I.  A clear majority of students in my physical science course for future elementary school teachers do not actually plan to go into teaching. When I ask why, they say that it’s because teachers they have come to know and/or meet all tell them they should “run away” as fast as they can from public school teaching. 

II. Because I am teaching 2nd semester physics, I have many more students with whom I interact for an entire year. I enjoy having these year-long relationships with students, because I get to know students much better. There are also real big advantages with the amount of trust that students have with me. We can do things and persist in things that are confusing, because they have been there enough times with me to know that it will pay off, AND that even if one time it doesn’t pay off, it’s OK, next time it will.

III. In my step II class (the 2nd course in the UTeach sequence), a hot topic of discussion from students has been their own challenges and successes in “getting students to say what you want.” This phrase comes up so often in class (from students, not the instructors). It’s a real window into how they are conceptualizing inquiry teaching so far. While I understand that they are grappling with the very real difficulties of asking good questions and facilitating discussion, their language here suggests that the students and I have different views about the purpose of questioning and discussion. I don’t think they yet see that questioning and discussion serves a role in helping the teacher (and students) find out what everyone is thinking. 

IV. Several of the physics teachers in our area have really taken up some of the discourse moves we have talked about and practiced in our monthly workshops. One teacher in particular says that “re-voicing” and asking students to “re-voice” has transformed her classroom practice. While many teachers really enjoy our workshops, some really “take up” practices more readily than others, and I’m curious about when and why this does and doesn’t happen.

V. I have an amazing group of students in my physical science class. We do lots of serious intellectual science almost everyday, and do it while having a lot of fun. It is so much fun to be in that class, laughing all the time. Yesterday, I had to kick students out of class (30 minutes after it was officially over), so I could start my other class in the same room. I wish I could tell you more.

VI. Being in my third year working with the future physics teachers has its advantages. Before, almost every student I knew was “new” to me, and getting students to “come around” was hard work. Now, I’m almost never teaching a class, where there isn’t a mix of students that are new to me, some I know a bit, and some I know really well. This has huge advantages, because the newer one’s learn how to “participate” implicitly by observing how the more experienced one’s participate. Students more quickly and readily pick upon the fact that “you have to talk”, “share and listen to ideas”, “defend your ideas with reasoning /evidence”, and importantly realize that we all understand the physics less than we thought (and that it’s OK to be wrong and admit you don’t understand something). 

VII. I am almost always barely getting by in doing what I have to do. It is stressful, but for the moment, things are going really well, so it makes it feel so worth it. While I’m quite content right now, I have to admit to myself that I don’t know how to get an appropriate work-life balance. I know that my current balance can’t go on forever, and I’m struggling to see how to make it work. Ugh.

One of the powerful ideas we’ve had in inquiry class this semester is called “Amy’s Pee Theory”. It’s an idea we’ve returned to again and again in explaining phenomena. Amy’s pee theory states that if you pee a normal size amount in a very large pool, no one will notice. The pee (to be sure) is still there, but it’s been spread out over such a large thing, that it’s not concentrated enough to have a noticeable effect. Peeing in a smaller container of water, such as a toilet, results in a more obvious effect (yellow color), because the pee is concentrated in a small container. This idea is our class’s instantiation of beginning to think about a thermal reservoir.

Last week, our class discussed the energy tracking of a battery-powered fan. We spent most of our time trying to decide whether the room’s thermal energy increases, decreases, or stays the same. We touched upon lots of everyday experience–running the thermostat in your house switched to “A/C”, “Heat”, or just “Fan”; actual temperature vs. “feels” like due to wind chill, fanning to “cool yourself” off, you don’t seem to cool down the room; how the moment you stop fanning, the cool feel goes away; how ridiculous it seems that you could really cool off a room by having lots of people fanning, vents in your car, etc.

Eventually, people were convinced that fanning didn’t actually reduce the temperature, but we didn’t have an explanation for why you felt cooler. The idea that was eventually was proposed was, “Fanning helps the thermal energy you’ve produced around you go away, by blowing the warm air away from you.” Several said that there mind was blown at hearing that idea.

Eventually,everyone agreed a room should technically get hotter, but you wouldn’t be able to tell via “Amy’s pee theory.” The room is so big that the little bit of thermal energy put off by the motor wouldn’t make a big difference. This nicely motivated why we should try the experiment with a fan in a very small “room”. So we ran a fan inside a small cooler for 10 minutes while we went outside to make moon observations, and the temperature inside the cooler had risen by 12 degrees. Pretty cool. Upon opening the cooler, pretty soon the cooler was back to being normal temperature, because the “pee” that we had kept trapped in a toilet had now spread out into the pool. The room was not measurably hotter as a result.

