It is impossible to characterize everyone's experience with teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world by the novel coronavirus.
Many teachers are working with unprecedented intensity to craft synchronous and asynchronous instruction that will cover and deliver academic content in an engaging and suitably rigorous way.
But the products of all this time, talent, and energy are not being universally absorbed by the students in the black Zoom thumbnails with muted microphones. There are stories in each one of those blank frames, covering a broad array of situations.
Many of us seem to have students who are completely disengaged. They are on our rosters, but we never see them, they are not in our Zooms, and they do not turn in assignments or take assessments. They rapidly descend into grades that are in the single digits, perhaps up to about 20%.
But there are some who seem to be somewhat engaged. But their participation is scattershot. They fall below 60%, but remain north of 40%. I am wondering if an F is the best grade for them while schools are wholly shut down or (worse), engaged in the pure partial daycare service that goes by the name of "hybrid".
So what about a grade of "E" for them? Not an "F" grade of fail. But not really a "D", either. "E" for evidence of engagement.
As a practical matter, the best I can do for now is to expand my range for a "D–".
One thing that a number of us are seeing more and more of in our parent-teacher conferences is parents and students who want to take an F for this semester so that they can repeat the course for a better grade next I'm not a fan of that practice. [Side note: Physics and Conceptual Physics are scheduled to be replaced by Physics of the Universe in my district next year, so that practice will be messy.]
I would let students move on with Es. Otherwise there will be a pandemic of students wanting to repeat courses when schools reopen in a meaningful way.
It's just an idea for now. But I wonder if it's an idea that will make more and more sense the deeper we get into the pandemic.
...from emails sent to district-managed student accounts. Here's the story:
In COVID-era Distance Learning, I have found Socrative to be a useful platform for administering student assessments. Among its useful features is the ability to send students their own individual scored test, showing which questions they answered correctly and which ones they answered incorrectly. The results can be sent to student email accounts with the push of a button. [You are correct to assume the instructor had to enter those email addresses into Socrative. But it's a one-time investment.]
This is a great feature for when we do Test Correction Journals.
But in my very first attempt to leverage this feature, it failed. I had, of course, tested the feature before using it with students. And it worked. But when I sent my students their test results, students insisted they did not receive them. I tried it using Chrome, I tried it using Firefox. Nothing worked. I had to create a privacy-respecting, individualized way to tell students which specific test items they missed. I created one breakout room per student, joined each one—one at a time, and announced which items they missed. While class time was burning.
I quickly came up with a functional workaround for the next period, but it fell short of what I needed it to do. And why didn't the student email solution work?
Students suggested that the district blocks third party emails from student accounts. The vendor, Socrative, meets all legal privacy standards. District tech services said they do not block third parties. Further investigation indicated the emails were blocked because they contained objectionable content. That offensive content appeared in the following question. TW: "Objectionable Content."
[Secrets of the Psychics] Psychologist and former palm-reader Ray Hyman found that he had the greatest success with clients when he
A. gave a straight-up reading in accordance with palm-reading guidelines
B. told clients the opposite of what he saw in their palms
C. imagined that he lived in an earlier era
D. assumed his clients were skeptical of palm-reading and his abilities
There it is: the objectionable content, clear as day. What's that? You didn't see it? Look again. "hymen" is right in there. Prurient anatomical terminology titillation that would offend any community's standards of propriety. High school students must be protected from such filth.
Okay, not "hymen" exactly, but "hyman," a simple misspelling of a highly salacious, practically pornographic word. Okay, not "hymen" or "hyman" exactly, but "Hyman," a not uncommon Jewish surname. I presume my college hall mate's name, Steve Hayman would trigger that comprehensive filter, too, lest bad actors use simple misspellings to skirt content filters.
Some might judge the content filtering of Jewish surnames (that are not anatomical terms) as anti-semitic. I'm confident the San Juan Unified School District doesn't intend it that way, but here we are. "Ray Hyman" triggered a full and immediate IP ban due to the district's sweeping content blocking protocols.
I was given no reason to hope that this filter would be removed by my district's tech services, now that they are aware of the embarrassing error. It seemed as if the onus was on me not to include terms that would trigger bans, and I should just know what all those terms are.
The filtering is clearly far too aggressive and highly impractical. Blocking my instructional program (without notification) for the "crime" of including a Jewish scholar's name? That's beyond a bad look.
It's indefensibly paranoid and ignorant, in my assessment.
Some critters are totally adorable when they're babies. Conspiracy theories do not. Maybe you came of age in science, reasoning, skepticism, and critical thinking after the "truthers" of 9/11 ran their course.
But given the magnitude of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, the ground was fertile for new brand new conspiracy theories. Nonsense was sure to arise. And arise it did.
Plandemic
A 26-minute "trailer" for a promised documentary has exploded on YouTube. The video violates YouTube's Terms of Service, so they take it down. But it pops up with a different video address soon enough.
Watched in a vacuum of ignorance, it might seem appealing. A plucky scientist, hounded by the omnipotent "they" tells her story of oppression and betrayal. You might know "they" from such hits as "they don't want you to know" and "they have been keeping X secret from the public" and so on. There is nothing worse than "they". Nuh Thing!
The video is in a perpetual out of control spin which continues into the manifesto that is the video description. But again, it's an appealing narrative for the uninitiated. Such unfairness; such corruption.
When it bubbled up to a YouTube doctor (ZDogg), he was dumbfounded by the pure dumbosity of the video's production and claims.
A Doctor Reacts to Plandemic
I know he seems brief in his dismissal. And annoyed.
If you need something a bit more concise, try Big Think's "The anti-vaxx agenda of The Plandemic". There's even an audio version with the print article.
Since Plandemic, itself, violates YouTube's terms of service, I must leave it to you to use your Google skills to find it. Any link I provide will likely go dark before you get to click on it.
I am not a fan of censorship, and YouTube knocking this video down plays into the hands of the conspiracists who claim oppression. On the other hand, it's YouTube's platform: of you don't want to play by their rules, host your video on your own platform. It's not rocket science. The promulgators enjoy the censorship, so they won't host it, themselves.
If you are predisposed to accept conspiracy theories, you are probably already a Plandemist, admonishing the sheeple to wake up!
In any case, the baby conspiracy theory of Plandemic has been born. Where it goes from here depends on all of us.
