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.
I'm going to keep the text of this blog short because the real action is in the videos in the Storify below! Today was our final collaboration with Angela Patterson, Kate Sommerville, and TEAM Togetherness of the year. We decided to take the marble roller coaster project we do over the course of a week in AP Physics to study conservation of energy, rotational motion, and centripetal forces and bring it to the 4th graders. In order to scale down a 5 day activity into a 2 hour time frame, we changed the ultimate goal just a bit. The design challenge for the teams was to build a marble coaster which had 3 obstacles. Obstacles could be hills, loops, jumps, or corkscrews. Each team was made up of a group of 4th graders and 2 - 3 AP students serving as coaches. The role of the coaches was to Help complete the team’s vision and stay within the rules. Aid in construction and making the 4th graders' design ideas a reality. Let the 4th graders fail, help the...