Author: Marianna Ruggerio

Marianna is the Physics teacher at Auburn High School in Rockford, IL. She currently teaches AP Physics 1 and AP Physics C. When she's not in disguise as Nerdy Physics Teacher she is busy at home as Nerdy Physics Mom with her husband Fr. Jonathan and sons Adrian and George.
The Science of Learning Physics: Active Learning part 1 – The Power of a Story
Science of Learning

The Science of Learning Physics: Active Learning part 1 – The Power of a Story

Marianna Ruggerio3 Comments

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

Story-telling as a primary means for learning and passing on information is ancient. In his book Why Don’t Student’s Like School, Daniel Willingham suggests that lesson plans are carefully constructed to tell a story.

This may seem obvious, lessons have a beginning middle and end, and perhaps some sort of conflict that students wrestle with, however in order to truly engage in effective story-telling we must be even more intentional. Willingham suggests the structure of the four C’s: Causality (the connection between information), Conflict (what challenges the student’s thinking), Complications (additional conflicts that arise en route to the goal) and Character (the players in the story and their interactions). The benefits of using storytelling is that they are digestible, since they follow a common framework, interesting and easily remembered. When we frame our lessons as creating and telling a story, we offer the opportunity for our content to be better embedded into our students’ minds.

When implementing story-telling as a lesson plan structure, Willingham advises several considerations:

  • Consider what part of the lesson students are most likely to think about
  • Think carefully about your attention-grabber so that it not only inspires, but engages your students with the intended learning
  • Use discovery learning with care
  • Design the lesson so students must engage with developing meaning
  • Organize the lesson around conflict.

Eugenia Etkina’s Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) cycle of active learning (similar in some ways to the American Modeling Association curriculum) is one of the most powerful tools to turn physics units and lessons into stories. While that this is also a fundamental feature of the NGSS story-line model, as well as Problem-based Learning cycles. In this post I am explicitly using Etkina’s cycles due to their research-proved efficacy in the classroom.

Each of Etkina’s cycles begins with the “attention-grabber” which she calls the “need to know” Take for example, this Pepsi ad:

It’s fascinating to discuss that not only is this possible, but that it’s not even particularly incredulous: his speed at the top isn’t insanely fast. This video as an attention grabber is also particularly valuable because the entire premise of “can it be done” lies in the understanding of physics. Students can picture themselves trying to run the loop and can consider what that would feel like and what challenges might be presented. In contrast, doing a bunch of demos to “wow” students, such as whipping a penny around on a hanger, might be cool but are much more challenging for students to engage in the how and the way.

Etkina’s cycles rely on a fundamental and critical shift in how we approach the teaching and learning of physics. Specifically, that everything we do is framed in a similar context to how scientists work; everything is an experiment. (She recently published some research that highlights the cycles and I strongly suggest it for further reading). This relates to Willingham’s second point of designing discovery (we know it as inquiry) learning with care. As wonderful as inquiry is, it can be all too easy for students to head down inefficient paths if left entirely to their own devices. By framing the learning as a series of experiments with specific end-goals in mind, the teacher acts as facilitator to guide student learning down the path of interest without stifling their own creative thought.

Uniform circular motion comes at some point after forces where students have learned that a force is an interaction between objects and that when there are unbalanced forces, that results in a net force which causes an acceleration. The acceleration is in the same direction as the net force. Circular motion is often very challenging for students because so much of it is counterintuitive to students: enter the conflict. But rather than trying to explain to students (which is totally ineffective, see chapter 2 in Dr. Mestre’s book), students are engaged in a cycle of experiments to construct their understanding.

One of the first observational experiments that can be done is to ask students to get an object moving in a circle. I have seen this done in many ways, from giving students straws and a marble, to getting a students to come up with a broom and move a bowling ball in a circle. (Side-note: I overwhelmingly prefer the bowling ball example because it is much more obvious to the students what is happening) In this observational experiment students should notice two facts: first, that a force needs to constantly be applied, and second that the force is directed in towards the center of the circle. Similar, but different observational experiments allow students to confirm and refine their hypothesis (bucket of water, rollerblader holding a rope). As the cycle continues students eventual construct mathematical models and then begin to test and apply those models to a variety of situations. Here, we see Willingham’s final two points: making and discovering meaning is completely unavoidable through this model and conflict is central to the story as students continuously refine their understandings.

Students construct mathematical models from quantitative testing experiments through Pivot Ineractives

There is a great wealth to learn and discuss about active learning, but what I want to bring your attention to at this moment is how this structure creates a story. This story is not just some instructor-invented story, nor is it some obscure hypothetical problem that may be defined in a PBL lesson plan, but rather it is a story where the student is the main protagonist, and all learning and model development is directly related to the experiments performed in class and their outcomes.

Eugina Etkina is a physics professor at Rutgers and author of the book College Physics: Exploring and Apply. She has a facebook group for teachers to discuss the text as well as her cycles which all all shared to members in the group!