After the experiment, someone blurted out remembering a long time when their house had been flooded.  To dry out the house, they had to bring in dozens of industrial fans, and they recalled how freakin’ hot it made the house. Bringing in dozens of huge fans was like getting several bus full of kids to pee in the pool. 

My inquiry class is going quite well this semester. The skills that this class has picked up quickly and use regularly include

– Re-voicing and paraphrasing what others are saying

– Asking questions about others’ ideas to get more information

– Asking questions to make sure we understand each others’ ideas

– Summarizing, comparing, contrasting different ideas that have been said

– Telling someone if/when their ideas make sense (even if one don’t necessarily agree), and why it makes sense.

– Talking to each other for extended periods of time (without looking at me).

– Using tone of voice / eye contact to indicate interest, care, and humility (rather than dismissal, indifference, and righteousness)

– Posing honest questions and making honest statements

– Using tone and body language that communicates that everyone is free to change their mind

Part of this reminds me that “being” a good listener and “being” engaged consist of things you actually do. But I’m also reminded of just how easy it is for everyone to do these things when everyone feels the right way–feeling safe and having a sense of belonging. Of course I know that there’s feedback between feelings and behavior: the students feel the way they do because of they way we are all behaving, but we are also behaving these ways because of the way we feel. It’s mutually reinforcing. And, of course, when these feedback loops are going the right way, it seems easy, like how could it be any other way. But I know that other times, when the feedback loops are going the wrong way, it can seem impossible. Cherish the good times.

One of the topics we teach in second semester physics is blackbody radiation. The typical kind of scenario students would be asked about is, given the temperature of a star and information about the size and orbit of a planet, determine how much energy arrives on the planet each second. One of the main difficulties students have is deciding how to use the relationship that intensity = power/ area. There are lots of different energies, areas, and intensities to consider, so students who are used to plug-n-chug can easily fall apart here. Since we introduced the topic two weeks ago, I’ve been starting each day with various discussion (clicker) questions asking student to think about intensity, energy, and power qualitatively. We’ve had lots of good days of discussion stemming from this and progress is certainly being made, but students’ handle on the ideas seem to be quite elusive and fleeting with lots of side-steps and backslides, even for the students who don’t usually struggle.  On Thursday, I asked the following question to start our day, which pulled us into a really good discussion that lasted 15-20 minutes or so:

Assume you know how much energy is emitted from a star each second, Es. You want to find the intensity of the light arriving at a planet. Which calculation should you use? The question included a diagram that showed three distancse: Rs, the radius of the star, Rp, the radius o the planet, and Rsp, the distance between planet and the sun. The four options where.

A. Es/ 4πRp²

B. Es/ πRp²

C. Es/ 4πRsp²

D. Es/ 4πRs²

Students thought to themselves, voted, and then talk in groups. When students re-voted, we were split between B and C, with a few unsure whether it was A or B. We’ve been getting used to these kinds of discussions, so I asked a few students to explain why those chose B.  The basic line of reasoning was that we were interested in the intensity at the planet, so the relevant area had to be the area of the planet, because the planet that was catching the energy with its cross-sectional area.

Instead of letting people voice an argument for C, I said that those who picked C had to explain what they was wrong with B without explaining why they thought C was correct. I motivated this by talking about why so many hot button issues arguments are unproductive, such as abortion rights, whereas everyone just keeps repeating their arguments without listening to the other side.

One really nice argument, which ended up being convincing to most in the class, was this:

– Es/ πRp² says in words that you are taking all the energy from the sun and spreading it over the area of the planet. This can’t be right because not all the energy from the sun gets to the planet. In fact, most of energy misses the planet because it goes off in other directions.

I made sure at least one other student could repeat the argument, and then another argument was made: This argument was about how we could actually “correct” the equation so it did give the intensity at the planet. The argument was that if the “area” you want to divide by is the area of the planet, than the numerator has to be energy arriving at the planet Ep, not Es. Intensity *is* an energy divided by an area, but to get the intensity of the planet using the area of the planet, you have consider the actual energy arriving at the planet, so it would be Ep/πRp².

