Day 11: That Cardboard Box Problem

The problem that never fails. It couldn’t sound more boring and the discussion couldn’t be more awesome.

Here’s the problem (which is modified only slightly from Matt Greenwolfe’s More Models in Modeling materials; also, which has an original illustration from my student and advisee who is doing an independent study to illustrate our new Physics 10 materials):

And here are some photos from class today. We got about halfway through the consensus on problem 1.

And here’s the email that I just sent to this section about their work today.

Hey there, physics friends,

Please read this whole email. It will only take you a minute or two.

I know I told you in class how great you all were, but I wanted to take a minute to give you more detailed information about the quality of your greatness. Here’s why your work today was so impressive and why I’m so psyched about getting to work with you:

You had so many different ideas, and you were fearless about sharing them.

And you made the room a place where people COULD be fearless about having and sharing those ideas.

You listened to each other talk and considered the ideas others had. You changed your mind when you heard convincing evidence. You wouldn’t change your mind when the evidence wasn’t yet convincing enough.

You asked questions of each other. “Why did you…” (draw the force in that direction, make your graph start there, etc etc).

You spent time trying to make sense of the situation as individuals and as a class.

You got excited about your ideas and the discussion, and you reined the discussion back in when the excitement started to boil over.

You let there be quiet moments, and those quiet moments allowed new voices into the conversation. When someone new spoke up, you wanted to hear what they said.

You were willing to have the same wrong idea as many times as it took until you were convinced of a different one.

You stuck through a confusing and sometimes frustrating problem long enough to make real progress, and you made sure that no one was moving on until everyone was moving on.

And you know what else? This is just September. The idea that we can (and we will!) get EVEN BETTER than what you all were doing today? WOW. I couldn’t be luckier.

We still have more to go, both on this problem and as a class. But what a great place to be.

Good work, team. Can’t wait for Friday.

Yours in physics,

Kelly

Can’t wait for Friday.

(Also can’t wait for Thursday when my other section gets to this problem!)