Questions for Consideration

  1. Pick a lesson that starts off “today we’re going to learn about ___” that is then followed by the definition or equation for ____. Can you identify the conflict for students? Can you think of something for a “need to know” attention-grabber that would get students thinking about the conflict before you dive into your lesson? Share it in the comments.
  2. What are your biggest fears or concerns with implementing active learning every single day in your classroom?
  3. Have you used an NGSS storyline or PBL cycle? Talk about the four C’s as they apply (or are missing) from that lesson. Discuss Willingham’s considerations for story-telling learning and how they are or are not addressed.

One of my first posts on this blog was about modeling vs intentional modeling. If you’re new to this idea, this post might resonate with you

The Science of Learning Physics: Teaching Students Expert Thinking
Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

The Science of Learning Physics: Teaching Students Expert Thinking

Marianna Ruggerio4 Comments

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

I also turned this into a talk for AAPT which you can access here

One of my favorite discoveries in my cognitive science journey is the expert vs novice thinker conversation, particularly as it relates to physics. Daniel Willingham discusses this in his book Why Students Don’t Like School, “experts don’t think in terms of surface features, as novices do; they think in terms of functions, or deep structure.”  In Dr. Jose Mestre’s book he talks about an experiment where students were asked to sort physics problems. The experiment showed that novice students tend to sort problems by surface features  whereas the “experts” sorted the problems by the big idea, specifically the major physics concept used to approach the problem. 

Part of what makes physics, as a course, so difficult for all students is the necessity to move towards an expert type of thinking in  order to approach problems. It is an experiment I would love to run formally, but in my experience there is a marked difference between the first 2 weeks of physics and week 10. By week 10 it’s like a switch has flipped for all of the students and the impossible is suddenly possible. Of course, there is no magic switch, rather students have begun to adapt more “expert” ways of approaching problems. 

A really great example of exposing novice vs expert thinking is card sorts. Brian Frank has created an abundance of these sorts and they are amazing to work with. I particularly like the way Kelly O’Shea runs her kinematics exercise with students. First students are given just the graphs and asked to organize the cards in any meaningful way. Every time I do this assignment students decide to organize the graphs based on their shape OR they put all of the position graphs together, velocity graphs and so on. They make little to no connections between graphs (such as a parabolic position graph goes with a linear velocity graph etc). When students are satisfied the teacher realizes she forgot to pass out some cards” and drops label cards. These cards begin to get students to reorganize the cards in order to make the cross-connections. This also gives students a “second pass” with the material.

Ok, so it’s easy to see students acting like students, but how to we get them to think like physicists?

Strategies for Training Students

I love this puck problem below. The premise is beautifully simple. Same force, one puck has more mass, compare the change in momentum.

The novice student thinking looks like this:

  • Change in momentum is mΔv.
  • M is bigger on A, so A has the bigger momentum change.
  • FULL STOP. OR……
  • M is bigger on A and now I need to calculate v (lots of calculations later and fumble around with force).

The expert thinking looks like this:

  1. Impulse is equal to change in momentum.
  2. The force on both is the same.
  3. The mass on A is bigger, so it will take longer to get it to the finish line.
  4. Therefore Ft for A is bigger, so mΔv must be bigger.

Students are in shock by how simple and elegant the expert solution is. But it really just comes from ONE critical shift, pulling out the big idea rather than pointing to where change in momentum is explicitly stated.

AP provides another sweet opportunity to practice this skill and it is embedded in the paragraph-length response. Too often students see the format and just start to free-write. I discuss with them that they need to draft their response, much like a typical essay, but in a physics-friendly manner. They should (1) determine the big idea (2) set up the problem as if they were to solve it (3) Any step along the way becomes a sentence or bullet point towards the answer.

I work with students directly on this skill during classwork. I have a series of energy problems that I love to do this with. I have them whiteboard answers for speed and accuracy and I provide some very specific directions (1) Write your conservation statement (2) Write your proportionality statement (3) write your answer.

AP Physics 1 Multiple Choice: The Exemplar of Expert Thinking Processes

Every year I have a few AP students who are so close to an A but can’t seem to push over the edge. Additionally, I often have a handful of students who, if you were to talk to them, clearly have a solid grasp of the content but they absolutely tank the AP Physics 1 multiple choice items. The beauty…and poison of  AP Physics 1 multiple choice items is their requirement to think like an expert. The questions and responses are immensely loquacious and even though AP provides students with nearly two minutes per item students tend to fall into two traps: first, they are so used to multiple choice being factual items that you either know or don’t know and move and, and second, they try to be so careful that they lose sight of the forest for the trees. After the exam students frequently get mad that the questions were so “easy” or “obvious” “when you explain it” often placing the blame on me for not providing enough worked examples. Instead, we need to shift the narrative and turn the ownership back to the student. We cannot shame them, instead we need to train them on how to better approach any problem, not the 10 on Tuesday’s test.

I have found that having small group conversations with students about this to be highly effective. Willingham further describes in his chapter about novice vs expert thinking that experts have conversations with themselves which allows them to dissect the problem, focus on the important information and test ideas. Novices, on the other hand, rarely do this due to the cognitive load required of them. Having these conversations with my students helps train them in this type of procedure in order to make them more readily do the process on their own. 

