All my Physics related blog posts are probably going to start with I hate how Schoology is down for our freshmen class. It’s really throwing a wrench in my organization and work flow. Over the long weekend, we assigned some homework pages that are meant to be practice for students about graphs and equations. I had quite a few miss the homework because they didn’t have anywhere to check to confirm what their homework is. Over the last ten years, my philosophy on this has changed significantly. It should have been on the student to complete their homework, but if they don’t know what’s for homework, then how can they complete it? Argh.
We ended up whiteboarding the homework. It was the original plan, so it was totally fine. The students did wonderfully! I’m so proud of how they all came up to present their problem and answered my questions wonderfully. There were some common misconceptions that came up like making graphs have even intervals. Another common one was that the cyclists had the same velocity at the moment the lines intersect (on a x-t graph). For the most part, it went well. I think students understood it more. I did get one student who was convinced that the negative slope meant that the cyclist was slowing down. We went back to the buggy lab conclusions and most of their peers were really excited to show how the negative slope meant the opposite direction.
I really enjoyed seeing the students work together on their whiteboards because they wanted to do a good job.
Learning with Ms. Medrano 