By the time we got around to asking for arguments for C, most students were convinced it couldn’t be B, but formulating good arguments for C was hard, and it took a bunch of back and forth among the students before a really compelling argument to emerge. The discussion was really juicy and students were really listening, but I had a feeling that while the “class” a whole was getting it, many students still needed an opportunity to pull it together, consolidate. So I had students vote with thumbs up, thumbs side, and thumbs down, whether their understanding was , “I understand the reason why it must be C, and could explain it,” “I think I understand why it must be C, but I’m less confident I could explain it someone else,”, “I’m still not sure I understand why it must be C”. The room was split about half between thumbs up and thumbs to the side. I said if your thumb was to the side you had two options: you could look to a person with their thumbs up and tell them that you want to practice explaining it to them OR you could ask them to explain it to you one more time. I’ve never used that move before (giving the students who are unsure the option to either practice explaining or receive an explanation), but for whatever reason, it was the right move at the right time. The entire class in pairs and groups erupted into conversation and spent a long time explaining to each other–serious, passionate, intellectual talk with gesturing and smiles. I just stood at the front of the room and watched and waited for the talk to subside. It took a long time. I had a few more clicker questions, which we breezed through. Many groups told me that while they were discussing alone, they had actually spontaneously asked of themselves and discussed the questions I had posed.

I wanted to jot down this brain dump, because I thought the two counter-arguments were really fantastic, and I wanted to think about why this particular talk move worked so well. Part of it is that they were just primed and ready to talk about it more, but I think there was something about putting the power in the hands of the person who doesn’t understand. They were in control-they could demand to hear an explanation or demand that someone listen to them.

Monthly physics teacher meetings:

Since September, our Department has been hosting a monthly event for local-area physics teachers. We usually have some time at the beginning for demo-sharing on a specific topic area, then we provide dinner and some time to chat, and we usually end the evening by engaging the teachers in some sort of physics/physics teaching activity. So far we’ve had 5 meetings, and we’ve had lots of good feedback from teachers. About 6-20 teachers have been attending. Hoping to continue to nurture this and thread this into some grant proposals.

Learning Assistant Program Pilot:

Last semester, two faculty in our department attended the LA workshop at UC Boulder. This semester we are piloting some curriculum changes and use of learning assistants. Right now, we are only implementing in two section of  our intro physics course and most of our LAs are already physics majors in our physics teaching concentration; but the plan is to implement more widely and to recruit students to be LAs for next academic year We’ve applied for some money that will hopefully help out with that. I’m not teaching in these section, but I have responsibilities for running the prep session with the instructor and the LAs for instruction each week. I have a undergraduate student who is also helping to collect data regarding this pilot implementation.

Two New Preps:

This semester, I’m teaching three courses, but two of those courses are ones I hadn’t taught before at MTSU. The first one is the second semester of the algebra-based physics course, which covers optics, modern physics, and electricity and magnetism. It’s been nice to have a different course to teach, but it’s meant more prep than usual.

I’m also teaching a new course for the first time. We had previously had a one semester seminar course called “Physics Licensure”, which was intended originally to be a self-study-kind of course for future physics teachers to make sure they were prepared for the Physics Praxis. We’ve made that a year long seminar now, in which we focus more on developing conceptual understanding / qualitative reasoning with 1st-year physics topics (and less on praxis prep per se). Students also have responsibilities for working on AP physics problems. This semester is the first time the second-semester of Physics Licensure is being offered. Right now the two courses are still kind of playing the role of “band-aid”, making up for deficiencies in our first-year courses. We are working to improve our intro courses (see above), so the nature of these courses may shift.

On top of this, I’m working on a grant that doesn’t overlap with any of the efforts described above and trying to finish a paper that’s been in the works for years that also doesn’t concern these efforts. The next time I write a grant, It’ll need to be more synergistic with my service and teaching efforts.

One thing that’s been on my mind is the extent to which our physics teaching majors are or are not developing identities as physicists/physics majors. Coupled with this issue of identity development is the concern that our physics teaching majors are not strongly integrated socially and academically with the rest of the physics majors.

There are a couple of factors driving this:

Physics teaching majors are not merely physics majors. They are also MTeach students. MTeach has a strong presence in their undergraduate trajectory. More specifically, students in a particular cohort are likely to take eight courses together to fulfill their minor in secondary education. MTeach has a very nice informal gathering space, where MTeach students hang out, get work done, etc. It’s a place where students are forging their sense of belonging in a community and developing identities as math and science teachers.