We go through the multiple choice items together and I ask them a lot of questions. I ask them to identify the big idea, then I probe them to tell me about components of that big idea that relate to the problem. Only then do we begin to look at the answer options. When you probe about the big idea first, several options quickly show themselves as incorrect. A wonderful example are the multiple choice items that you might label “Newton’s third law”. As soon as a student sees the phrasing how does the force of A on B compare to the force of B on A, the rest of the problem should be irrelevant, whether there are numbers, masses and so on. So if I were working this problem with a student I would ask them to identify it as a force problem, then I would ask them what our class definition of forces is (an interaction between objects) and since a force is defined as such, we can cut through the distractors and identify the correct answer. 

Another strategy I use in my classes is I will literally hand them the exam a week prior to test day. However, I have made one very important adjustment: I take the question and all of the letter options off. Instead, students are presented with a scenario and they have the freedom to discuss with their peers the possibilities for the exam. I do this as an in-class activity, so students are not leaving the room with exam questions. Some students have reported back that this process makes them more anxious for the exam because they come up with exceedingly challenging possibilities, however in the end what it does is it allows students to perform on assessment day at the level they deserve. What happens here is, once again, students are engaged in conversations. They can transform these conversations into self-talk when they take the test. The idea that they have the actual exam in their hand means they know a 100% is possible if they talk to everyone, so they do not waste time working alone.

My tagline on this blog is “infecting students with passion” I definitely try to infiltrate their brains in several ways, and moving them towards expert thinking is one of them. As I tell them often, it’s my goal to get them to have conversations with me in their head when they sit an take the exam so it can feel as easy as a real-life conversation and they can knock it out of the park.

So tell me…

  1. What does expert vs novice thinking look like in your classroom?
  2. How have you tried to model or scaffold expert thinking and practices for your own students?
  3. What are you ready to commit to doing differently when we return in January?

The Science of Learning Physics: Retrieval Practices
Science of Learning

The Science of Learning Physics: Retrieval Practices

Marianna Ruggerio4 Comments

This post is part of a series on the Science of Learning Physics

In light of my recent post regarding the learning and teaching of physics, which is much more than mathematical derivations, I’ve decided to dedicate a series of posts not only to what I’ve learned about teaching and learning, but also how I’ve applied those practices directly to my physics classroom. It’s time for some SciEDUComm 🙂

Often it can be easy to read a practice or idea that sounds good, in theory, but in practice seems difficult or inapplicable to the very specific setting of physics. 

One of the most powerful practices I’ve recently adopted is retrieval in my classroom. 

Pooja Agarwal explains it excellently in her book, Powerful Teaching. Retrieval leverages what cognitive scientists know about memory: that the more frequently we ask students to pull content out, the stronger the pathways become and the more easily they are able to accomplish this task when the summative assessment comes along. 

Later I will discuss how I use these practices together with metacognitive practices to truly bolster student learning. 

The process is rather simple: ask students to retrieve some amount of knowledge
“using only your brain” Pooja explains that this should be preceded by a no-risk, easy-entry warm-up such as “what is your least favorite flavor ice cream” or “would you rather be locked out of your car or your house” the warm-ups have answers that are only correct to the unique student, but not so easy that the answer is a knee-jerk response. 

Then, students are asked “using only your brain” to do one of the following:

  • Write down everything you can remember about __________ or from (yesterday, last week, last unit). 
  • Write down two things you can remember about
  • Write down one thing you can remember about (provide a list of topics)

There are, of course, many other iterations of this and the activity can be as short or as long as you’d like. I would like to discuss two uses of this activity. 

After the first day of reflection I asked students to write just two things. That was it! I collected the slips and we carried on.

On another day, while students were learning refraction, I did the same. However, I set up my room “speed-dating” style and as students moved through the room they added something new to the boards. Eventually the boards were exhausted and by the end of it we had nearly everything on the board that we knew about refraction. 

While this is a good lesson in the power of retrieval, I leveraged this moment to teach another important lesson: the 100% is always in the room. Students had, without my interference, discussed everything they knew about a topic. Too often I find students feeling that they need to do everything on their own, or they limit themselves to their friend circle. However, true collaboration takes advantage of everyone’s strengths. After we completed this activity we dove into the day’s “actual” activity that involved making observations of various refraction phenomena and then describing them.

It may seem at first glance that this process takes up additional time that cannot be sacrificed. However, as I quickly learned, the time spent actually pays off in several ways. First, students have a lot of critical conversations that would otherwise be 30 hand-raises and me going around answering the same question half a dozen times. Next, it put the learning process right in the hands of the students, and they see the pay-off. This leads to students working more efficiently and working more readily together. Thirdly, it makes it clear to students that no one has all of the answers, but together as a class they have everything. 

I also generally enjoy using retrieval as a launch-point for further application and practice of whatever we are doing. While Pooja will explain that just the process of going through retrieval is important, I particularly love using it as a way to build community and confidence before jumping into a new task. I presented on this topic within my school’s small learning communities. The presentation slides can be viewed here

But what about the pandemic?

I was really sad that at the completion of my first unit using retrieval practices, students reported the best test ever and then the state shut the schools down. I have continued to do retrieval in my classes by setting up enough break-out rooms for pairs and then moving students into larger groups. Like most activities online, the process is not as seamless as it is in the classroom, but it still gives students the opportunity to practice retrieval. 

