Inquiry Stylee: First Day of Physics Fall 2012
Here are my lesson objectives for the first day:
- Practice the names and faces of my students obsessively the night before; sleeping on it seems to help.
- Class starts, forget to take attendace because you’re nervous.
- Provide link to class website/syllabus. Do not discuss other than to demand the SBG mentality from them.
- Sell the castle-siege, nerf-gun, John-Carter, giant-torque-mobiles, g-vs-mentos-diet-coke, rockets, and field trip to Museum of Science and Industry lessons.
- Start Socratic, what-is-measurable-in-a-circle-pi lesson. Go measure circles all over the building. Make graphs of Circumference vs. Diameter.
- Begin crowd-deriving the idea of root-mean-square-error analysis: “Is the slope really pi”
- Whiteboard up their data.
- Call it a day
Standards-Based Grading: Every Thursday, A Love Note Like Moths to a Flame (Help?)
2 thoughts on “Inquiry Stylee: First Day of Physics Fall 2012”
Thanks for all you do, Shawn, to change how teachers teach and students learn! You are making a difference!
I’m stealing some of your first day stuff. But that’s why you put it here, right? Good.
Have you heard about tau as an alternative to pi? When I read about it, I had a great big eureka moment. See http://www.tauday.com and also a video by Vi Hart (linked on that page)