OneAndOneIs2

At last, a genuinely good lesson!

In fact, a fairly good day all-round. Two classes at either end of the day, almost polar opposites. The first one, a low-ability high-year group; the second a high-ability low-year group.

The first class is quite challenging because they're not easy to keep them on-track, but because of the way they're doing the course, you basically spend a couple minutes at the start telling them what to do, then wander round the room helping them do it. Which I've done for weeks anyway, so the only difference today was that I talked for a couple minutes. No worries.

The end of the day was a year 7 class - and my main worry with them turned out to be fully-justified. Talk about precocious... In other classes, pupils have spent weeks working on one topic, and then when I tell them to look something up, they just stand around helplessly because I didn't give them the page number to look at. This bunch I was all ready to lead them gradually up to a point that they leapt effortlessly to as soon as I started. Quite a contrast!

But they're a nice bunch and I kept them on-topic and involved. And dizzy.

(I had to get them interested in spin and orbits, so I had them act it out - The 'sun' stood in the middle holding a torch and 'earth' walked around her spinning as he 'orbited')

I had, however, run out of things to tell them about Earth and the Moon about ten minutes too soon. Time to panic..

Or it would have been, if I hadn't prepared for the eventuality!

Good old Xplanet - I remember it from its "xearth" roots and my, hasn't it come a long way since...

I had thoughtfully prepared a bunch of images using xplanet's -output option, so I passed the time showing them images such as "This is the Earth and Moon as they look right now from space" and "This is the second planet from the Sun, can anyone tell me its name?"

They could. Of course. As easily as they could explain phases of the moon and axial rotation.

The lesson ended, and the feedback I got from the teacher who'd been observing was "We'll go through it properly next week, but I enjoyed that" and I have to say, I'd enjoyed it too. It was a nice way to end the week.

Except I have them again on Monday. First thing. For two hours. More time spent on the solar system.

And that's all well and good, but I'm a biochemist! Two hours of physics with that bunch??

I've got some planning to do!!

Thank God I was born a geek... otherwise I'd be completely stuffed ;o)