Coming soon…how I used retrieval in my gifted AP class and interleaving.

Not all SciComm is Excellent Teaching
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Not all SciComm is Excellent Teaching

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

Edit 3/11/2023 – For those of you who follow The Physics Girl, she is in dire condition due to long COVID and the development of ME/CFS. Please donate to her patreon. After this post, Dianna and I had a google meets call where we met. I learned that her creator process is much, much bigger than Dianna. Her former AP teacher who helps with her content creation agreed with my post, and I learned that in creating the series there was a delicate balance between the things Dianna wanted to ensure were in the videos and what was demanded from PBS/YouTube. I still stand by the fact that whoever is in charge of production (in this case, not Dianna) should be consulting experts. Period. I still stand by my original sentiments: teachers are experts in teaching, SciComm folks are experts in SciComm. They are related, but they are not the same. We would both be better working collaboratively.

I haven’t blogged recently, but in the midst of a pandemic, when teaching is really hard I take the art and the craft of teaching more seriously than ever. Unfortunately the phrase “those who can’t do, teach” has become a popular motto, bolstered by the way in which teachers are generally treated as simple public servants rather than highly educated and trained professionals. Along with this comes all of the opinions that everyone has about education. The common rebuttal is that just because I’ve been sick doesn’t mean I diagnose and treat myself…I go see the doctor. 

It seems that everyone thinks they can teach, but teaching is hard. Teaching physics is harder. Teaching so students can be successful on AP Physics 1 is arguably the hardest endeavor I’ve taken on. 

So The Physics Girl, Dianna Cowern, has decided that she is going to teach the world physics. Specifically for the AP Physics 1 exam. I have loved all of Diana’s work since I caught her “what is color” challenge video and I have used many of her videos ever since to excite and inspire students. Dianna has a degree in physics, worked and studied at top institutions, she has also done extensive outreach work prior to being a major scicomm personality and has received numerous accolades for her work in education. I love and have great respect for Dianna and her work. Naturally, I wanted to watch her Physics 101 videos to see if they would be a great resource for my students. I’m always looking for good resources, especially right now. 

Sadly, I was completely disappointed, although not particularly surprised. I shared a quick blurb on Twitter and quickly got attacked by random followers of hers. One even asking “as a baseline, what is your physics education” 

Over the years I’ve learned a great way to get a sense of a source’s pedagogy in physics is to check out how they discuss work and energy. You could argue that the whole of science is summed up in this topic. 

In my course, and in AP Physics 1, we start by defining systems. Then we can discuss how work adds or removes energy from the environment to the system and the transfer of energy within the system. We spend several days working with these conceptual models before even touching equations or calculations. Dianna’s video starts by defining work as force times distance. I will be the first to admit that this is exactly how I started the unit when I was a novice teacher! That is part of the trouble, as a novice you tend to teach how you’ve been taught, not necessarily through evidence based research methods (an unfortunate pitfall of too many teacher prep programs). From there, you have to get about half-way through the video before Dianna begins to explain the concept of changes, transfers and reference points. This part of energy is absolutely critical to comprehension, but it is a side conversation without any accompanying visuals or further discussion. Instead, she jumps into the potential energy calculation. 

Another topic that I’ve shifted over the course of my career is forces. Within the #iteachphysics twitterverse we had intense conversations about inertia (thanks Joe) and why the typical phrasing of Newton’s Laws is problematic. When I taught Newton’s three laws formally, I had my students change the words “action” and “reaction” in the third law to “force”. Furthermore, I now define a force, not as a “push or pull” but as an interaction between objects. This is so important because it now becomes really difficult for students to make up random forces. Students love to make up random forces on force diagrams. Fapp shows up all the time, but when you require students to define a force as an interaction and name the objects interacting, not only does the ambiguous Fapp become obsolete, Newton’s third law becomes a natural consequence. 

However, aside from these language and pedagogy criticisms, my problem with Dianna’s work runs far deeper. Physics has the reputation of being too hard for most people to do or understand. Dianna has this incredible platform that has made physics accessible and interesting to so many people. On top of it, she’s not an old white guy with spectacles talking about the secrets of the universe, she’s a bubbly, attractive young woman and she frequently features a diverse range of other scientists in her videos. This is such important work and cannot be diminished. She had an incredible idea to create these videos and they really could have served as an incredible launch point for students interested in physics thinking “maybe I can do this”

Unfortunately, in our nation only 24% of teachers who teach a physics course have a degree in physics. I don’t have the numbers, but I would argue even fewer pay attention to the latest in Physics Education Research and evidence based methods. The biggest challenge in teaching physics is helping students work through the first 6-8 weeks of the course. I am very clear with my students that this is a normal adjustment period that all first-year students of physics experience regardless of age or level of the course. The challenge in physics is that to truly tackle problems efficiently you need to be able to look at a problem, identify the big idea, and then pull out the necessary components about that big idea to apply to the problem. This is what has been defined in the research as “expert thinking” which differs from “novice thinking”. Essentially, a novice will see a problem and try to force it into a previous homework problem based on whatever minutia is presented to them. A great example of this is when my AP students are presented with a graph of velocity vs time of two objects and they are asked to determine if there is an external force. To be completely honest, most students just guess. They typically say “no” because the velocities end up coming to the same place on the graph. The expert recognizes this as an Impulse-Momentum problem. The expert will then find the change in velocity of each object and see if there is an equal transfer of momentum between the two. Asking students to approach problems in this manner has never been required of them before, especially at the high-school level. The only way to get students there is to model the process, and require them to actively engage and wrestle with the material frequently. None of this is about equations. Equations and math are simply the tool. Weaving the concepts together and identifying what is important is the art of physics. 