Why is this disingenuous hot mess dangerous? Because it's attempting to plant the shopworn anti-vcxx message relative to the hoped-for coronavirus vaccine. The Plandemists will claim (without evidence) that a COVID-19 cure will be the product of the shadowy "they" in a money-grubbing, power-hungry. another evil-hyphenation-goes-here cabal set to control the world population. A population made docile by, of course, the vaccine.
I'd say the best response is "Cool story, bro, but eh ... hard pass." But the story really isn't all that cool.
So...this video is now circulating widely on social media. This woman is titled as a Molecular Biologist/Medical Researcher. The guy interviewing her claims to be a 'Father/Filmaker'. The last I looked 'Filmmaker' has two 'M's in it. Anyway...this video's defenders seem so drawn into it...I took some time to evaluate, and fact check this.
00-3:00 - nothing corroborated that 'they wrecked her life'
2:07 - footage of police raid is file footage, and not her supposed 'raid'
4:10 - Fauci directed cover up. Proof? No proof given, no contrary voices to her
5:45 - paper she wrote contradicting Fauci. Where is this paper? That should be easy to show, and physically have excerpts of paper for the video
7:35 - Fauci and CDC director Redfield own patents. Proof? A look at the patent office should be indication. They don't do this easy check. So, no proof
8:15 - Who is this 'expert'? No graphic I.D., so we can check his credentials
9:26 - Bill Gates accusations...Proof? None offered
10:23 - she says 'I can't say it was man made, but'...what exactly is she saying? This is intentionally vague
10:34 in - Quick length of time proves virus was manipulated. Proof that this is always the case?
10:54 in - she says 'Virus didn't occur at a market'. Proof?
11:26 in - article is from Dailymail.co.uk, which is a British conservative tabloid...hardly objective
11:31 in - footage from CGTN, which is China State-Run TV, and who is the 'reporter'? Could be anyone speaking over the footage. Could be friend of the 'filmmaker' or 'fimmaker'...we don't know
11:38 in - article from NationalFile.com, rated as an 'Extreme Right-Wing conspiracy site
13:55 in - Bakersfield doctors, that have been widely discredited. They get a lot of time in this video
14:50 in - Host says that he 'talked to many doctors' that incentivize Covid-19. Where is the footage of ANY of them being talked to? That would be what a 'filmmaker' or ummm 'Filmmaker' does.
15:08 in - Doctor on clip says that hospitals are paid '$13,000 for Covid diagnosis, and $39,000 for a Covid ventilator'. Snopes link below widely weakens that claim
15:29 in - person in clip has medical scrubs on, but who is he? could be an average person with a medical shirt on. We never see his name or title.
15:40 in - proof of Italy vaccine?
16:40 in - from 'WashingtonTimes' - a conservative daily newspaper...and who is 'reporter' narrating? Could be anyone
17:12 in - Mikovits says 'thousands of documents on hydroxychloroquine'...well, where are ANY of these documents? None offered
18:55 in - She says flu vaccine makes a person more susceptible to Coronavirus. That is disproven in link below
21:02 in - host says 'You're not the first person to tell me that we are doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing'...well, 'filmmaker'...show us ANY of these other people
22:55 in - who is this doctor? No I.D. to check his credentials
24:55 in - she says 'every medical person who has learned about this has turned their opinion around'. Show us ONE person that has changed their views? None offered.
Below, and in the comments, I will post a bunch of links that debunk some of the claims made in this video, and I will also cut and paste them here.
For those of you looking at this post, and saying 'geez'...I spent about an hour and a half on this. It doesn't take much time to scrutinize/fact check a 26 minute video, especially this one.
She is selling a book on this...so this literally drums up interest in her book. Who is the host? A family member? A good friend? We don't know...do we...
Actual journalism always backs up statements. This does nothing to back up claims. This has no one on to debunk her, and it also has no one on to back her claims. Yet, somehow, many people have attached themselves to a doctor, whom they know only from a YouTube video, who has questionable credentials, and is questioned about her repeated attempts to create conspiracy theories...maybe to sell more books. If you click to watch the video...enjoy the marketing attempt.
Call me Physics Oprah. Because everyone on my roster gets an A this semester. Everyone.
If you didn't read Part 1 (below), you won't realize why I have adopted this grading solution.
After you read Part 1, you may not like this solution. I do not like this solution. But Part 1 details how all the teachers in the San Juan Unified School District were needlessly and deliberately thrown into a no-win scenario. And there are no good solutions to a no-win scenario.
The object lesson provided by the highest-paid district leadership and the dues-collecting union officials couldn't be clearer:
Angry, misguided, vocal minorities operating on incorrect information are to be respected and appeased.
You could start with a well-reasoned, correct and deliberative position. But abandon it without a fight when any opposition is mounted. Ill-informed? Misguided? It doesn't matter. It's opposition, so capitulation is the expedient response.
I don't like it. It's a policy that comforts the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. But it wasn't my call. I argued against it to no avail.
But the call has been made and I must roll with it.
It's clear that none of the decision-makers have ever been classroom teachers. If they had, they would realize that they were asking teachers to keep a double set of gradebooks: one set for students happy with the default C/NC and a second for students who were petitioning for letter grades. My god.
I am sure that after throwing teachers under the bus, district and union leadership imagined energetic and innovative teachers would find some way to thread the eyeless needle and develop a second set of online/distance learning policies that would keep students fully engaged with powerful teaching and learning.
And they may be onto something. A colleague compared his Unit 5 and Unit 6 test scores. The Unit 5 test was administered in a secure classroom setting. The average score was under 40%. His Unit 6 test administered online. The average was over 100%. He had clearly made a successful transition to online learning and his students were shining in this new environment. Only a hardened cynic would so much as suggest that elevated Unit 6 scores may have been influenced by cheating of any kind.
So yes, I'm giving all my students A's. Because I have no idea what each of them is up against, but I do know exactly what I'm up against. I will share the news of this obvious grade inflation as far and wide as I can. Admissions officers at colleges and universities need to know: I'm giving all my students A's for Spring 2020. And I'm not the only one. Check out this news from San Francisco. The angry, misguided petitioners' victory is entirely pyrrhic.
I'm giving all my students A's. Because when everyone gets an A, no one gets and A.
