Post from Tom on 9-27

In her post Deb brought up the idea of having a safe enough environment for students to get into full participation, I am finding that this is not the easiest thing to accomplish. I feel like I am always trying to help students dare to voice their opinions or questions. I did have a good experience yesterday in physics, we had gone over newtons first law and I was hoping they could derive the second. I had them hanging weights (variety of
force) of the table to accelerate a car at different rates. The entire
class was engaged and trying to find out how to better their experiment. I
the end they plotted their data and did come up with F=ma while I probed them with questions. Honestly, I think they were a bit weirded out, I heard one of the girls comment to her neighbor, "wow, he really gets excited about this doesn't he" But that's ok, I was exited.