When I made my initial post I had a lot of backlash from random, non-educator followers of Dianna insisting that physics is math therefore I shouldn’t criticize the math approach in the videos. What Dianna’s videos are creating is a misleading sense of familiarity with equations, but familiarity is not comprehension, nor is it what is required of a physics student. Physics students need to be able to apply and synthesize concepts in order to properly apply the mathematics. I often tell my students that math will never be the hard part of this course. Half of my AP1 students are taking calculus, and the hardest math thing in AP1 is solving a system of two equations! As for familiarity with equations, if that was all that was required to be a great physics student then the equation sheet should serve as a cheat-sheet to success. Teaching physics is truly an art, and I am 100% confident had Dianna reached out to excellent AP teachers she would have had lots of wonderful ideas and support. Once again, teachers are put on the sidelines and our expertise is neglected. 

The M.Ed Journey I Wasn’t Expecting
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The M.Ed Journey I Wasn’t Expecting

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Two years ago in November I sat in one of the large conference rooms at the district office with 19 other teachers, 17 of whom I’d never met before. Dr. Swindle, the program director, informed us that we needed to prepare to commit 24 hours per week to our new studies and reminded us that this wasn’t a free master’s because it wasn’t free to the community or our families.

I was 3 months pregnant and bracing for what I thought was going to be the biggest challenge yet: starting a master’s and delivering a newborn. We left the conference room with a Rockford University coffee mug, excitement and apprehension. Over the next year the 20 of us became family. I delivered George and edited my relevant topic paper in the hospital the following morning. I showed up to class 9 days after delivery and was quickly reminded why we are supposed to take 6 weeks to rest and heal. I thought the most challenging part was over. I had no idea.

In September on the first week of school, our district was hit by ransomware. We had no internet, no printers, no phones, no clocks, no bells, no PA system, no access to years of resources on district servers (this is part of the reason I haven’t blogged) Even still, we persisted in our studies, all the while reinventing our craft and our materials for our jobs. In December 2019 we all attended cohort 2’s research symposium, excitedly supporting our colleagues and talking about our own day soon to come. The ransomware attack had mostly been resolved and we thought we could get back to normal. We had no idea.

By March the University announced classes would no longer be in person and we shifted to zoom, where we remain. Many of us have children at home and having class over dinner time and bedtime is not exactly easy. Meanwhile many of us had to shift and rethink our research projects, now severely impacted by the pandemic. Once again we found ourselves reinventing our craft as we struggled to find effective ways to teach online learners, hybrid learners with less contact time and constantly changing schedules and constant uncertainty about what tomorrow would look like. When I entered this program, I entered with a mindset that I would just “get it done”. Completion wasn’t something to be particularly proud of because getting a master’s is just a thing “you do” as a teacher. All of that has changed. And in the process we’ve been transformed as educators and bonded forever as friends.

Classroom Issues

No, My Day’s Not Filled with Motivation

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

“Well YOU have no problems because YOU have all the GOOD kids”

Look, I have no problem recognizing the sweet deal that is my current job. I love getting to work with students who care deeply about their work and learning. But in the last ten years, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time teaching students who’s current life situation makes a typical high school course completely irrelevant. While many teachers may give these kids many names, they always share one thing in common: they have something in life way bigger than F=ma. While in that role I had to be an adult to connect with, first and foremost. You could argue that this is the job of any teacher, but trust me on this one: if you’ve only worked with motivated kids from solid, affluent homes…you have no. idea.

What does it take and how does it affect the classroom?