But doesn't that hurt students who could have distinguished themselves from their classmates with a performance-based A supported by documentary evidence? Yes it does. But in Spring 2020, we do not possess the means to assemble that performance-based documentary evidence.
That's why Credit / No Credit was the sole correct solution to the circumstances. Those are the only honest grades that can be earned this semester. But the district abandoned honesty. And so will I.
Do colleges and universities need to populate their freshman classes with appropriately capable students? Yes they do. But the Spring 2020 grades in your course (and many courses across the country) may not be an honest reflection of students' capabilities. True. Somehow, colleges will need to overcome The Grade Inflation Pandemic of 2020. I have confidence in their abilities to do so.
Primary source documentation available in the comments.
As the coronavirus pandemic began to take off, schools around the world began to close. Initially it was thought that a month-long shutdown might suffice. Student were told to take their papers and books home on our last day of school.
After a few weeks of virtual office hours paired with opportunities for students to read, review, and enrich, it was decided that more direct instruction was called for. If assignments are to be assigned and so forth, there must be a mechanism for determining grades.
The in-class lesson plans for the remainder of the year were rendered useless. Teachers had to suddenly master online distance teaching tools and techniques that most of them never had any interest in using. "Have you activated your Google Classroom? Are you ready to Zoom with your classes? Are you hip to Flip Grid? What about Pear Deck? Do you have an Edulastic account? Have you tried Screencastify or do you prefer Screencast-omatic?" Every company with online solutions flooded teacher inboxes with free trials and promises of online instruction efficacy.
There was an expectation that teachers would flip a switch and put their in-class instruction online. Of course they cannot. And college prep / Advanced Placement lab science? Not a chance.
Even if they could, student families were in various states of preparedness. In any school community, there will be a variety of Internet accessibility. And on a larger scope, there is now a variety of economic stability/parental employment status. And a variety of direct COVID-19 impact.
Practicable instruments to asses individual student performance online do not exist. Period. Full stop. If you believe students can be honestly assessed online, it's because you are old. Well over 20. Anyone under 30 knows secure online assessment doesn't exist. (If you think you know such an online tool, type its name into your search engine and add the word "cheat" and see what happens. I'll wait.)
Given the variety of teacher preparedness and student circumstances, it was decided that the most equitable solution would be to switch from letter grades to pass/fail (credit/no credit). The decision was agreed to and communicated to the district community of teachers, parents, and students.
But some families chafed. Rather than appreciate the extraordinary circumstances and understand that everyone was affected and that colleges and universities would take this into account when evaluating applicants, they took a different tack. They behaved as if their child was going to be saddled with a D– on their permanent record (transcript) and no elite, top-tier post-secondary school would even consider them for admission. College admissions officers would gaze upon the Spring 2020 grade and wonder why it was what it was. Colleges were assumed to be completely unaware of the pandemic.
My own Next Door app feed, usually filled with tales of found and lost Chihuahuas and porch piracy now featured an angry petition to Stop the madness of Credit/No Credit being imposed on district students. Petitioners asserted that the policy would cripple the district's best and brightest students, ruining them for college admissions and beyond. The email addresses of school board members were shared and a boilerplate angry missive was suggested.
They demanded that individual students be able to opt out of Credit / No Credit into letter grades if they so desired.
When I caught wind of this movement, I did what I could to stand in opposition, as you can see in the previous post. The angry petitioners were arguing for a policy that would comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.
Within hours of my action, the district announced it would acquiesce completely and without modification to the petitioners wishes. Word for word capitulation. My principal instructed faculty to direct their misgivings to their union (San Juan Teachers Association—SJTA) representatives.
The adoptee policy allows students to opt into letter grades, but they can change their mind on that no later than the end of the school year. So if the grade is looking good to them at the end of the semester, they can lock it in. If they don't like what they see, they can fall back to C/NC. Perfect!
The union agreed to this complete and total cave-in, 100% and without any pushback whatsoever. But they attempted to gaslight their dues-paying membership: in an email to be shared with all bargaining unit members, we were told of the pitched battle SJTA mounted.
"We did our best to negotiate, and we got what we could. Most of our neighboring districts mandated teachers to give letter grades A—F. Our union was able to reach the compromise of C/NC with the petition piece."
Here's what the Next Door petitioners were petitioning for.
'Instead of the misguided "Credit/Co Credit" policy, the district should allow ALL students the option to choose either "Credit/No Credit" OR letter grades."
Re-read the union's statement—they never said that our district was demanding X and SJTA battled them back to Y. In reality, the angry petitioners and their school board enablers demanded Y, and SJTA agreed to Y. No negotiation; no compromise.
UPDATE: I had a conversation with the president of the SJTA. It seems that the union had very little leverage in this decision. The school board and superintendent went forward with their capitulation and there really wasn't much the union could do about it. And the petitioners' demands were in line with CDE broad guidelines for what would be permissible. Still though, the objectively correct response to the pandemic closures was to adopt Credit/No Credit. And to then stand firm in that position. My district opted to appease the angry petitioners. That decision, expedient in the short term, will not age well.
This is the context necessary to understand my solution as laid out in Part 2.
[My district, San Juan Unified in suburban Sacramento, decided to adopt Credit / No Credit grading for Spring 2020. But they are facing blowback from a certain element in the community. So I wrote this and sent it to the decision-makers. How is your institution handling Spring 2020 grades? Let me know in the comments.]
The feed on my Next Door app has turned from posts about lost and found Chihuahuas to angry missives about the San Juan Unified School District’s decision to adopt Credit / No Credit grades for the pandemic shutdown second semester: Spring 2020.
I am grateful that I can count on my district and especially my association to maintain their resolve on this important decision. Because it is the correct decision.
During shutdown, there is no way to assess individual student knowledge or capabilities. In functional school, in-class tests carefully designed by classroom instructors could be administered and proctored by those teachers to ensure accurate and secure results. There is no practicable way to do that online. None. Everyone under 20 understands that perfectly well. People over 30 have diminishing understanding of that, which decreases with increasing age.
That reality, alone, is enough to scuttle any hope of being able to produce letter grades for students during shutdown. But it gets worse.
As of March 13, 2020, instructors such as myself planned to make it to retirement without ever having constructed or administered an online version of their course. I teach college prep and Advanced Placement physics lab courses. No one imagines teaching or learning such a subject in an online environment. No one.
