16.2.10

My Snow Days


I am a science teacher. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that to you all few times.

We've been off a bunch the past two weeks due to record snows in the area. I've been able to catch a couple of episodes of Charmed - two were ones I hadn't seen before! Heck, it's snowing right now and my street is snow covered making me wonder about my chances for school or at least a two hour delay tomorrow. Crazy stuff...

Anyway, we've spent the last two days at Casa de Calen shut in and working on the oldest's science fair project. He designed an experiment changing the masses of the balls in Newton's Cradle to see the effect of mass on reaction time. He's got two other partners and he's been telling me all along that the work's all be split up equally.

Interestingly, it was not. He wrote the entire thing...He spearheaded all the work times and organized when everyone needed to get their portions completed. He asked his father to make the apparatus you see at the top of this post - three versions, for the three different masses. He asked me to have the boys over when they were having trouble isolating their question.

The project is due tomorrow. I was out of town this weekend so I couldn't help him work and the other two boys met to work on their portion of the project and my son couldn't attend because we couldn't get him to the meeting with the kids. According to my son, those kids got all their work done and he was all nervous about his part of the deal.

So we started working on it yesterday. It wasn't like we were going anywhere...and then I found out what he had assigned it to himself to do and what he assigned to the other boys. The oldest had only allowed the other two boys one assignment each. One of the boys was allowed to do the "materials and methods" and the other was allowed to make the tables and graphs. Great delegation, I know.

So...I asked him about it. Why didn't you guys split up the work a little more evenly? Why are you writing everything? Why are you in charge of buying the trifold?...and putting it together?

The answer surprised me...because I didn't trust anyone else to do it... Really? You're the one with control issues now? You're the one who needs to make sure your fingers are in every part of the assignment?

Wow...didn't see that coming. He actually took charge and did the entire thing himself. He was even angry with me when I said glue would work instead of rubber cement - that wasn't going to be good enough for him. He apparently has standards for his own work.

I know...I'm blown away.

4 comments:

Grace said...

Story of my life!

PHSChemGuy said...

Many of us live there...and it's kind of cool that the eldest is starting to show that more than the semi-slapdash quality of work that you've described from him in the past.

calencoriel said...

I know...but he was the last person I expected this from. Although, I guess I should have recognized the signs this summer when he said he'd rather be starting the game at pitcher than at shortstop because then he'd have more control of the outcome of the game...

achilles3 said...

I think it's just cool that he took the context of the people in his group and said "well looks like I'm the man here". important skill for sure