  1. TRUST: I cannot begin to describe the lack of trust some of these kids have. When every adult has failed on them, they don’t trust you to be there or stick around. What does that mean for the classroom? Your expectations/procedures/plans are everything. They can see right through your inconstancies. Where my AP kids might run me over for it and make demands to help themselves, or accuse me of not knowing what I’m doing, the “unmotivated” kid sees yet another adult who can’t stand by their word. If you can’t keep your calendar straight, why should they trust you at all? If they don’t trust you the classroom is an unsafe learning environment for them and it’s fight or flight. I’ve seen both the fight and the flight, which generally means shutting down before we’ve even started.
  2. FRIENDSHIP AND EQUITY: If you can gain their trust, the next step is to foster a friendship. Getting to really know these kids is so important. When you get to know them, they start opening up. But be ready. Cause you’re probably going to hurt deeply and cry for them. But here’s the other thing, you know this cartoon?IISC_EqualityEquityYou’ve seen it before. Yeah, that’s important in the classroom too. I had a kid who worked third shift every night. He was dead set on graduating, but there was no way in the world he was going to get his homework done or stay awake during a lecture. I couldn’t penalize him. Working a job out of necessity is the most common thing I run into when it comes to students trying to make it. I’ve had kids with bum alcoholic dads, older sisters raising their younger siblings, and students kicked out of their residence and forced to live outside of town. Folks…NONE of this is their fault. This is about kids trying to do whatever they can muster as the right thing to do who still love their parents, even if their parents are the worst, and still want their parents to love them. Because that’s what kids do. They need someone who is proud of them, they need someone who will tell them “you can keep going” but they also need someone who can say “I see you have a lot on your plate, let’s find a way to make this work”
  3. PATIENCE Yeah, it sounds like the canned response. But let me tell you, you won’t believe the amount of patience it take. I’ve decided that teachers need to read parenting books. In one of my favorites it’s emphasized that as a parent you need to be sure you “respond, don’t react” to your child’s behaviors. Along those same lines, from another book is “chase the why”. It goes something like this in the parenting book. You’ve come from from a long day of work, you’re going through the mail, decompressing from the day, and you see your kid jumping on top of the table yelling. Most of us would react: Get down from there now! And when our kid inevitably says “no!” the situation escalates. You know how it ends, and it doesn’t end pretty. The same thing happens in our classrooms. A student isn’t doing the “correct student behavior” so we snap. If they don’t stop, we get irate, then come the referrals and the consequences. There’s an alternative though: responding. With your kid it involves first and foremost a personal connection, often a physical one, in order to connect with that primal part of the brain. Next, getting to the root of the “issue” by talking to your kid. We have to do this with our students. No, I’m not saying we’re hugging our students that are flipping out…but we certainly can’t explode or escalate the tantrum, and certainly not in front of the whole class. So we take a deep breath, we get close to the kid, we bring our voice down low, and we show our student that we care for them first. It’s freakin’ HARD. But it pays off in the long run.

I was originally going to write this about small successes I saw today in my non-AP physics course. I’m still trying to build a culture of trust, and I saw the sparks today for the first time. But I think I’ll save that for another day.

In My Class Today · Teaching Methods

Day 2: Thinking about Relationships

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Day 1 I run a HUGE physics smorgy: 11-15 demos/lab set ups with minimal directions. Students are told to play, investigate, explore, PAY ATTENTION and ask lots of questions. This is my hook into the class for the year. I’m able to observe the students, act ridiculous and ease the MASSIVE anxiety they walk into this class with.

The next four days we actually spend working with data and relationships. Specifically to build the skills necessary to analyze data on a graph and straighten it when needed. I have a reading I ask students to do ahead of time and then we go through the straightening process. These brilliant students (half of whom are in AP Calc) are completely flabbergasted by the straightening process. It just doesn’t. make. sense to them.

I decided to try something different today on the fly, and it brought about some great conversations. First I put up blank sketches of graphs depicting a linear, squared, inverse and square root function. I asked them to put the graphs on their white boards and write the relationships. The answers consisted of the following:

  • “linear, squared, inverse and square root”
  • y=x, y=x^2 (etc)
  • y∝x y∝x^2 (etc)

This kicked off some great conversations. Are we in agreement, generally, about which is which? (yes). Are the equations really representative of the sketches? (We don’t know, there are no labels or numbers on the axes)

Next, I gave students four statements

  1. “Momentum is proportional to velocity”
  2. “A spring loaded gun is fired upward. The height of the bullet is proportional to the compression squared”
  3. “Velocity is inversely proportional to mass”
  4. “The period squared is proportional to the length of a simple pendulum”

I asked them to label the axes of their graphs with the physical quantities to match the statements. Here’s where the fun began. Students took a lot longer than I had originally anticipated completing this task. Here were the great conversations to be had:

  • In science, we usually put the independent and dependent variables on the x and y axis. With these statements, is it obvious which is which?
  • Since it’s not obvious, are answers where the axis are flipped wrong? (Not if they picked the appropriate shape!)
  • So, we often are going to use slope to talk about relationships. Like, say, if we plotted distance on the y and time on the x what would we get? (speed…minds are blown)  The cool thing is if you plot the graph “wrong” you can look at the units,  and decide if they need to flip because you’d have seconds per meter or something. The important thing is whatever you tell me the relationship is, needs to match your graph.
  • Then, of course, I let them in on the secret: we always list the y thing first. Literally all we are doing in these sentences is taking the math proportions, like y∝x^2 and saying, instead, height ∝ compression^2. It’s like the hugest lightbulb moment for students ever.

Now that they have that substitution thing in their brain, explaining how to straighten graphs is a snap. I was really pleased with the lack of frustrated and confused faces. Last year, I sadly, lost several kids during this unit. I wanted to cry so hard because we hadn’t even started physics and seriously questioned my lesson plans.

Tomorrow they finish their pendulum labs, so we’ll see how this all goes.

Meanwhile, AP Physics C is dabbling in computational physics for kinematics. More on that later.

 

In My Class Today

Day -2 (Teacher Institute #1)

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

It’s WELCOME BACK TEACHERS DAY! For the next two days we get to be immersed in three hour PD sessions morning and afternoon. I was also starkly reminded of the fact that I chose a profession that values, favors and upholds extroversion as ideal.