Sophisticated and specialized demonstration equipment remains locked away in access-restricted classrooms. Sophisticated and specialized laboratory apparatus for hands-on student lab group collaborative experiment activities is similarly behind lock and key. Neither demonstrations nor labs can be conducted or assessed during shutdown. And these are the core of my courses.
As of March 16, 2020, I have been bombarded with invitations and recommendations to engage in Google Classroom, Pear Deck, Edulastic, Flip Grid, Zoom, etc., not to mention online science resources. The flood of online platforms, tools, and resources is overwhelming and I am being asked to build an airplane while it is in flight. I know nothing of these things and never planned on using any of them. They do not pertain to the job I was hired to do—a job that I have been recognized for doing exceptionally well.
Could I assign copious reading, video watching, and essay writing for the many, many students on my roster? Yes. But those assignments would be going into homes with an untold variety of circumstances: high and low bandwidth, high and low economic anxiety, high an low physical space, and myriad environments—some more conducive to learning than others. At best, getting all those lengthy assignments back would require time beyond what’s available to assess.
Those who insist that letter grades be awarded during this time appreciate and understand none of this. They are worried that a Credit/No Credit grades awarded in Spring 2020 will disqualify students from admission to top-tier elite post-secondary institutions. They imagine that none of these institutions will be aware of the global pandemic that shut down the world in Spring 2020. They worry that students from districts who are awarding letter grades in Spring 2020 will have a competitive advantage over SJUSD students in college admissions. None of this is true.
In short, it is a small but vocal band of affluent families who are arguing for letter grades that cannot be determined honestly in Spring 2020. It is an argument for a policy that comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.
I appreciate my district and my association rejecting such a policy.
Dean Baird Rio Americano High School Physics
Presidential Awardee for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching
American Association of Physics Teachers Fellow
TL;DR: Today's high school students suffer anxiety brought on, in part, by always being connected on their phones and by a perpetual need to know what their grade-in-progress is right now. I actively remediate against both of these things, but my methods are frowned upon.
We tend to imagine ourselves the heroes of the movies we live our lives in. And those of us with blogs rarely hesitate to trumpet our own heroism. (That includes virtually everyone on Twitter, the microblogging site where virtue signaling is like oxygen.) As a publisher of a blog and someone with a Twitter account, I am in no position to hold myself above the crowd.
The theme of a recent faculty in-service session for the faculty of my school was anxiety among high school students. Counselors hoped to raise awareness and broadcast availability of services.
One potent source of anxiety was that students were constantly on their phones, connected to social networks that functioned as stock markets, chronicling the ups and downs of their individual social status.
I bit my tongue. I had a suggestion, but it would not have been welcome in this setting. This setting was to paint the picture of how bad things are for today's high school students. The aim was for recognition and accommodation. The problem was described as too pervasive and universal for remediation or solution.
Another stressor was the constant obsession with academic grades. Students and parents are in a state of perpetually refreshing their online grade book page to see if the latest assignment's score raised or lowered their grade-in-progress.
I bit my tongue again. Had the biting been literal instead of figurative, there would have been blood.
Students hate it. My enrollments have suffered. Colleagues won't do it. Many teachers never want to be cast as the bad guy in their own classroom. So they beg/plead/bargain with students, who deploy the full measure of their genius to stealthily maintain their ongoing phone activities while instruction plays out around them. I cannot change my colleagues, but I also cannot allow my classroom to be another phone zone. I have a finite number of minutes to teach a difficult topic, so I'll don the black hat.
When I began teaching in 1986, we tendered grades four times a year. That evolved to six times. That, in turn, evolved into eight. Every increase in frequency was heralded as a solution that would lead to better student performance. In my personal experience, the actual outcome has been the diametric opposite.
With the advent of online student information systems (SIS), there is an expectation of daily grades-in-progress updates.
But I don't use my district's online grade book. I do not post daily updates to the SIS. I post updates at the district-mandated grading interims, eight times a year. (I prefer Excel over the online grade book; I can bend Excel to my will, and I like math. To me, the online grade book is a horrendous kludge.)
So when we learned that a source of student anxiety was their constant need for grade updates, I might have raised a hand and described how I didn't play into that practice. But doing so would have cast me as the jerk. Counselors and parents, too, want up-to-the-minute grades-in-progress. I make my students wait a month (a month!) between grade updates. What kind of luddite barbarian am I?
Of course, there are some who would argue that I'm actually precipitating anxiety through my solutions. While separated from their phones during instruction in my class, students might not be able to think about anything except when they will be reunited with their phones. And two weeks into that one month eternity between grading updates, students could be wracked with anxiety over what their grade has progressed to.
If this is the case, it's a Kobiyashi Maru. I have chosen one losing path while others choose another.
Jeff Lind at 888-227-8212 navigated his way into my school voicemail box to request a call back. He is not a parent of any of my students. He is not someone I have elected to do business with. No, it seems he's on a cold-call campaign from WorldStrides, an educational travel company from North Carolina.
Nope. I blasted a mass email to all my colleagues at school to ignore any call-back requests from him.
Students being distracted by phones at school began registering in the early 2010s. By the late 2010s, the problem was full-blown.
Teachers and administrators were somewhat flat-footed in their response. They didn't understand the depth of the phone addiction epidemic because they hadn't ever suffered from it. That was a mistake.
Amid the generational gap in understanding, teachers were overrun. Many wearied of pleading and admonishing and bribing and punishing students to keep them from using their phones in class.
As in any profession, teachers populate a spectrum of professionalism. And at one end of the spectrum, some teachers were delighted to discover that they could produce a silent classroom of happy students by letting them "phone out" (zone out on their phones). Teacher effort required: zero. A perfect pacifier.
There were also the "treat-em-like-adults" optimists who felt that given free anytime access, 14 year-olds in class would exercise only use their phones if they truly needed to. They were shocked by the ubiquity of that need.
There were also jerks like me. I never harbored any patience for unauthorized phone use in class. And my authorizations were few and far between. Very few. The "No Phone Zone" policy is displayed and repeatedly announced. But there were always students who were undeterred.
Those students were accustomed to teachers begging and pleading. They'd often make an attempt at discretion by hiding their phone behind books or a backpack on the desk. They were in complete disbelief when I assigned them Saturday school upon their very first phone infraction. But that tended to keep subsequent infractions in check to some extent.
