Herding cats

Written 11/26/09

I have been trying to do as many hand-on things with my physics students as possible. My supplies are basically just what I can find around the island. Fortunately, you can do a surprisingly large number of things related to physics with just rocks, sand, water, coconuts, and clear plastic bottles. During one class, I brought my students outside to where there’s a bunch of sand so I could explain pressure to them. I showed them that things with more pressure sink more in the sand and let them see how the area of contact affects how much you sink in the sand. I thought it was a pretty good idea.

Of course, any time I move students from one place to another, it is, as Morgan so eloquently described, “like herding cats.” Some run on ahead, some linger in the classroom for a few minutes, and some just b-line it for the dorm. The first two of my three physics classes went alright. It took us a while to get over to the sand, but we made it there and back in one piece and I think they might have even learned something. During the third class, however, I almost lost everyone.

All it took was one fellow JHS teacher to get my cats to scatter. As we were leaving my classroom, he was walking by in front of it. Before I knew what was happening, he had whipped out a stack of papers and given them all to one of my students to hand back to the rest of the class. Then he was gone. Getting papers back, of course, makes every student instantly absorbed in their grade and comparing answers. Considering that my “lecture” out by the sand really only consisted of about two sentences, having everyone’s nose buried in their papers would make the entire trip useless. Fortunately, as soon as I saw what was happening, I stopped the student and told him to hand them back at the end of my class, which he did only after checking out his own paper’s grade.

The tough part was there was no one to get angry at. The student was just doing what the other teacher had told him. The teacher was long gone, and might not have thought that my class was actually doing something (moderately) learning-related outside in the first place. And what really gets me is that there was no possible way he could have pre-meditated this. He must have just *happened* to have finished that particular class’s papers and be walking across our path at the time. He didn’t even have a bag with him. These papers must have been just tucked in his back pocket or something. Truly an extraordinary set of circumstances.