One Teacher's Texbook-Based Course

I visited this private school a slight drive outside of New York City on a rainy day, and I got a little wet wandering around the campus for a while. I had to ask three people for directions before I was able to find the science wing. My point is that this school is well-equipped, and their campus is BIG and beautiful. The school is not predominantly a boarding school, but some students (and some teachers) live on campus. There are about ...

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Conversation with a Friend

Last Friday night at 1am (!), I ended up having a conversation about science teaching with a friend of mine who lives in DC. She is working for the American Engineering Association on nation-wide campaign to change people's views about what it means to be an engineer. Essentially, the AEA sees much-reduced enthusiasm for the profession, and they're trying to do something about that by changing the public attitude. When our nation's brightest potential physicists and mathematicians spend their time bringing the world's financial system to its knees rather than, say, solving the world's energy ...

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Modeling PF in a New Jersey Public School

The head of the science department at this public high school in New Jersey was one of a few people in my area who responded to an open request I sent out to the physics first listserve in the spring of 2010, and I'm very glad he did. The program at this school was exciting to see, and it is a rare example of a large public school that's been able to institute a successful physics first program at multiple skill levels. The program is an excellent example of successful Modeling Instruction, and students have shown significant gains on diagnostics tests and an increase in upper-level ...

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Student-Designed Experiments in an All-Girl School

This post describes my visit an all-female K-12 school on the upper east side in Manhattan. The school is small, with a class size of about 60 students in each grade, 15 students to a classroom. I spent most of a day at the school, and sat in on two ninth grade physics classes, one senior level AP-style course, and one student-teacher interview about an independent research project. What follows is a rough account of what I saw during my visit, and my impressions of what the program seemed to emphasize. The teacher I spent most of my time with took a great deal of time out of his ...

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Introduction

Though I've been working on these observations since September, I'm just now getting around to creating a public record of these observations! I apologize for the delay! Much of the information here has been copied directly onto the "What's this Project?" page, so I'm sorry for the redundancy.First, some background: My name is Joe Kremer. I have a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Russian Language from Oberlin College, and I worked teaching physics ...

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