The backpack rack is reasonably effective. But phone addiction is strong among teenagers. And getting stronger. Some keep their phone in a pocket rather than surrendering it to the pack which will lie feet away from them for the duration of the period. And, as mentioned previously, my zero tolerance casts me as an intolerant jerk who just doesn't "get it". Some colleagues would suggest I'm not meeting the students where they are.
In 2019, we have sporadic tales of schoolwide attempts to minimize phone distraction in class. My own school flirted with Pocket Points. It required no expenditure and was simple to defeat. Other schools are trying magnetically locked phone bags. The logistics seem cumbersome and, again, teenagers know how to defeat these measures. The addiction is strong.
There is no research that I'm aware of that touts the benefits of student phone use in class. Research to the contrary doesn't seem hard to find. For example:
France has banned phones from classrooms. I don't foresee this happening anywhere in the US. Because
1. many parents delight in having immediate access to their children throughout the school day.
2. classroom teachers, many of whom have all but surrendered on the phone issue, strive to find positive uses for the phones they know will be up and running during class.
3. administrators fall behind in assigning phone-violation discipline as it is. That only stands to get worse with an all-out ban
I will continue to be a No Phone Zone jerk in my own classroom, allowing phone-friendly colleagues to appear "chill" in comparison. Some will argue that students won't be able to concentrate, anxious from having been separated from their phones.
At AAPT's Summer Meeting 2018, I attended session AD: High School, with considerable interest. After a series of College Board-friendly talks by AP Physics Redesign proponents, Mt. Olive High School's Brian Holton presented "AP Physics 1: A Seasoned Perspective".
Holton's talk was clearly not sanctioned by the good people of The College Board. But his expression of frustration and exasperation with AP1 resonated with me. Apparently my expression of frustration and exasperation resonated with him, too. (He cited my lament in his talk.) His critique was much more robust than mine was.
A small group of us had a combination perambulation, ventilation, brainstorm as we migrated to our next sessions.
We concurred that dropping AP Physics 1/2 from a school's curriculum constituted a marketing challenge for any school that would dare to try. We now advertise and market our schools on the basis of the breadth an scope of Advanced Placement offerings and performance.
AP courses are to be added to a school's course catalog; not removed. That other high school being visited by shopping 8th-graders and their parents is offering AP Physics, so your school must match.
One idea we tossed around was running a course that would prepare students for the SAT II Physics exam. Does anyone, anywhere run such a course? I'd love to hear from anyone teaching such a course. For now, it's just a thought. And The College Board still wins.
I know AP Physics C fans are happy with their exams. Abandoning AP1 and AP2 for an SAT II-based course is a different set of conversation. One might argue that outstanding performance on the SAT II Physics wouldn't get students out of any physics course at a college or university. I would hasten to add that outstanding performance on an AP Physics 1 or 2 exam doesn't necessarily exempt a student from intro physics courses at college, either.
Here's what the SAT II Physics exam covers. (A physics content-based assessment: how tantalizing!)
Mechanics 36%-42% Kinematics, such as velocity, acceleration, motion in one dimension, and motion of projectiles Dynamics, such as force, Newton’s laws, statics, and friction Energy and momentum, such as potential and kinetic energy, work, power, impulse, and conservation laws Circular motion, such as uniform circular motion and centripetal force Simple harmonic motion, such as mass on a spring and the pendulum Gravity, such as the law of gravitation, orbits, and Kepler’s laws
Electricity and magnetism 18%–24% Electric fields, forces, and potentials, such as Coulomb’s law, induced charge, field and potential of groups of point charges, and charged particles in electric fields Capacitance, such as parallel-plate capacitors and time-varying behavior in charging/ discharging Circuit elements and DC circuits, such as resistors, light bulbs, series and parallel networks, Ohm’s law, and Joule’s law Magnetism, such as permanent magnets, fields caused by currents, particles in magnetic fields, Faraday’s law, and Lenz’s law
Waves and optics 15%–19% General wave properties, such as wave speed, frequency, wavelength, superposition, standing wave diffraction, and Doppler effect Reflection and refraction, such as Snell’s law and changes in wavelength and speed Ray optics, such as image formation using pinholes, mirrors, and lenses Physical optics, such as single-slit diffraction, double-slit interference, polarization, and color
Heat and thermodynamics 6%–11% Thermal properties, such as temperature, heat transfer, specific and latent heats, and thermal expansions Laws of thermodynamics, such as first and second laws, internal energy, entropy, and heat engine efficiency
Modern physics 6%–11%
Quantum phenomena, such as photons and photoelectric effect
Atomic, such as the Rutherford and Bohr models, atomic energy levels, and atomic spectra Nuclear and particle physics, such as radioactivity, nuclear reactions, and fundamental particles Relativity, such as time dilation, length contraction, and mass-energy equivalence
Miscellaneous 4%–9% General, such as history of physics and general questions that overlap several major topics Analytical skills, such as graphical analysis, measurement, and math skills Contemporary physics, such as astrophysics, superconductivity, and chaos theory
You know it's a bad situation when the hashtag basically writes itself.
This first year of teaching AP Physics C: Mechanics and Electricity & Magnetism has had lots of lessons, one of which I was not expecting. I assumed (and you know the old saying about assuming anything) that students in AP Calculus or Multi-Variable Calculus could graph data. And I was wrong.
Well to clarify, they can graph but they often choose not to. Be it innate teenage laziness, prioritizing their overwhelming workload, or even just forgetfulness, my students don't spend the time on their lab graphs that I would expect. My expectations were laid out at the beginning of the year, as they were in regular Physics and I'm sure every science class they have ever taken. They are summarized below:
1. All plotted graphs (not sketches) should be at least a half a page in size and made on graph paper.
2. Axis and best fit lines should be made with a ruler.
3. Each axis should be labeled with the quantity and units. Each axis should have a uniform scale but it need not be the same from one axis to the other.
4. The graph should have a descriptive title (i.e. not "Graph #3").
5. If multiple data sets are plotted use different colors and/or different data point symbols. Include a legend.
6. Add a best fit line or curve to your data that gets as close as possible to all of your data points. Do not "connect the dots." If the best fit relationship is linear include a slope triangle to calculate the slope of the line.
