Chapter 2 Review (Day 28)

Even though it's been four days since I was in that science classroom, I still can't help but think about that class -- and how I could have made my science class three years ago look more like that one from last week.

I know -- last year I kept making endless charts of how I could have balanced science and math in the classroom given the time I had. This year I cut out those charts in my re-blogs, but retained the discussion of how I could have taught science.

You might say -- all this consideration about how to teach science would have been worthwhile, I don't know, say three years ago when I actually had the science class. But ever since I left that class, I know that my failures in that class have derailed my teaching career. So I want to keep discussing it over and over so that, if I ever get my career back on track and return to the classroom, I won't repeat those same mistakes.

In this post, I describe how my science class could have resembled the specific class from last week.

For starters, I really needed to have an interactive notebook. One thing I could have done with the notebook is have the students divide them in half by labeling the left pages as "math" and the right pages as "science" (by writing "math" or "science" inside the respective cover). Notice that this would have forced me to teach science better, since it would have been awkward to have science pages inside the notebook and then not teach any science.

In previous posts, I repeated that I should have devoted one day of the week to science. (In various posts, I proposed different days to be the science day.) But in the classes I observed last week, I saw how important day-to-day continuity is. Originally, three days were to be devoted to a single lab, which we may call the pre-lab, lab, and post-lab days. In some ways, these extra days followed the scientific method -- "pre-lab" was for the question and hypothesis, "lab" was for the actual experiment and data, and "post-lab" was for conclusion and communicating the results.

Other parts of the lesson I observed also required multi-day continuity. One day, the class was divided into two groups (or "learning centers"), and on the next day they switched groups. Even the quiz spanned several days -- one day to review, one day to take the quiz, and then the next day for making quiz corrections.

With 80-minute periods at the old charter school, there was nothing wrong with dividing it in half and devoting 40 minutes each to math and science. My problem was that I had to do this for all three middle school grades -- sixth, seventh, and eighth. This would leave me with six "preps" -- more than any secondary teacher can handle.

How could I have given my students all the math and science they needed everyday without having to plan for six preps? After thinking about this for the past few days, here's what I came up with:

Each day, I alternate between making math or science the "active" lesson. Thus I'd have only three preps -- sixth, seventh, and eighth grade in the active subject. But students would still have work to do in the inactive subject.

For example, science is clearly active on the day of a lab or project. But the "pre-lab" and "post-lab" days might be inactive, especially if the students are given a form to answer questions about the project they're working on that week.

In math, active days are for taking notes in the notebook. Inactive days can be for working on problems from the text. "Dren quizzes" are inactive, but other quizzes and tests are active. Perhaps if I had tried this, I might have been more successful with both math and science at the old school.

Notice that while tests are active, reviewing for a test could be inactive, if there's a procedure on how exactly students should review to prepare for tests. Oh, and speaking of test review...

Today marks the start of the review for the Chapter 2 Test. Notice that Chapter 1 of the U of Chicago text had nine sections, and so there was no true review day for the Chapter 1 Test. But Chapters 2 through 6 each have only seven sections, and so the opposite happens -- there are two review days for each section.

In the past, I kept juggling around how I wanted to assess the first three chapters. The worksheet from last year prepares the students for a test with 11 questions -- and some of these questions are from Chapter 1, not just Chapter 2. But there's no harm in retesting Chapter 1 material again.

With two days of review, some teachers may use the extra day differently. Some, for example, might choose to cover Lesson 2-7 from the Third Edition of the text today. This section, "Conjectures," doesn't appear in my old Second Edition of the text. There's even an activity -- the Conjectures Game (or "Who Am I?") that I refer to several times on the blog -- that fits here. (How ironic is that? I have a Conjectures Game even though my book doesn't have a conjectures section.) Then the review worksheet can be given tomorrow instead.

This is what I wrote last year about today's worksheet:

Here is the rationale for which questions I decided to include on this review worksheet -- just as I did for the Chapter 1 Quiz, these problems come directly from the "Questions on SPUR Objectives" appearing at the end of each chapter.

For Chapter 1, I begin with Question 21, the three undefined terms (point, line, and plane), and then move on to Questions 26 and 32, two of the properties from arithmetic/algebra (Multiplication Property of Inequality and Substitution Property of Equality). Next are Questions 36-37, order on the number line -- except that I made the distances whole numbers, not decimals, and also I omitted point V from the second question, which serves no purpose other than to confuse and frustrate the students. Question 39 directs students to find the two points R on the number line that are the right distance from Q, and Question 41 is another distance question. Finally, I jumped to Question 61, another absolute value question similar to one that appeared on the Chapter 1 Quiz.

For Chapter 2, I begin with Question 16, which asks why the following definition is not a good definition of triangle: "A triangle is a closed path with three sides." The problem is, what exactly is a "closed path"? We're not allowed to give definitions containing words that also themselves need definitions. Question 20 asks the students to rewrite a statement in if-then form, then Question 30 reminds students that just because a conditional p=>q is true, it doesn't mean that its converse q=>p must be true.