11.02.07

Featured Teacher: Chris Carman

If you know a high school teacher who really knows how to motivate students to learn about science, email us why they should become our next Featured Teacher.

Chris Carman is a science teacher at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio.  He has been teaching for ten years, and has a Master's Degree in Science Curriculum & Instruction from Kent State University.  He has been happily married to his wife Tara for four years and has a bright and energetic three-year old daughter named Anna.  He collecting old video games and announcing football and basketball games at RHS, and as a boy once burned up a brand new Radio Shack 160-in-1 electronics project kit in less than five minutes.

In My Own Words

One of the most exciting things that has happened and continues to happen to me as a high school science teacher has been participating in making science teaching more interesting to students and applicable to real life.  I recently moved from the southwest corner of Ohio to the northeast, trading in a high-stress job as a technology coordinator at a large urban high school for a more traditional science teaching position in the college town of Kent.  I originally began my career by taking over my father's chemistry and physics classes for a few years before moving into a new information technology career technical program that was so wildly different from traditional education that I had a very difficult time acclimating to the change.

Science classes have traditionally focused on the abstract theories and laws that form the basis of our understandings of the natural world around us.  Ironically, these understandings are usually presented in a confusing way that is similar to how we learned them ourselves: detached and theoretical, with the occasional lab breaking up the monotony.  I've been guilty of this myself as I've worked to try to figure out more interesting and exciting ways of engaging students in science lessons that are logically cohesive and sufficient to prepare students for their next level of study.  So much of my time as a teacher is spent grading assignments, doing paperwork and just trying to keep up with each day's unique chaos that I find it all too easy to fall into the trap of staying safe and comfortable with more traditional lessons.  I believe that's something no science teacher really wants to do, but the reality of our situation often forces us to compromise in order to achieve any measure of success, even if it's not ideal.

Fortunately, one of the great things about teaching is that there's a lot of potential and flexibility for trying out new ideas, and the wealth of ideas and opportunities available to educators has never been greater.  An example of this is the science elective I created last school year called "Supermarket Science", which was designed to be a semester-long course for juniors and seniors who still had to fulfill their science credit requirement, but weren't necessarily interested in or prepared for taking chemistry.  I came up with the idea for the class when I was looking for some more interesting and relevant laboratory activities to use in chemistry to help my students who were really struggling with the material, both due to interest and ability.  I was amazed at the wealth of real-world activities that were available on the Internet and in print, and I was further assisted by our science department, who gladly chipped in books and labs they've saved over the years.  After looking over what was available and spending some time deciding how the course should be arranged, I used some free time during the summer to re-work the labs to be more easily completed by the students in one 48-minute period without being excessively dangerous or esoteric, and I came up with a collection of lab activities that students seem to have really enjoyed so far.

The semester is divided up into individual units based on what I found were reoccurring themes in science labs that involved household products and foods: heat, solutions, minerals, fats, sugars, proteins, vitamins/medicines, soap, plastics, paper and cleaning products.  I also have a few fun labs thrown in at the end of the semester, one of which is tie-dying with natural dyes, a lab that creates all sorts of interesting smells and leaves the students with slightly discolored hands for a day or two.  One of my favorite units is sugars, where we taste-test different kinds of sugars and sugar substitutes, make artificial fragrances in the form of esters, and bake a 'chemical' apple pie that contains no apples yet is quite tasty.  Another one of my favorite units is proteins, because we make white glue from milk, investigate how enzymes work using meat tenderizer and gelatin desserts, and even apply a perm to mannequin heads borrowed from our cosmetology program, which is usually an eye-opening experience to the male students in class.  I'm also a big fan of the plastics and paper labs, because they introduce the processes behind and importance of recycling, something about which I have strong beliefs (more on that later).  But my favorite lab of all is the capsaicin lab, where the students who are a bit more adventurous eat samples of different varieties of hot peppers and attempt to rank them based on their 'hotness' and therefore estimate their placement on the Scoville scale, using milk and its protein casein to dissolve and wash away some of the capsaicin molecules, providing temporary relief from the heat.  Many students have never tried eating a hot pepper before, and a few of them really develop a preference for spicy foods and hot sauces after surviving the lab!

One of the main goals of Supermarket Science was to be interesting and applicable to all students, so I was concerned that traditional teaching and assessment methods that I've used previously might get in the way.  As a result, I designed the class without homework, quizzes or tests, and I couldn't be happier with the outcome.  All of the focus in the class is on three types of activities: labs, of which there are three per week; Supermarket Studies, in which students pick a product from home and do a short write-up and presentation to the class on it; and the semester project, which is a substitute for the semester exam.  For the semester project, students can modify one of the existing labs from the class, or they can design their own experiment (usually a taste test), or they can do one of the labs that I collected when I was designing the course but cut from the final list.  I've been amazed with the quality and originality of the projects that students have developed, mostly because they're practicing real methods of scientific investigation based on the techniques they've learned in class while exploring something that's personally interesting to them.  One student had heard that banana baby food could be used in place of eggs in a cake mix to reduce fat, so she made two cakes - one traditional and the other with the baby food - and had students blind taste-test them and decide which one was more moist.  Another student tested the Diet Coke and Mentos reaction with different types of diet drinks, only to see his project reproduced on MythBusters a few weeks later.  One student, after spending some extra time to finish a particularly long titration during our vitamin C lab, decided to test the levels of vitamin C in children's vitamins and ranked them based on their amount of vitamin C per gram.  One of my favorites of all time was when a student made paper out of grass clippings, which was an absolutely disgusting process that resulted in a surprisingly nice product.