I don't feel that any of these requirements are too extreme, strict or beyond what they are being taught in math class. Yet as the year has progressed I have seen the graph quality decrease. The occasional student "forgets" to do it on graph paper; I may let it slide. Once in awhile someone makes the graph too small and I'll draw an unhappy face on it in red pen. The mistakes were becoming more common but due to drowning in curriculum development I kept ignoring the growing problem.
But then it became too big. Last week I collected student lab notebooks with two labs in it. One required several graph sketches (just a variable labeled axis and a general shape, no plotting) with two plotted graphs and the other only required two plotted graphs. Students had begged for additional time for lab notebooks and after agreeing I joked that I was expecting perfection.
I did not get it.
It started with one unbelievable graph. Bad enough that I snapped a picture and posted it on my Twitter feed. Then there was another. And another. I collected enough of the "worst" that I decided that I had to have a little "talk" with my classes about quality of work. I assembled them into a powerpoint and planned the reckoning.
The big day was today and I had it all set up to make the big points in an amusing way, but letting them know I was serious. I started each class with, "I graded your lab notebooks. We need to have a bit of a chat. What math level are you in again?"
Students warily reply "Calculus..." because they know they're getting set up.
"Oh that's right," I reply, "So you should be able to make a graph right?"
They nod.
"Well, I thought so too, but we need to talk about that."
In one class a student said, "Oh man, she made it into a powerpoint, that can't be good."
I assured students that these contributions were anonymous, and that if their graph was included I still care for them and I know that they can do well in Physics. They just had a big "oops" with this graph.
We proceeded to flip through the examples, with a mixture of roaring laughter (to the point of tears for some) and absolute disbelief.
They had questions:
"Someone turned that in?"
"Is that a hole in that paper?"
"What is that line even supposed to be doing?"
"Were these all from that one assignment?"
One student at the end said, "Wow, and we had extra time so you wanted them to be perfect." Yeah kid, I was shocked too.
In the end it was a funny way of reminding them of my expectation, and now I have a collection of some of the worst graphs I've ever seen. Of course I would rather not have had the situation at all but at least we can all benefit. The collection is available as a pdf and individually below. Feel free to use in your classroom for the same purpose, hopefully they help you avoid your own #GraphFails.
Only one data point really? No ruler used for the axis, not made on graph paper, no slope triangle and the best fit line doesn't even go through the single data point!
One of my students said that this apparent best fit line (that completely missed every data point) might be a Z-axis. I don't know if that makes it better. And no, seeing the grid through the back side of a blank piece of graph paper doesn't count.
Not on graph paper, not made using a ruler and made a thicker line (potentially to hide poor data). Actually I don't even know if these data points are even properly plotted. We decided this was more of an artistic representation of someone else's graph than a graph itself.
Students often ask to use Excel, and they can, as long as they can use it right. This is not right. I have no idea how that best fit line worked with that data.
These are supposed to be sketches, not plots, with a variable on each axis. That pen tip is for scale. Yes they are that small.
If you're asked to make a slope triangle on your graph it will probably be linear. When in doubt, the student apparently thought drawing a slope triangle would help anyway.
When I said a "uniform scale on each axis" I didn't think I need to be specific and say you need more than one number to establish a scale.
Of course having no scale is worse.
The large data points on this were annoying but not terrible. It was the sneaky breaking of the graph that they tried to slip past me.
When your data doesn't seem to have a trend, I guess plugging it into a calculator is one way of finding a best fit line.
Then again, even if the best fit line seems obvious maybe you should use your calculator to double check.
When I was a new teacher, I was wary of veteran teachers who complained about "kids these days". The gist was that students of a long ago yesteryear were capable of hunkering down and rising to the challenge of rigorous academic coursework, while today's students simply cannot hack it. I didn't see it. My students were rising to the challenges I set before them. What was the problem? I never wanted to age into that seemingly inevitable "get off my lawn" stage.
Back then, a veteran teacher was anyone with ten or more years in the profession. But it was those with more than twenty years in the classroom who were most likely to shake a "kids these days" fist.
I now have more than thirty years of classroom teaching under my belt. And I now see why it happens. The struggle is real. And I don't have a ready solution.
In my own recollection, my Physics students of 1996-97 figured it out better than those of any year I've taught. (I'm referring to my Physics students in this post, not my AP1, AP2, APB, or CP students.)
In 1996-97, I was entering my second decade of teaching and had settled on some pedagogy and policies that seemed to work for me and my students. A large majority of students in 1996-97 (N=116) essentially agreed to my terms and prospered as a result.
In contrast, my Physics students in 2018 (N=60) have largely opted out of my conditions and suffered predictably. Here's a side-side comparison of the grade distributions.
There were four sections of Physics in 1996-97; there are two sections in 2017-18. (There was one section of AP Physics B in 1996-97; there is one section each of AP Physics 1, AP Physics 2, and Conceptual Physics in 2017-18. These classes are not included in this analysis.) Seventy percent of Physics students earned an A or B in 1997; only 57% did so in 2018.
Why the dramatic difference? In my analysis, it is engagement. Engagement is difficult to quantify for purposes of comparison. My best method for quantifying engagement in 1997 relates to random homework checks.
By that metric and its built-in tolerances, 29% of Physics students were very engaged in 1997, 45% were somewhat engaged, and 26% were disengaged.
Since 2014, we have had a Test Correction Journal (TCJ) process by which students can earn back up to half the points they missed on each unit test. "Sweat equity" is required: students spend class time writing "journal" entries for each test item they missed. Completed journals grant students access to a ten-question quiz. A 10/10 gets you half your missed points back; 7/10 gets you 70% of half the points you missed, etc..
So I can now use TCJ performance as a measure of engagement. We have five unit tests in the first semester. Students who participated in all five are rated as "very engaged". Students who participated in four of the five are "somewhat engaged". Students who missed more than two TCJs are "disengaged".
By that metric and its built-in tolerances, 28% of Physics students were very engaged in 2018, 27% were somewhat engaged, and 45% were disengaged.
Here is how the Physics grades break down (2014-2018) when classified by levels of engagement. (N=382)
That infographic might take a moment to absorb. The green columns are grades earned by highly engaged students: mostly As, fewer Bs, fewer Cs, two Ds and no Fs. The yellow columns are grades earned by somewhat engaged students: some As, more Bs, some Cs, a few Ds, and two Fs. The red columns are grades earned by disengaged students: one A, more Bs, many Cs, dozens of Ds, and all but two of the Fs.