Most, but certainly not all of other physics majors, go through the calculus-based introductory physics sequence. In their sophomore year, most physics majors take a year of modern physics and a year of theoretical physics (i.e., math methods). So in the first two years of the program, a cohort of physics majors will have taken 6 physics courses together. Being in those courses and hanging out /working in the physics majors lounge working is partly where physics majors forge their sense of belonging to the community and develop identifies as physics majors / physicists.

Most of our physics teaching majors, however, are going through the algebra-based physics course, not the calculus-based course with the physics major cohort. For some, this is because they decide they want to pursue physics teaching only after taking our algebra-based physics course. For those who know early on they want to pursue physics teaching, it’s likely they don’t take the calculus-based course because they haven’t taken calculus yet, and are advised to take the algebra-based course. And while the graduate school track physics major concentrations require that students take the sophomore year theoretical physics course, physics teaching majors don’t have to take theoretical physics if they take both linear algebra and differential equations from the math department. So far, very few physics teaching majors take theoretical physics.

What does this mean for our physics teaching majors? In the first two years that our physics teaching majors are in the program, they take only two physics courses with other physics majors–the year of modern physics in their sophomore year. They don’t become integrated deeply at all into the a cohort of physics majors, because they weren’t in the same courses freshman year and then they don’t struggle through the very challenging calculus-based physics and theoretical physics course with the rest of the physics majors. Most of the physics majors go onto take a demanding course load in their junior and senior years, including a mix of required and elective courses, including some courses that verge on graduate level work like courses in quantum field theory, general relativity, etc. Physics teaching students take a few more required physics courses at the upper-level (e.g., thermodynamics), but they have less required physics content courses (in part) because they are required to take a sequence of physics teaching courses offered in the department. This is just to say that, even in their junior and senior years, physics teaching majors are unlikely to have social or academic interactions with the rest of the physics majors. And while they could elect to take more upper-level physics electives, they are not likely to, in part due to peer groups but also because many physics teaching majors are dual certifying in mathematics, so they are busy taking other content course in the math department and their education courses which required a lot of field experience time.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and then it really hit me hard last night when only one physics teaching major came to the annual physics department pot-luck / party / gathering. Not surprisingly, the one physics teaching major that came is quite socially integrated into the physics major cohort, chose to do research in physics not physics education, and elected to take theoretical physics even though it’s not required.

I’m not quite sure what this all means yet, and there’s other issues at play that I haven’t described, but I’m thinking hard about this. The issue of navigating multiple communities is complex, and I’m hoping by choosing to write about some of this that I will develop some insight into what this all means.

 

 

One interesting physics conversation this semester has been about how we categorize forces. One future physics teacher in particular kept being concerned about whether to call something a tension force or a normal force. For example, consider the following situations:

• A chain, consisting of many links, hangs vertically. The very top link has a rope wrapped around it, which keeps the whole chain fixed to the ceiling.
• A rope is wrapped around a box and pulled by a person.

What kind of contact forces act on the top link? What kind of contact forces act on the box?

I think many students learn to associate types of forces with kinds of objects. For example, objects like ropes and strings exert tension forces. Objects like walls, ramps, and tables exert Normal forces. Springs, of course, exert spring forces. This kind of object-focused categorization means having to have a category for forces from a hand, like “Applied Force”

If this is how you think about forces (in terms of object categories), both the link and the box have tension forces exerted on them by the ropes, because ropes exert tension forces.

Another way to talk about forces, however, is to focus on mechanism. This is how I, and many other physics teacher I know, talk about force. Normal forces are contact forces arising from surfaces or points of contact that press into each other. In other words, Normal forces are compression forces. Tension forces are contact forces that result in points of contact that involve stretching. Friction forces involve sheer. Compression, tension, and sheer are about what’s happening at a point of contact not about what kind of object is exerting the force. A hand that pushes, of course, is just a normal force, because your skin cells are being squished not stretched.

It took me a while to really get insight into the students’ concern, but as we talked more and more I realized his concern resulted from the juxtaposition of these two ways of categorizing force. In the two scenarios above, the part of the rope that is contact with the object is being compressed. If  one is attending to the mechanism, then you’ll conclude that it’s a Normal force. If you are focusing on the kind of object it is, you’ll conclude it’s a tension force. This contradiction troubled the student.