It's important to note that many of the students who take Supermarket Science usually haven't passed Ohio's high-stakes Ohio Graduation Test in Science, so they typically haven't been very successful in traditional science classes, but they love doing labs, and they learn many of the basics of science and scientific investigation without having them taught explicitly.  This is similar to the inquiry method that is all the rage in science education theory, but it's much more closely guided and directed than traditional inquiry because of the time constraints involved in doing so many lab activities in such a short period of time (48 in one semester).  There are some advantages to the open-ended inquiry method of scientific investigation, but my experience has shown me that students will need some basis for what they're doing, and the best way I've found of implementing it so far is both informally during labs by making suggestions while the students work and more formally as the semester project.  The trick is always walking that fine line between having enough guidance so the students aren't frustrated yet leaving it open-ended enough so that they draw their own conclusions.

I haven't been alone with my experiences in Supermarket Science - three other members of our science department tackled semester courses based on their own personal interests and areas of expertise.  Linda Pollack, a physics teacher and former engineer, developed and teaches "How Things Work", which investigates modern technology and products in a manner that's largely self-explanatory.  Kate Kusnyer, a biology teacher with a Master's in endocrinology, developed and teaches "How Your Body Works", which is a hands-on anatomy and physiology course that takes a lot of the memorization out of the subject and focuses on the interconnectedness of systems and their relevance to each student.  Finally, Ben Marquette, a physical science and AP Chemistry teacher, developed our most popular science elective called "Science at the Movies", where popular movie approaches to science and scientific concepts are investigated and supported or disproved in class.  So far, the response to the courses has been overwhelmingly positive; the students appreciate having choices besides chemistry and physics, and several students who had previously decided by their junior year that they just didn't like science are now signing up for higher level courses their senior year.  The response has also affected my Chemistry classes, helping me reorganize the course to be just as rigorous, but more logically arranged to meet student interests.

Although we typically repeat the semester classes with a new group of students, I'm actually in the middle of developing another semester elective that has much more personal importance to me.  This past summer, I participated in a two-week environmental science academy focused on the Cuyahoga Watershed in northeast Ohio called "Igniting Streams of Learning Science" (ISLS) along with five of my students from various classes that I've taught.  My student team, along with nine other teams from nearby high schools, stayed at Hiram College for the entire program and spent nearly every waking moment learning about water quality, stream & wetland health, and related environmental issues by getting out of the classroom and into the streams to take measurements and samples that we would later analyze back in the lab with professors and scientists who were helping to teach the program.  While the entire experience was admittedly a bit exhausting, the impact was tremendous, as my students were determined to bring what we had learned back to our high school in the form of an environmental science class that used hands-on methods similar to those that we experienced in the ISLS program in a format similar to Supermarket Science.  The students have been working on developing the curriculum for the course and aligning to the state science standards, and we were recently awarded a grant from the Kent Environmental Council to help purchase high-tech sampling equipment, like an ozone monitoring device and electronic probes, and to fund unconventional field trips, like a GPS geocaching scavenger hunt in downtown Kent that takes students to various environmentally significant sites.  However we finally end up approaching the class and the topics we'll be learning, it needs to be as experiential as possible to impress upon the students the importance of our environment and the challenges we currently face and will continue to face as a society.  With the climate change crisis, peak oil looming on the horizon and widespread threats to many species, how much and how well we teach our children about their environment and how valuable it is may determine our ultimate fate as a species, so there's obviously tremendous importance in developing a class of this nature (no pun intended).

This brings me back to my original point about making science more interesting to students and applicable to their daily lives.  I believe we're going to continue to see a shift in science teaching away from the traditional methods that we grew up with, namely worksheets and abstract tests, to those that more accurately emulate how scientists actually work, like ongoing experiments with results that are sometimes up for debate and conclusions that rely on collaboration with other student-scientists.  We continue to see a decline in students enrolling in math, science and engineering majors, so a career technical solution may be necessary, allowing students to enter pre-college science programs that have a seamless pathway to a nearby postsecondary institution such as a community college or four-year university.  However each of us decides to take on the challenges surrounding science education in our country, I'm just glad I've had these opportunities to try something different and, with the support of our school and community, I'm sure I'll be able to try more new ideas in the future.

Tags:

+ Add Comment