New community blog spot

This blog will no longer be updated regularly, instead please visit the YPSD-COE partnership community blog at:

http://umk12tas.blogspot.com/

Conference Report

It again has been a long time since my last post. I have made many visits to both Mr. Sowder and Miss Hardy's classes in between. Several times I did not necessarily come in with anything prepared for that day, and would just follow along with the class and try to contribute where I could. Both teachers are doing an excellent job of trying to involve me-- by asking me questions or having me cite an example to illustrate a point-- which I really appreciate.

Last week I talked to both classes about the experience I had at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in San Diego from Nov 4th - 7th. I explained to them what a scientific conference is all about (communicating new findings, meeting colleagues and forming collaborations, etc.). I likened the poster session to a really big science fair, which appealed to the students as they had created posters earlier in the year for one of their units. While attending a conference is not quite a vacation, it is still an opportunity to travel to an interesting place and have your school or company pay for it. I wish I would have emphasized that point more as kind of a "perk" if you will of a scientific career-- that is the kind of stuff that seems to motivate the students, especially Miss Hardy's 4th hour class.

I also discussed with the class that the other main way scientists communicate with one another is by publishing journal articles. Many of the students said they read magazines instead of books because there is always new stuff in them (since they are periodicals) and also lots of pictures. I showed them an overhead transparency of an article from a recent issue of Nature, where there were also lots of pictures (in this case electron micrographs) and new stuff that the authors had just discovered in the past year. The students were also surprised to see that some of the concepts they were studying that day (e.g. the cell cycle and specifically anaphase) showed up in the article.

The point I was trying to make is that the skills they are learning as 9th graders in biology are preparing them well for a career in science, and that maybe some day one of them could publish in Science or Nature!

Osmosis Lab Demo

Since my last post I have visited both Mr. Sowder and Ms. Hardy's classes several more times. In Ms. Hardy's class the students were doing a project on careers in science. Each student chose a particular field to study and report on. I worked closely with the student that chose Engineering. He "interviewed" me to obtain much of the information that he was required to find out-- such as the roles/responsibilities of an engineer, where engineers work, salary, and more. I enjoyed working one-on-one with the student, and I think he appreciated being able to talk to someone with firsthand experience rather than just reading about the job. He mentioned that he was interested in Automotive Engineering and that his favorite carmaker is BMW, so I sent him a link describing a current job opening as an engineer at a BMW plant in South Carolina. I also gave him some information about UM's Automotive Engineering Program.


In Mr. Sowder's 1st and 3rd hour classes I led a two-day lesson on osmosis and then performed a lab demonstration using dialysis tubing. This involved a great deal of work but it was very rewarding. 1st hour the students are very sleepy (7:15 is awfully early for teenagers) and 3rd hour they are more awake but still need a lot of prodding to get them involved in the class. Getting the students engaged in the lesson was the most challenging part. In both classes there were one or two individuals that were always raising their hand to answer questions, which is great but at the same time seemed to make the other students less willing to think about the questions because they just figured the other students would answer it for them. On Wednesday I went through the terminology the students needed to learn and had the students help me fill the dialysis bags (our semipermeable membrane) with water and get their initial mass. We placed them in beakers of sucrose solutions of varying concentrations, and I had the students try to form a hypothesis based on their knowledge of osmosis from the lecture. Then on Friday we reviewed the terms and concepts, obtain the final mass of the bags. We calculated the percent change in mass and discussed whether the data supported our hypothesis or not. That was actually a very interesting situation. Of the 4 biology classes that performed this demo, 2 of them came out with very clean data that agreed with what one would expect to happen due to osmosis. However the data from the other 2 classes did not come out this way at all. Mr. Sowder and I talked about whether we should present this data to the students or not, because we were afraid if we did it might confuse them about how osmosis really works. In the end we decided to go ahead and share all the data with them and use it as an opportunity to discuss the different sources of error in the experiment that may have caused the counterintuitive results. We also talked about the need to repeat scientific experiments many times as the data from any one trial may not be reliable. I am very glad we made this decision, as later in the day I attended a lecture at UM about concern over increasing problems with ethics in science and research. I think by presenting the questionable data with the students we were able to teach them a lesson in scientific ethics as well as osmosis.

First Day (Friday, Sept. 14)

Not only was today my first day in the classroom, it is also my first time ever blogging... should be fun.

This Fall I am serving as a Teaching Assistant at Ypsilanti High School, as part of a partership between the University of Michigan College of Engineering (CoE) and Ypsilanti Public School District (YPSD). According to the welcome letter, the goal of the parternship is to establish a lasting, mutally beneficial partnership between the school district and UM CoE's Office of Engineering Outreach and Engagement and volunteer graduate and undergraduate students to:

• improve the learning culture and make learning more meaningful at YPSD
• increase the number of underrepresented students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses
• increase the motivation of all students
• support the rigor of YPSD courses

I will be assisting in two Biology classrooms, Mr. Sowder's and Ms. Hardy's. Both classes will cover general biology and are made up of 9th and 10th graders. I had met Ms. Hardy a couple weeks ago at a workshop before school started, but I had not met Mr. Sowder prior to today. At the workshop Ms. Hardy and I had discussed some of her general plans for the year, and some areas where I may be able to help out the most. We had tentatively planned for me to first come into her classroom early in the second week of school. However after her first week Ms. Hardy said she was still trying to get her students into a good routine and introducing someone new that Monday or Tuesday may not be the best idea. She asked if I could come in for the first time that Friday instead. I had absolutely no problem with that suggestion. I think it is very important for the teacher to feel comfortable having the graduate student TA's in their classroom, and so I certainly did not want to pressure her to let me come in before she was ready. I also think it is important for the graduate student's to not take suggestions like this personally or negatively.

