

How do you use projects to enhance the learning in your classroom?

What can we do?

One of my students is fond of retweeting from @SayingsForGirls.  Today, the following came up:

I sat and stared at my computer for awhile trying to figure out how to respond to this.  I responded back to her with

Unfortunately she gave me a funny response which didn't help.  But, the real problem still remains.  Teenage girls are sitting in class thinking about all of these other things, not what I am talking about.  We can put on the theatrics and fancy demos to try and draw their attention, but they are still spending more time thinking my room is too cold then how awesome it was to watch the death of a gummy bear.

So, amazing educators of the world, how do we get "I'm excited to be here" into the top 6 things teenagers are thinking about?  How do we get them to wake up in the morning and say "I am excited to go to school today!"