Excel is happy to make pie charts as well. Here are the grade distributions by engagement level.
Eighty percent of very engaged students earned an A or a B.
Somewhat engaged students were somewhat distributed across letter grades.
Half of disengaged students earned a D or F. One out of 382 earned an A.
My own assessment is that students who engage in the course will get a good grade. There is more to engagement than Test Correction Journals. Homework engagement is crucial. But I have no way to measure that, whatsoever.
Still though, you will most likely earn an A or a B if you are at least engaged in the TCJ process. You will most likely get a C, D, or F if you're disengaged.
Some might argue that in addition to preparing and maintaining quality physics pedagogy and policies, I have an obligation to compel or otherwise force students to engage in the course. I cannot bring myself to agree.
At some point, students must have the option to engage or not engage. In my own highly biased assessment, I consider my course to be highly engaging as it is. And I believe there is a valuable lesson to be learned about the consequences of choices that we make when approaching an academic course. Physics is a college prep course; many students will be sitting in college courses in less than a year.
I want my students to succeed. In my class and beyond. I know that no one will chase them down in college to make sure they are duly engaged in their coursework. If they know how to engage on their own, they will be set to succeed to the limits of their abilities.
Full engagement is not a guarantee of an A. An A represents a level of mastery that is demonstrated in various assessment instruments. Engagement puts an A, B, or C in play while virtually precluding a D or an F. Disengagement, on the other hand, operationally precludes a student from earning an A.
Choices and consequences.
Am I at the "kids these days" stage? I don't think so. Engaged students are doing very well in the course. Top grades are well within reach of anyone willing to engage. And AP students (unsurprisingly) remain highly engaged. I am bothered by the increasing number of students who choose to be disengaged in Physics.
One last graphic to convey my disappointment. This is this year's 1st period Physics class's test scores. This was the most disengaged class I've ever had. In the test scores field, red indicates a TCJ that the student missed. Yellow indicates a test that was made up during the make-up period following the administration of the test (usually about 10 school days). Blue represents a test that was missed and not made up in the make-up period. It was made up at the end of the semester. Black is a second test that was missed and not made up in time. It goes down as a zero. The letter grades are shown in the leftmost column. Green shading for very engaged students, yellow for somewhat engaged students, and red for disengaged.
At semester's end, it's possible to look back and see how student engagement in the course manifested itself into semester grades.
Students who perform well on tests and labs naturally percolate to the top. But those who don't excel in those objective measures have alternate routes to good grades in my courses.
During the semester, "extra credit" (credit toward the final: CTF) is awarded in dribs and drabs for various tasks and in-class competitions. Completing paperwork associated with the beginning of the school year and team performance in our egg-toss competition are typical first-semester sources. The credit is accumulated through the semester, but only becomes active as an addition to the final exam score. Some teachers add in extra credit as it comes in. That leads to disappointment when final exam scores are low. Adding it to final exam scores at the end of the semester leads to delight similar to finding money under the cushions of the sofa/couch/davenport.
More importantly in my Physics (PHY) and Conceptual Physics (CP) courses, students can earn back points lost on unit tests. The process is called Test Correction Journal. Students write "journal entries" for each item they missed on a unit test and reflect on why they were drawn to a wrong answer over the right answer. Later, a quiz is given consisting of questions from the original test. If they get 10 out 10 on the quiz, they earn back half the points they missed on the test. If they 9/10, they get 90% of half the points they missed, etc.. A 60 can turn into an 80 and 40 into a 70. A 90 can turn into a 95. The more help you need, the more help TCJs provide.
Neither CTF nor TCJs depend on rapid assimilation of course content. But they do depend largely on engagement. Sometimes students who miss many items on a unit test cannot finish the journaling process that we begin during class time. They need to come it at lunch or after school during an approximately two-week window to finish the journal. Only students with completed journals are allowed to take the quiz that will earn their missed test points back.
Students who disengage from TCJs create and expand a gap between themselves and those who are engaged. My engaged students earn only As and Bs. But Cs, Ds, and Fs are given every semester, as many students elect to disengage.
The listings below are actual student data. Each is a period, sorted by points earned. I used Excel's conditional formatting to color the cells in a spectrum from top-score green to bottom-score red, with yellow in between. The next column colors CTF points on a same basis (green good; red bad). Then (for PHY classes), it's the TCJ column with the same color scheme. The last column shows the final exam raw score out of 50. The top number in each column show the maximum value possible.
The pattern is fairly consistent, with anomalies here and there. Nothing to shatter the Earth here. I just wanted to see how well the seemingly nebulous "engagement" tracks to overall class performance. Teachers know this pattern is really the only one that's possible. Students don't always have an intuitive understanding of it. Some will see the evidence and reject it nonetheless.
Those students believe it's possible to get a top score with minimal engagement. It's mathematically possible. It just never happens. They may also fear that investing in full engagement will not be rewarded in a top score. Yet we don't find a red Points value followed by green CTF and TCJ columns. That's actually much less mathematically possible, given what TCJs do.
I received an email from my office staff indicating a parent had called and wanted to talk to me, but I was teaching at the time. The parent requested I call her back.
When I did, it turns out she was a telemarketer keen to offer me a private business group travel "opportunity".
"I'm sorry: what is the name of your son or daughter enrolled in my class?" "I don't have one."
"So you're not really a parent here, are you?" "I have children."
"I don't appreciate your deception and am not interested in your opportunity." "Do you know another teacher who might be interested?"
"If I did, I would not tell you. As we speak, I'm composing an email to my colleagues warning them of your deceptive tactics."
Thus ended the conversation. The email was sent out shortly thereafter. The blood pressure remained high for some time.
I get it: times are tough in the world of group travel sales. Maybe. But posing as the parent of a student to a teacher in order to trick them into calling you back is beyond the pale. It disrespects what we do and our commitment to maintain communication with parents.
I cannot imagine this tactic works for her, but if it doesn't why does she do it? She presents an example for those who consider "business ethics" to be an oxymoron.
I expressed my misgivings about the AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2 exams in a previous post. Once again, this is a rant. If you're not into rants, kindly scroll to the next post.
The purpose of this post is simply to show the global exam score distributions, three years into the redesign. I used the numbers posted by Total Registration.
