Safety

One of the things I am working on is helping implement a laboratory safety plan for Ypsilanti High School. While taking an inventory of the chemical stockroom, we came across some chemicals that we decided to get rid of. Because many University of Michigan professors have been so generous in donating laboratory materials, Mr. Mullins and I decided to offer some of these chemicals to Materials Science and Engineering professors at Michigan.

Last week Students from Prof. Kim's group came through to pick up material as part of this pollution reduction plan.

I would like to thank Ray Decker and Charles Hayes, Executive Director of the ASM Materials Education Foundation, for their generous donation of teaching materials in support of this project.

Thermite!

The class just learned about oxidation and reduction reactions, and next week they will be learning about reaction thermodynamics. I though that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to get more involved in the course. I had heard that some of the students talking about the thermite reaction, so Mr. Mullins let me put together a lab based on the thermite reaction.

I had to:

1. Write the lab
2. Collect the necessary materials
   
3. Test the reaction before Thursday's lab.
   

Unlike other thermite demonstrations, I wanted the students to actually mix the materials and initiate the reaction themselves. I didn't want it to be a demonstration, I wanted it to be a lab.

We built up 6 reactions, and three were either partial or complete duds. Every student got to see the reaction, but some didn't work.

Thermite reaction night __________________________Spent reaction

Thermite Day

The students greatly enjoyed the lab. I would like to thank UM professors Dr. Wayne Jones, Dr. Ron Gibala, and Dr. Amit Ghosh for volunteering to donate some raw materials for this lab.

I would also like to acknowledge a great thermite demonstration that I used extensively while writing the lab.

...the other side of the fence

My friend (and fellow YPSD TA) Tiberius brought his 9th grade math students to campus today. He asked me to give them a general introduction to materials science and engineering and and engineering career choices. I have come to realize that my complaints and frustrations pale in comparison to what others are dealing with. Sometimes my students fool around, but many of these students just didn't care. The students were talking to each other and blatantly sleeping while we were presenting.

Last Friday, there were about 10 students from Mr. Mullins 10th grade chemistry class finishing a quiz. (Briefly, finishing a quiz is a situation that arises when students can't finish a test or quiz in class, and he/she is allowed to finish the quiz after school. This begs the question, "If you have already seen the quiz, why not just look up the answers between class and the time you will sit to finish the quiz?" With rules like that, I wish I was in high school again. This is a topic for another post...)

Anyway these 10th graders had questions like estimate the diameter of a baseball in centimeters. In the quizzes I looked at, nobody got this right. Another question was to calculate the volume from your diameter estimation. Almost everybody just added a zero to their previous answer!

I'm not writing this stuff to call anyone out, but these experiences led me to realize that despite my frustrations, my students are interested in the physical world, and not everyone is.

New thoughts

I've been talking to some people who have taught public school in the past.m and they gave me some advice and perspective on my recent frustrations. When discussing my frustration that the students fool around instead of quickly finished their labs, my friend Jackie suggested that the work is inefficient because the students like being there (they would never admit this). I'm coming to realize that many of my students see evening chemistry labs as a socializing opportunity.

Now I need to figure out a way to take advantage of this situation. I'm thinking that Mr. Mullins and I can think of some more interactive labs where the student teams interact with each other. At the very least we could make the labs interactive "games" where the students teams compete for things like the best yield, or the lowest error....




Some interesting notes about my students:

Every week I learn something about them that amazes me:
There are students in my class who:

1. wrote a one act play
2. attend Saturday morning physics
3. have learned speak Japanese
4. want to attend the United States Air Force Academy
5. manage to "need" to use the eyewash station every class period (well that's not so good... but we're working on that)
   

A comedy of errors

When I tell people that I'm doing my GSI requirement at YPHS, they are surprised to hear that I am primarity working with an AP chemistry class that meets primarily at night. To be honest, most of my students are extraordinarily dedicated to come back to school after homework, jobs, and other activities to do a chemistry lab. Another cool thing about this program is that many of my students are naturally excited about science. I don't have to any of this, "why science is cool" stuff, most of my students think science is cool, and that's pretty nice.

Despite having dedicated, exceptional students, who care about the material, I am still struggling with some constant frustrations. The question I keep asking myself if, "If the students are dedicated enough to return to school for a chemistry lab, why can't they stop fooling around and do the work?"

Todays lab was Analysis of Aluminum Potassium Sulfate , and it was supposed to be completed in under two hours. It still took every group the full three hour period. Like last week, this lab involved a lot of heating and waiting. While waiting, the students could be working on their prelab assignments (about half of the students had finished this 'homework' assignment by the time the period started), preparing their lab reports, or working on post-lab questions. This rarely happens, students generally use the down time to socialize with their friends, and the lab ends up taking three and a half hours! Today students got really bored and some juvenile horseplay broke out. This is not acceptable for an AP course.

Not all of this is the students fault. Mr. Mullins and I could be more prepared with equipment and materials when the students arrive. If we did this, then he could collect the pre-labs, and the students could begin the labs right away.

First Post.

Well this is my first post of my Fall 2007 YPSD classroom experience. I have been working in Ypsilanti Public High school for four weeks now. Specifically, I am helping out with AP chemistry laboratory sessions. I was supposed to have been keeping a blog since this project began so I will include my notes from my first three weeks on the project in this post.

9/21/07
Today was the first day that was not so fun. It was really a very simple laboratory exercise. The students had to heat up a sample of silver oxide(Ag2O) to remove the oxygen. Most of the lab required waiting while the Ag2O heated up. While they were waiting, I suggested that the students work on their post lab questions. I couldn't understand why the students were wasting their own time socializing with each other and not working quickly. There were some behavioral issues as well (iPods and PSPs), nothing major.

I would like to thank Professor John Halloran for donating some silver oxide for the lab.

9/13/07
I'm still learning my way around the high school. Today's lab was setting up a colorimetric assay to determine composition. The lab went smoothly, but it could have been prepared slightly better. One problem was that many of the students threw their samples away before Mr. Mullins or I got to check their work. Because of this the results were a little bit off.