The question remained, however, how should we resolve the conflict? At first, I was being a very bad debater. I just kept repeating my own arguments about normal forces being compression, dismissing altogether the issue of what kind of object it was. Now, I do think that categorizing based on mechanism is more useful than categorizing based on objects, but merely repeating my view was not going to help us understand the real issue. It wasn’t helping either me or the students get a deeper understanding. The real issue came about by thinking about grabbing someone by their shirt and pulling them toward you. In this case, if we choose the person’s naked body as the object of analysis, then the shirt is compressing against the person’s back pushing them forward, meaning there is a normal force. However, if we choose the object of analysis to include their shirt, then we could conclude that the shirt/person system was experiencing a tension force. If you get really picky about the exact boundaries and how the hand grabs the shirt, you might even conclude that the force exerted by hand on the shirt/person  are some combination of normal forces and friction forces. The key point is that we could certainly draw the boundary somewhere around the person (e.g., including most of but not all of the shirt) where the force at the boundary is a tension force.

The thing we realized is this: The ambiguity about whether something is compression or tension goes away when you attend to both mechanism carefully and attend to system boundary carefully. Small changes in the exact location of the system boundary (naked body or naked body + clothes) matter for whether the points of contact at the boundary are in tension or compression. That’s because even a single object can have places that are in tension and that are in compression. If you slice the boundary over a region that is compressed, your going to have normal forces. If you slice the boundary over a region that is being stretched, your going to have tension forces.  The shirt example helps, I think, because of it’s a subtle shift in boundary.

With the rope around the box, if you are serious about only including the box in your system, then there is no tension force. However, if you drew the boundary around the box a bit farther out, such that the rope around the box was in the system, then the force acting on the system is a tension force. The truth is, as an object, a lot of the rope is in tension.  One thing you realize in thinking about this is that tension forces can’t arise with out adhesion or bonding.  If you haven’t adhered a rope to an object, it can’t exert a tension force.

What’s interesting is that this is the complete opposite of what I’ve often heard said to students. Students are often told that ropes can only pull, not push.

 

 

This year in inquiry, we started with light as usual, but now we are moving on to energy. We’ll be conducting our own energy inquiries as we also analyze and discuss Sharon’s 3rd-grader’s inquiry into energy at the Responsive Teaching in Science Website, reading the book she co-authored called, “Becoming Scientists“, and talking over skype with Sharon about teaching science.

Below are excerpts from students’ first assignment that are still coming in. We have actually not discussed energy at all in class. Students were asked to write about an object or activity in their house that they think involves energy. Here is just a peek into what students are writing:

I think that fans are powered by electricity/energy and this allows them to move in a circular motion to create air flow.  This makes sense because in order for something to move it would need energy.  To me, it has always made sense that anything moving has some sort of energy asserted on it.  Usually when things move other objects, then the object gives energy and the object receiving the energy is using it.  I think that energy is needed in order to make fans work because without energy it just wouldn’t move at all.  The fan wouldn’t have anything to power the engine.

I know that light uses electricity which I think is powered by energy.  I know the term “electrical energy”, so this leads me to believe that electricity is either a type of energy itself, or is powered by energy.  Energy has to be present for the light to turn on.  I believe that energy sends electrons to the light and the electrons make electric energy which causes the light to turn on.

I do know that there are different types and different ways energy is transferred and/or released. I know that the energy starts somewhere and is transferred through wires through an outlet in my home. Then, the energy is transferred again through a lamp, air freshener, or TV. My question now is where does energy begin during this process? I understand that energy can move from source to source but where does it begin in this scenario? For example, a child pushes a ball. When the child pushed the ball, energy was given off and transferred onto the ball. What is the “child” if you will through using an electric outlet?

Energy results in an action. A lamp being turned on is evidence of a change or an action. Energy had to be used to create that change. Energy was transferred from the outlet to the source in this case, a lamp.  Energy is needed to make this action happen because a lamp is not going to turn on itself. A TV needs another source to “wake up.” The way I look at it is this way: everything is at rest, there must be an action that “wakes up” an object to get reaction desired. In this example, energy is being used through electrical outlets. Energy transferred through wires to the electrical outlets, this process causes many different objects to “wake up.”

When I think of energy, I think of any type of movement: Even if an object only moves or works because of another source of energy—the stationary object is still using energy.
In the case of playing the piano, I am using energy in all sorts of different ways.  In a sense, I am “giving” or “transferring” my energy to the piano to make sound.  I think of energy almost like a chain reaction or domino effect—the energy used or transferred happens so quickly that it’s almost unbelievable!