This morning’s activities consisted of the following:

An all staff competition of rock, paper, scissors, where the winner had to be followed around and cheered on by all the foes they had overcome. I lost on purpose (people love rocks) because I didn’t want to be followed around.

A request that we not only stand in the hallways at passing period, but come up with a greeting for all kids that is uniquely “us” and a competition for the teacher who gets to know the largest number of random students in the hallway that is not their own. I can tell you right now, as a student…I probably wouldn’t be able to survive the school day.

This afternoon I attended a well done session that was intended as an overview to trauma and how it affects students and classroom interactions. We were asked to “discuss with our neighbors” frequently as there were 400 of us in the room from across the whole K-12 district.

We need to remember that nearly HALF of the population is introverted. This means nearly half of our students are, and that many of our colleagues are as well. For those of us who are introverts, school is exhausting on an emotional level that has nothing to do with having a good day. We need to keep this in mind as we plan our beginning of the year activities, and activities throughout the year. Providing both the opportunities to be loud, boisterous and extroverted, but also the time to quietly reflect and engage in deeper, meaningful conversations.

Initially, I pose as an extrovert on the first day of school. After brief introductions it’s a day of physics demos. Students form their own groups and move flexibly from station to station. I do this because I want students to get their hands dirty without having to worry about the social aspect of school on the first day.

I, on the other hand, do a LOT of observation that day. I observe student interactions, I observe who the “outliers” are, who is quiet, who is a leader, etc. I use the combination of their assignment for that activity and their student information surveys to get a bigger picture of who they are socially and academically, and then we begin.

Have a great school year everyone!

I’m going to go take a quiet walk outside now.

 

“Aside from the Obvious Differences, I Don’t Think There Are Any” (Sally Ride 1982)
book review

“Aside from the Obvious Differences, I Don’t Think There Are Any” (Sally Ride 1982)

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Late mornings, leisurely lunches, time to rediscover and enjoy hobbies. These are the best parts of summers as a teacher. All of which are desperately needed in a position that takes literally every shred of your personhood, physically and emotionally for 180 days.

I have a 2 year old, so I’m up up at 5am everyday because the sun is up at 4:30, lunch is a different kind of frenzied fiasco most days, and I’m doing the taxi-mom shuffle back and forth from story time to soccer to birthday parties and playdates. Also, somehow, I’ve spent two weeks horribly sick with first the flu (serious wtf) followed by the worst food poisoning of my life, AFTER escaping the worst flu season of history.

But I digress.

What I HAVE been able to do is READ. Like actually books. Yes, in plural. I’ve read three books so far this summer, and although the days of my youth where I would knock out 200-300 pages in one day are long gone, it’s nice to be able to start and finish something and LEARN along the way. In my adulthood I’ve decided I have no time for frivolity when I read, because there are so many things to learn, so I have a hard time selecting works of fiction. Besides that, real live tends to be far more fascinating. The first book I read this summer was an excellent biography of Louisa May Alcott, which contained far more history on America and the transcendentalist movement than I would have imagined. It was weird, and intriguing and ultimately the story of an iron wrought woman “living in the wrong century” because she wasn’t one to succumb to gender norms of her time.

The latest biography I finished, however, was Lynn Sherr’s Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space.

Very quickly I decided I need to recommend this book to one of my students who is starting her studying in astrophysics this fall, and not long thereafter I feel this is a book all my students need to read, especially my female students.

Our culture praises the barrier-breakers, but rarely praises the person beyond the title. With the recent fame of the film Hidden Figures, I could not help but also have that story running in the background as I read Sally’s.

What do we find with Sally that I feel is so important for our students?

  1. A girl who was raised to follow the things she loved, and encouraged in them regardless of any other thought, concern or bias.
  2. A woman who insisted she was going to be the best at whatever she did. Katherine Johnson echoed this same mentality in her commencement speech last year.
  3. A woman who lived by reality, facts, and hard work. Not a battlecry.
  4. A teacher so passionate about what she did, she was able to convey not only her passion, but her standards of excellence to all of her students.
  5. A woman who felt strongly convicted to civic duty utilizing all of her strengths for the betterment of our nation, but without needing to have a seat in the bureaucracy.

Over the last quarter century so much time, energy and money has been spent trying to “stop up the leaky pipeline” and “close the gap” and “insprire girls” etc etc etc blah blah blah, and, don’t misinterpret me here—I am very much in the club to be a part of the movement.

However.

I also feel strongly that far too many of these initiatives are pushed in the wrong direction. There’s no need to “inspire” girls, and a pink lego set is still gender-normative (and super-restrictive), and if girls are solely being promoted in STEM areas without being truly supportive we run into problems of (1) not really encouraging the growth of future engineers and (2) shunning the boys.

In my personal experience, my absolute best mentors (male and female) were the ones who demanded excellence. period. How you demand that excellence and pull it out of a student and nurture it is going to look a little different for each student, particularly if it’s a male vs female, but it’s not a “thing” the thing is excellence.

Sally double majored in Physics and English, and found that the classes she had to work the hardest at were her physics classes. She wasn’t a straight A student for four years. I can’t even begin to talk about the number of students who decide they “can’t” do physics because an “A” doesn’t come easy to them or they think “physics isn’t my thing” because they have to work at it, but they don’t have to work as hard in any other area. Grit is the defining factor that makes the difference between the movers and the shakers and the folks who settle for mediocrity and less than they are worth.

