Media literacy is the thing!

As teachers we are faced with many competitors for our students time and attention. They are checking facebook and texting friends, and we cannot delude ourselves into thinking that our class is the most important thing in their lives. Frankly, it isn't any where near the top most of the time. We are given around 200 minutes a week to help them to understand our subject and how it connects to the wider world. We try to get them to think and apply knowledge. We try to get them interested in science, or history, or math and hope that they will use the knowledge and skills they have learned in their lives at large.

That being said, I propose that we take up another teaching task that should make their lives more informed and more full. I think that we should teach media literacy, or the skill to discern valuable and verifiable information from the vast volume of information that we are bombarded with every day. As we all have heard of the Kahn Academy, so have our kids. It has also been pointed out that some of the information in the KA videos is not entirely accurate. If our students are watching the videos for extra help, they should also be able to question the authority and the facts that they are presented with.

I do believe that a good teacher already does this in class and gives the students a base line to measure things by, and the students will be able to discern a valid source from an invalid source. It is important for a student to be able to do this in order to become an informed member of society. To simply take a KA video at face value, which seems to be what most of the country is doing, is folly because there are experts in the fields that Sal Kahn is lecturing on who have more accurate information and a better way to help our students understand. It is very important that we help our students to question the validity of the sources of information that they are using.

Learning is your responsibility !

In my class today I had to give my students a scolding. We just finished quarter grades and comments and during that time I surveyed the students about what they felt was good and bad about the course. I also asked them to say what they wanted more of. This being an AP class, I have some very motivated students and a majority stated they wanted to do more difficult problems in class. So today I decided to do one. We were walking through a particularly difficult problem and I asked for a number which could be found by simply plugging into a calculator. I waited and waited and found that there were only three students even attempting to find the answer.


At this time I stopped those three people and began to rant to them about their lack of attention and participation. I said to them that their participation in class is required and they are the ones in need of the understanding. If they were waiting for me to pour it into their heads, they will be waiting for a long time. They cannot sit and wait for the understanding to flow. They have to attempt to solve problems and form opinions and participate in class.

If they don’t take control of their learning, they will never learn anything and they need to keep that in mind when we are having a discussion. I have to get out of the front of the classroom in order to force them to drive their learning and stop waiting for me to pour in information.

Letting them struggle.

Today in class we were looking at four specific questions that are essential in understanding motion and Newton's 3 laws of motion. Those questions are :

1. What is Mass?
2. What makes things Move?
3. What is a force?
4. What makes something change its motion?

We started looking at a video of a plane dropping a flare and seeing it as parabolic motion. One of the students stated that the flare had a horizontal velocity and a vertical velocity. So we looked at the horizontal velocity and I asked why it had that particular velocity and it was pretty unanimous that it was the velocity of the plane before the flare was released. So I then asked what made it continue with that velocity and I got several different responses, most common was the plane's force on the flare was still acting. Someone also stated that the flare was slowing down. So we went back to the video and it showed no evidence of slowing down horizontally during its descent.

We then moved on to a hover puck on the table in front of the classroom. Again they were insisting that the force of my hand was causing the puck to move across the floor. So I called someone up from the class and asked them to apply a force to the puck. She pushed it, and then I asked her to do it again but without touching it. She acquiesced that she could not apply a force without touching it, and I thanked her for thinking so highly of me that I could apply a force without contact. We then opened up the discussion to what was required for a force to occur. We came up with four requirements for forces.

1. A push or a pull
2. Contact is necessary
1. Exceptions: Gravitational, Magnetic, and Electrical forces.
3. An agent to apply the force
4. An object to feel the force

If a "force" doesn't fit all of these requirements, it cannot be a force. So we revisited the hover puck to look at what was applied to the puck and if there were any forces involved in keeping the puck moving, discussing all of the scenarios that they brought up.

So I finally asked a different question. "Are there any forces being applied to the puck as it is freely moving across the table?" The answer to that was generally a "no" and so I then reasked question 2 from the beginning of class and someone stated "Nothing!" I asked others to clarify that and I didn't understand how "nothing" could be a real answer. I got several clarifications to my satisfaction, and we concluded to the following statement: "Why couldn't you just tell us that?" I replied that I had in the previous class and they didn't believe me or didn't remember and asked if they would forget now. I got a resounding "NO!!" and this time I believe them. There is no explanation for an object's motion. We only need to explain things when motion changes.

They struggled and they understood. They listened and they forgot.