In physics licensure, students were working through a tutorial about tension. The tutorial guides students through a series of scenarios and questions to generate the reasoning behind the approximation that tension forces exerted on/by both ends of a very light string are equal in magnitude.

Near the end of the tutorial, students apply this knowledge to the Atwood’s machine. The first case is where there are equal masses on both sides , but the masses are at different heights. Based on intuition, some students expect the masses to stay put , but others expect the higher mass to descend in order to match heights .

I nudge students to subject their initial ideas to further analysis. Students conclude correctly that each mass has two forces… Tension up and weight down. The students also reason that the weights are same because the masses are the same. They also reason that the tensions must be the same by the small mass approximation–not by Newton’s third law!

For the student who anticipated that the masses would balance, this looked like proof. Everything is equal and balanced.

For the student who wasn’t sure if they would balance, this was not settled. The student noted that while we knew the tensions were equal and that the masses were equal we knew nothing about how the tensions compared to the masses. So true.

Eventually, with probably too much help from me, we sorted this out using proof by contradiction. Let’s assume that the tension is greater than the weight. If that’s the case , then both masses would accelerate up! Which is impossible, both intuitively, and logically based on the constraint imposed by the rope. You get a similar contradiction if you assume the tension is less, with both masses descending. You are only left with the possibility that the tension is equal to the weight. Both masses sit still perfectly content to be at different heights.

What I loved about this moment was the following:

(1) Being a scientist in this moment was not about knowing the right answer, but rather about pursuing reasoning to help settle a matter.

(2) The person holding us accountable to rigorous reasoning was, in fact, the one with the wrong intuitive prediction. The person who was confident of the right answer was actually briefly convinced further of their answer by incomplete reasoning.

(3) While everyone at the end was convinced of the correctness of final reasoning, the student with the initial wrong prediction wanted to see it to believe it.

That’s a lot of science in there–argumentation, application of newly learned scientific tools to settle disputes, offering and critique of lines of reasoning, and insistence of empirical support for theoretically drawn.

In intro physics, after exam one, I like to let student give me feedback about how class is going. That feedback is about what happens in class. After exam two this year, I want them to think more about themselves and how they are spending time outside of class. So, here are today’s clicker questions: Am I being to confrontational?

 

I read the lecture material

A. before class, annotating the text to enhance learning, taking notes for myself about what I do and don’t understand.

B. ahead of time, but not close enough to really learn or be prepared for class.

C. Eventually, but never before hand. I don’t really stay on top of it.

D. Not really ever. I maybe just skim it eventually for formulas and to look at solutions.

 

I work problems…

A. Regularly from the end of the chapter, taking note of what I am doing well on and what needs improvement.

B. Sometimes, but not regularly enough or in a way that’s useful for me learning.

C. Seldom, but only really in the days leading up to the exam.

D. Not much at all. I just look at solutions.

 

I apply for reassessments

A. Regularly to get extra opportunities to practice and to get feedback on how I’m doing.

B.  Sometimes, but I wait too until it’s too late and don’t do it often enough.

C. Never, but I want too. I’m too disorganized in my life to remember.

D. Never and I don’t even think about it.

 

I read about the lab activities

A.  Before class, so my group can be efficient in how we spend out time. This gives our group enough time to nearly finish the lab in class, so there isn’t too much left to do outside class.

B. but only in a glancing way, so we end up wasting time in class not understanding what the lab is about. We never finish lab in class, and we are left with lots to do.

C. Never before class. I’m almost always confused about the labs.

D. Wait, we can look at the lab activities before class? Wait, the syllabus shows a schedule of what labs were doing each day?

 

 

A. I read the appendix of the lab activity book to learn about uncertainties, graphing, and how to linearize graphs.

B. I have looked at the appendix, but I don’t put in the effort to learn from it. I sort of blame the text for being confusing.

C. I know that there is an appendix, but I haven’t really looked at it closely.

D I didn’t even know that there was appendix.

 

I have met with Brian

A.  On multiple occasions when I didn’t understand something

B. The week of the exam.

C. Never, but I always say to myself that I should

D. Never, and don’t even think about it.

 

I have…

A. Been to free tutoring on multiple occasions.

B. Gone to free tutoring once.

C. Never been to free tutoring.

D. Not been aware of free tutoring.

 

When Brian gives us choice in class,

A. I’m always using that opportunity to practice extra challenge problems and questions he gives us.

B. I sometimes scramble to finish an old lab and sometimes get a chance to practice.

C. I’m always scrambling to finish old work, and never get extra chances to practice learning in class.