A recent facebook status of mine, for lack of anywhere else at the time to discuss it: “is contemplating guided student-led interrogation-based science curriculum in the upper elementary grades, wonders why it isn’t done more, and wants to examine the NY state science exams to see how it could be applied to our test-based curriculum…”
Thoughts?
I considered this mostly as I was committing my own little experiments in the kitchen. Does anyone remember cutting up the potato and suspending the pieces with eyes over water with toothpicks? I had to cut cups down to fit the pieces, and was just crossed with a slew of simple questions:
How much water? Is more better or less? Is it better if they’re closer or farther? What if the pieces are bigger or smaller? Do all the parts without the skin have to be in the water? Do they rot otherwise? What about how much light they get? Will they grow faster in water or dirt? Will they do better this way or that way?
You have to wonder how many questions a student could come up with if you offer them some new scenario and a chance to think on their own. Has anyone tried this more student-guided method of teaching?
I always thought it would be especially and essentially useful in something like the sciences, where we seem to have trouble holding students’ interests as it were.
What I would really like to do, now, is sit down with the NY State mandated curriculum, the things we need to teach because they need to know them because they’ll be on the tests. And I want to restructure an entire curriculum based on student inquiry and utilizing students’ natural curiosity for things, instead of trying to suppress it to teach them.
I wonder if this could be a graduate dissertation.
My problem is, now, that I have a very vast topic on which I was considering doing my senior thesis — that’s still in the works and I can’t say much more about it yet until I sort out my ideas.
For anyone who’s done one or is doing one or is a professor or the like: What does a senior thesis mean? What does it do? What is its aim, its goal, its purpose? Is it something that guides your ideas later on? Do others look at it for contemplation? Does it really matter to anyone but you and the people who had to grade it? Have the topics come back up later in your lives, in your careers, in your academic careers? And what’s the functional difference between an undergraduate senior thesis and a graduate dissertation?
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