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Thank You for 20 Years.

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After 20 years of teaching at Brookfield Central, I am saying goodbye. Although I spent the majority of that time in the physics classroom alongside my learners. That changed for my last 18 weeks. I ended up in a place similar to where I started, teaching chemistry and biology. So, rather than dealing with juniors and seniors at the end of their high school careers, I was in classrooms with freshmen and sophomores still trying to find their place. At the same time, I was learning and teaching a set curriculum I hadn't taught in over a decade. So, we were learning. But, of course, I already knew the content.  The point of this post is to take a step back, take in, and share the gratitude from the last students I had in my 20 years at Brookfield Central High School through the cards and notes they made for me on my last day with them.  I don't take many yay me moments. But after 20 years, I think I'll soak this one in.
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If My Students Are Being Asked to Take Risks, Why am I Playing It Safe?

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When I looked at my first set of AP Physics 1 video projects on momentum, I thought they were very good.  Groups took them into some very unexpected and interesting places.  I'll share more examples in future posts as the inspiration strikes me.  This project in particular struck me because in it I saw the seeds for something greater. In this project, I saw the possibilities for tying together seemingly desperate content areas such as physics, art, and history.

Watch it and hopefully you'll see what I mean:




I realized that all of my students showed great ambition in their projects.  They all took risks both emotionally (acting like a fool because the script called for it) to physical (playing simulating collisions while riding in trash cans and tacking each other in the snow.)  It was me who lacked the real ambition to try to find the ways that this project could truly bring in standards from other content areas.  I can just imagine this video becoming so much more if I had asked the group to include more of a historical framework for the project after an initial viewing.  Why not also tie in standards from the visual arts as well?  The only reason, is my fear of failure.  If I am asking my students to take risks as they design and create their projects, why am I not doing the same in the design of what they are asked to learn? Alright, I'm going to have to do some serious research into other content standards to incorporate.  I will see how they did on these standards, but these scores won't be a part of the grade.  I have to start somewhere.  I already tie in literacy standards into my projects, but what about other areas? Any ideas of a good place start looking for standards in other content areas for the high school level?

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