never mind the optics

I’ve heard people talking about “dead time” recently. It’s defined as the time between pupils choosing their course options for the next few years and the end of the current school year. The problem is that you end up with kids in your class who are not going to be taking your subject next year (for whatever reason) and whenever you try to motiviate them to work, they remind you that they don’t need/want to do your subject next year, so why bother?

Well, it bothers me. The way I see it, it makes little difference whether a pupil is taking my subject next year or not. Those who are will start their new course in June, those who are not don’t need to be dragged through what is left in the curriculum, all this does is switch them off to the possibility of picking your subject up again in later years.

Last year, I used the “dead time” to work with my low ability S2 class to produce a series of short films, each showing a small group performing an experiment (they all chose an experiment that went bang!) After filming, editing and producing a compilation DVD, they voted on their favourite script, effect, experiment, camera operator, scientist, etc. and awarded prizes at a “Science Oscars” ceremony.

Being the new boy in our department, I have the bottom S2 science set again this year. I’ve taken my inspiration for this year’s “dead time” from a Curriculum for Excellence meeting I attended back in November – a group of physics teachers and university researchers got together to start work on a set of resources supporting the introduction of optoelectronics in the draft science outcomes. We were looking at cross-curricular opportunities, linking physics outcomes on light into the chemistry/biology outcomes, and someone suggested an investigation into the response of plants to different colours of light. So that’s what my S2 class will be doing this year.

We have propagated some geranium cuttings from the school greenhouse and are getting ready to grow them on under single colours of light. I persuaded my PT to part with some cash and I’ve bought a supply of ultra bright blue, yellow and red LEDs. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to show some of the class how to assemble a circuit on prototyping board before we move on to soldering next week.

One of the things I am really looking forward to is the chance to give the class an opportunity to try soldering. Everything we do with circuits in school is based around the ubiquitous crocodile clip, a component designed to allow teachers to move quickly from one circuit to another with little thought for giving pupils the skills they might need if they decide to follow a career in electronics.

When I asked the teams to develop success criteria for their experiment, they told me it was important to know if the plant had grown. They came up with a range of ideas and settled on three different measurements; plant height, leaf size and “greenness”. While my classroom is fully quipped to deal with height and “size” measurements, I’m not so sure about the determination of colour. The kids came to the rescue with a suggestion to make their own “paint chart” to compare the shades of green, so that’s another task for tomorrow. It’s going to be a busy 50 minutes and that’s before I introduce our new wiki for recording our progress!