First up: the final three years of the AP Physics B exam scores. Fives were earned by 15% of students, fours were earned by 19%, threes by 27%, twos by 17%, and ones by 22%. (Approximately one third succeeded with 4s and 5s.)
Next up: the first years of the AP Physics 1 exam. Fives were earned by 4% of students, fours were earned by 14%, threes by 21%, twos by 30%, and ones by 31%. (Approximately one fifth of candidates succeeded.)
Try not to judge too harshly those who have lost enthusiasm for algebra-based AP Physics.
To complete the Algebra-based exams, consider the AP Physics 2 exam. Fives were earned by 9% of students, fours were earned by 15%, threes by 34%, twos by 32%, and ones by 9%.
The College Board hastens to offer explanations for the precipitous plummet, especially in regard to AP1. The AP2 scores actually match the legacy APB results reasonably well. There's reason to speculate that many (if not most) AP2 examinees are successful veterans of the AP1 exam.
1. Teachers aren't teaching the new course correctly. They haven't undergone enough in-service retraining. (This is part of the admission that the AP1 and AP2 exams aren't really about physics anymore, but about Big Ideas. Physics topics are merely the canvas upon which the Big Ideas are painted.)
2. Too many students are taking the AP1 exam. This is where I'm trying to help. And you can, too. I assure my students that I will do my best to prepare them for the exams as they are. But I encourage them to not submit to the exam. This reverses a position I held for 25 years. If we work together, we can help to reduce the glut of AP1 examinees.
The Physics team at the College Board has replaced the muscular Camaro that was AP Physics B with shiny Lamborghinis called AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2. Emulating the college course that examinees could test out of is now a long-abandoned goal. The new courses hope to be the richest, most immersive physics courses that could be imagined.
I don't find the course syllabi to be particularly practical for high school students. The courses go well beyond virtually all introductory college and university courses. The AP Physics B exam was more demanding than those administered at the college level. And the AP1 and AP2 exams amplify that disparity to 11.
Surely this escalation of difficulty of the AP1 and AP2 exams must have resulted in a global advancement of the way colleges and universities accept and interpret passing scores. If it has, I am unaware of it. In the old days of AP Physics B, college acceptance of passing scores was a crazy patchwork. To the best of my knowledge, the crazy patchwork remains unchanged even with the more stringent AP1 and AP2 exams.
You might wonder why AP Physics C instructors remain enthusiastic about their course and exam. They were unaffected by the AP Physics B redesign. Let's bring them into the mix.
While the AP1 and AP2 scores plummeted, the un-redesigned AP C Mechanics exam scores continued to flourish. Over the past three years, fives were earned by 31% of students, fours were earned by 28%, threes by 18%, twos by 13%, and ones by 10%. (Nearly 60% success rate.)
The score of 5 (highly qualified) now represents the mode.
The un-redesigned AP C Electricity and Magnetism exam scores did well, too. Over the past three years, fives were earned by 30% of students, fours were earned by 24%, threes by 14%, twos by 19%, and ones by 13%. (More than half succeed.)
The score of 5 (highly qualified) continues to represent the mode.
AP Physics C continues to be a physics content-based exam. That is, its blueprint refers to topics in physics instead of the more philosophical Big Ideas that form the core objectives of AP1 and AP2. This may well be a key to the continuing success enjoyed AP C examinees.
Of course there's more to this discussion. I'm obviously ventilating a bit here because this continues to be a source of frustration. AP Physics C is not a viable option at my school due primarily to its prerequisites. Intra- and inter- district competition for school enrollment prevents me from simply abandoning AP1 and AP2. If not for that, I would.
I feel like astronomy photos have a much higher possibility of being "fake" than do those of any other discipline. This is not to be confused with artistic representations of celestial objects we don't have actual pictures of. Often these artist's drawings are believed to be real, even if labeled, leading to more confusion. I will never forget showing students an artist's rendering of the Milky Way and pointing to one arm of its spiral saying, "And the Earth would be approximately here," when one student pipes up in utter disbelief, "Wow, who went that far to get that picture?"
Ummm... nobody. That was also the year I had a debate with a student that insisted The Martian was based on real events.
So astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary scientists, etc. has a tough time educating the public about their science as they combat some really bad misconceptions. [I won't even address the flat-earthers.] Their struggle is not helped when images like this go viral. Take a minute to look at it and think about everything you know about the sun and the moon.
Had a minute? If it doesn't come to you right away I have a few questions to help:
1. How are we able to see the sun?
I teach my students that some objects are luminous, meaning they give off their own light. Stars like our own sun are one of those things. We see it because it emits (or makes) its own light.
2. How are we able to see the moon?
Is it luminous like our sun? Some students would say yes but check the definition again. Does it make its own light? Well, no, nothing in our Solar System is luminous except for our sun ... so how are we able to see it if it doesn't make its own light? Right about now I would hear some students hesitantly saying, "Is it ... reflecting the sun's light?" Gold star for you! We see the moon (and all other non-star objects by the way) because they reflect light from the nearest star. The moon is illuminated by the luminous sun and it is that reflected light that we see.
3. So if we can see the illuminated moon, where should the sun be?
Hopefully you're at the forehead smacking moment. In order for the very full moon to be photographed it must be reflecting back the sun's light to the camera. The side of the moon that is facing the sun is always lit, and that half that is lit is not always facing the Earth. If you can see a full moon you have to be facing away from the sun and towards the side of the moon that is facing the sun, reflecting its light and thus able to be seen. It is not physically possible to catch a full moon and the sun in this shot as is above.
There are many other astronomers and amateur enthusiasts that can probably explain it better than I. In fact the Reddit, Twitter, Imgur and Facebook takedowns are pretty amusing if you're interested. The picture is apparently not new, the oldest post I could find was from 2014 on Google+ of all things. But I would like to make the point that some pretty basic understanding of the arrangement of our sun-moon-earth system let's you spot an (amazing but) obvious fake.
With the approaching total solar eclipse in North America, I suspect there will be a lot more of "Incredible photos you won't believe!" Because you probably can't, for good reason. My favorite example of making it obvious what the proper eclipse arrangements are comes from astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack:
So next time a family or friend shares an "amazing astronomy" photo, take a close look, think critically and be prepared to (politely) rain on their parade.