So many of Sally’s encounters carried many of the same challenges and frustrations we can still find in academia and the workplace today. When greeted by her adviser in college he said, “Well! A physics girl major! I’ve been waiting to see what you’d look like–I haven’t seen one in years!” while this may seem like a kind sentiment, there’s nothing obviously negative, it also is a confirmation of the “weirdness” of being a female physics major. Another professor said, “what are these girls doing here? You are taking jobs away from men!” When I was in college and founded the Society for Women in Physics we made a conscious decision to “flood” quantum physics. On the first day of class, there four of us sat in a row, in our “This is what a Physicist” tee shirts and the professor said “wow, why are there so many girls here”

I loved reading about when Sally  secretly had a meeting arranged with Svetlana Savitskaya, the second woman in space while in Budapest. The Americans were under strict orders not to entertain the Russians, but Sally couldn’t help the connection she shared with Svetlana. Reading about their lively encounter reminded me of when I finally realized the importance of having a network of women in a male-dominated field. Up until that point in college I had a “so what” mentality regarding my love for physics. I think most of us do. We just love it and we don’t really care about being a minority, rather, we just want to be excellent. At the same time, there is so much value in being able to share experiences in a similar manner that can only be done in the circle of sisterhood. It doesn’t define us, nor does it inhibit us, but it is incredibly validating.

At the end of the biography, Sherr details Sally’s 27 year relationship with her partner, Tam. Sally didn’t “come out” until it was in her obituary in 2012, and as Sherr reports, her biggest critics were those in the LGBT community themselves complaining that she should have been advocating. There is no need for any woman’s relationship to define her. A woman is not defined by the man, or woman, with whom who she is most intimate. And a person’s spouse is certainly not their defining factor in their career and achievements. Had Sally lived her story 30 years later I doubt she would have made a big deal of her relationship even in a climate where it is far more acceptable than it was in the 80’s and 90’s. Sally did not discuss her private life or her emotions with anyone, even those closest to her. What was important to her as far as the public eye was concern4ed was how she could advance her mission, whether it be Mission to Earth or encouraging girls in STEM.

To my students: In whatever you do, be the best you can be. If it’s not your thing, at least you’ll know how far you can go before you quit.

I did something I would NEVER do in most classrooms
In My Class Today · Teaching Methods

I did something I would NEVER do in most classrooms

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Anyone I have spoken to one on one knows that my group of AP Physics C students is truly a unique group. They are the kind of group that comes around once every few years and makes your teacher heart soar…so you bring them up with you and cast them off and they fly higher than even you could have imagined.

So I thought I’d try something radical. Work on a skill that was far greater than their ability to do physics. I wanted them to focus on the learning process.

We are starting the Biot-Savart Law. Students need to do the derivations for a line, ring and ring segment of current. The reality is that the math skills are no different from anything they haven’t already seen before. But as we know, often times when students are presented with a new application it’s like everything they’ve learned is back to zero. The reality, of course, is that they lack the experience and mastry to be able to make those connections as we do as teachers. So I assigned the reading several nights ago. I asked students to take particular note of the three examples, and then I assigned the students in groups to one of the three examples.

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The paper they received, however, was not a carbon copy of the book’s example. Because we know what students do when we ask them to read. They skim. They decide they can understand how the author got from step 1 to step end and they move on. But we know if we asked them to do a similar problem they would barely know where to start. I wanted them to actively engage in the material in the text. So I told them they had to prepare their assigned problem to teach to the class, instead of me teaching it.

Students had 2 nights to prepare plus 30 minutes to discuss in their groups the day before. Today was presentation day.

Imagine your first year teaching and that lesson you thought you’d be fine at, so you didn’t quite prepare it the way you should have. That’s what happened. But it was ok because I knew that all of my students would be ok. They challenged each other, they forced the students presenting to slow down, they asked the necessary clarification questions that required the presenters to really think about what they were doing rather than regurgitating text.

After the group had come to the end, I stepped in. I asked the group to step back for a moment so we could summarize (because we all know what happens when we get lost in the details and the mistakes…) I asked the students to explain why we did each step and connected it to what they had seen before. If notes or annotations needed to be added to the board, we added them. Once we were certain everyone was securely on the same page we moved on.

At the end I explained my goals of this exercise  to my students. Not only do I want them actively engaging and learning (and seeing you CAN learn) from the text, the reality is that since they are ALL pursuing STEM majors there is a VERY REAL possibility that they will each be in a teaching assistantship in the next 3-5 years. They are going to need to learn how to teach what they are comfortable with, what they may not have been comfortable with, or something they learned 4-5 years ago. These teaching and communication skills are so valuable and go well beyond the world of academia.

I almost backtracked on this assignment and took over today, but I’m really glad I didn’t. My students once again rose way above and beyond what I expected. Working with a group of gifted AP Physics C students can be really challenging because finding the sweet spot of struggle vs overwhelming is a lot higher than one might anticipate, and in this course I think that sweet spot is higher than even the students realize. But that sweet spot is where the largest amount of growth happens, and I think we hit it today.