I showed up to the high school today at 10:00, halfway through 3rd hour. This is Ms. Hardy's planning period, so she met me in the office and escorted me to her room. We discussed her plan for the day, which was to conduct a laboratory exercise involving cohesion and adhesion. After taking attendance in her 4th hour class, she gave me a couple minutes to talk the students. I introduce myself to them and informed them that I would be coming into their class a couple times a week for the rest of the year. I explained to them why I would be doing this, essentially going over the goals of the partnership program although in quite different terms than the bullet points listed above. During my brief talk to them I tried to focus on the college experience. I started by asking the class how many of them planned on going to college after they graduated high school, and I believe every single one of them raised their hand. I told them that I went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Most of them said they had heard of Purdue before. I asked who had been to Indiana before, and a handful said yes and volunteered where they had been. One of these students said she had been to Chicago, and I politely said that Chicago is close to Indiana but is actually in Illinois. The rest of the class laughed a little bit, and I felt bad that maybe I had embarrassed her. She seemed to be okay though. I them explained to the students that after I had worked for a few years I decided to go back to college for graduate school. To my surprise, none of the students even knew what graduate school was. I explained that it is a lot like college, except that you specialize in one area and conduct your own research. Now I realize that they probably don't really know what research is, so next time I talk to them I'd like to elaborate on that concept, stressing how there are many things in science that still aren't known and research is the attempt to figure them out just as they were doing in the cohesion/adhesion lab.

I then sat in the back of the room while Ms. Hardy went through the pre-lab with them. The students were given two beakers, one with water and one without, and a piece of string. Their task was to make observatioins about their materials, hypothesize how to get the water from Beaker A to Beaker B without pouring in less than 5 minutes, and then test their hypothesis and state their conclusions (i.e. follow the scientific method). Once the lab got started I walked around to each group and asked them questions about what they were trying to do. Some groups were just simply dipping the string in the water and then wringing it out into the other beaker. Besides the fact that it would take much longer than 5 minutes to transfer the water this way, it also wasn't really demonstrating the principles of cohesion and adhesion. So for the most part I tried to get these groups to see the lab exercise in terms of what they were learning in lecture regarding cohesion and adhesion and to see if they could think of way to take advantage of those concepts to accomplish their task. For example one group had placed one end of the string in the water and placed the other end of the string in the empty beaker. I said this was a great idea and it demonstrated their understanding of adhesion (the tendency of water molecules to stick to other objects) but challenged them to also incorporate cohesion (the tendency of water molecules to stick to themselves). This is because a key step in accomplishing the lab is to get the string wet first.

Most groups seemed to figure out how to do the lab, and I was surprised at how quickly everything was went and before I knew it Ms. Hardy was having them clean up (maybe 10 minutes or so total for the lab, I lost track of time). She then performed the lab herself in front of the whole class (essentially get the string wet, run it in between the two beakers, and "pour" the water through the string into the empty beaker). I also tried to ask the students to think of examples of cohesion or adhesion from everyday life. One student said rain in a gutter. I also mentioned to them raindrops themeselves (which I think is kind of amazing actually, without cohesion there would be no drops and rain would just come down as individual water molecules I guess), or when they fill up a cup with soda or juice even above the top of the cup and yet it doesn't spill. I wish I could have talked to more students about this (like I said the lab went by more quickly than I was expecting) or maybe even arranged with Ms. Hardy to say something in front of the whole class about it. I think making connections to the real world is extremely important in order for the students to remember the scientific concepts.

After 4th hour Ms. Hardy took me to the staff lunchroom to meet Mr. Sowder. He was very friendly and invited me to grab some food and sit down next to him. The conversation at the table was interesting, evidently one new teacher was having extreme difficulty in controlling his classroom. The other teachers were very understanding and were offering to go out of their way to help the new teacher in any way they could. This made me better appreciate the job Ms. Hardy must be doing, as she is also a first-year teacher but her class seemed pretty under control. Mr. Sowder then asked me to describe why I would be coming into his class. At first I thought maybe he was testing me or didn't really believe in the program, but what he said next assured me that he does. Rather he was just trying to think through which one of his classes would be best for me to help with given the goals of the program. He said his 3rd hour class is "high-energy" and may benefit from having another adult presence in the room, while his 5th hour class is "advanced bio", which in some sense is supposed to be a college prep class. The kids in the advanced class may be the most likely to have an interest in my research or in hearing what college is all about, while there may also be several kids in the 3rd hour class with latent ability that just need a nudge in the right direction. We decided that for now I would start in the 3rd hour class and go from there. At his suggestion I did attend his 5th hour class today as an observer to get a feel for his teaching style.

So my next visit will be Wednesday, to Mr. Sowder's 3rd hour class and Ms. Hardy's 4th hour class again.