The First Day

On the first day, I planned on grouping kids for the group work we are going to be doing right out of the gate.  At my school we only have 20 minute blocks of time with each class on "orientation" day.  I find this time to be cumbersome because it is not enough time to get much meaningful work done, but it is not a short enough time to merely have a little face to face time and figure out where the classroom is.

Given the 20 minute block of time, I figured an ice breaker/grouping exercise seemed to be in order.  I was grateful that the night before school Gary Abud tweeted something about Frank Noschese's subversive grouping method.  This was perfect timing and a wonderful game.  I made the cards and edited some of the groupings to include road names near us and some others to get to the number of groups/students I needed.

I teach three levels of physics, "Light, Sound and Waves" a semester-long algebra-based entry level course, Honors Physics, an algebra-based course, and "Calculus-based Mechanics", a semester-long calculus based second-year elective.  The two sections of LSW finished the exercise in 5 minutes with very little discussion.  Given the number of car/president names, one class ended up with 6 presidents and a car all by herself and the other ended up with 6 cars and a president all by himself.  Once I noted that this might be an odd way for me to intentionally set up groups, they all looked at each other and switched seats, and voila, the appropriate number of three-student groups appeared.  In reflection on this, I found it intriguing that they were able to accomplish this task without really speaking a word.  Now, I should let you all know that many of my students have known each other since they were 4.  Liggett is a PK-12 school where 1/3 of any grade has been together since PK.  Perhaps they used telepathy:)

The Honors class took the entire 20 minute period and barely finished on time.  The students were much ruder to one another, and they were completely unwilling to change their mind.  "I have Washington, and Washington was a president, and I am with the presidents!" I remember hearing as another class member pointed out that Washington was also a state.  Leaders only emerged when the time pressure became clear.  Then the leaders decided that they should put all the cards on a table and sort the groups out.  At this point the 4 leaders, all girls btw, sorted out the groups correctly.  Some other students watched, and several completely disengaged from the activity.  I was surprised by how differently the activity went with the honors kids.

The Calculus based class took a bit longer than the LSW kids, but still finished pretty quickly.  There are only 11 of them though, so that might add to the speed.  There were fewer groups.  They did not argue much, but they are a really close knit group of students, so it made sense.  My honors course has 24 kids (my largest group ever) and that might be why that class took longer.

In any case, I don't know if I debriefed this exercise correctly, but It was odd to me to have honors kids disengaging in a 20 minute ACTIVITY on the first day of school.  Herumf!  One of my LSW kids commented that if this is what the first day looked like, she was going to be in for a long year.  I found that disheartening, as I am here trying to do something engaging, fun and useful, and her response was to be completely overwhelmed.

Lastly, I spoke with one of the mothers of one of my students after the second day of school, and she shared with me that when she asked her daughter what she thought her favorite class was going to be this year, she responded physics.  This was a shock to mom, and it makes it all worth it for me.  To have a student who is not necessarily predisposed to physics tell her mom that she thought it was going to be her favorite class encourages me to continue my journey as a modeler.