the teaching life

Last fall I attended a short meeting in California in which a kit-based organization was exploring ways to bring their products into the realm of preservice teacher education. To introduce ourselves we were to share our relationship to the curriculum. I found myself listing all the units I'd used: Earth Materials (grade 3 in Cleveland), Fabric (kindergarten in Cleveland), Air & Weather (2nd grade in Salt Lake City). What struck me about this sharing was first that I had a considerable amount of experience (ALL joyous and enlightening) but also that I had not done this kind of stuff in my current location. So I wrote myself a note that reminds me I needed to return to this. This week, it happened and what a joy.

The reality is that the kit did not arrive so I had to borrow stuff from the physics department. They had only 9 bar magnets but a bunch of cheap little compasses. The morning of the lesson, I decided we'd start with the materials that were in the greatest abundance. All I asked the kids to do was to record observations of the "object" in their science notebooks. They didn't have to worry about using scientific vocabulary. And although they were supposed to feel excited and happy and so on, those did not qualify as "describing words" for their journal. Emotions were important and it was great to hear those being expressed. But not so they appeared in writing.

They witnessed some unexpected phenomena including that the objects felt cold, smelled like metal, and rolled really well. It was when each child received a second compass that things got interesting. My expectation was that they'd put compasses side-by-side and notice how the head of the arrow always pointed toward the tail of the next arrow. But most importantly was when they put one compass on top of the other: the two arrows always went different ways. So I told them about the phrase "opposites attract." And we met the objective for the day even though I was not certain what a reasonable goal was for this day.

The reader will have to trust my claim that the students were interested and engaged in the activity. And everybody wrote observations without too much pressure. When I asked what might be causing the arrows to move, some child ventured that it was a force -- apparently a topic the teacher had been covering. I then asked what kind of force: wind? (nope: they tested that by spontaneously blowing on the compass) light? (no again: shading the compasses didn't change anything). Two faint voices proposed magnetism. I responded by producing the bar magnets and we all delighted by the discovery that the red end stuck to the blue end, but not vice versa. That the bar magnets were too weak to obviously repel was just fine. And we were all delighted and amused that waving a bar magnet over a flotilla of compasses made the needles dance and spin. Not only have I been encouraged to return next Wednesday morning but two giant boxes of equipment were waiting for me on campus today. Quite a life to be having.