Benedikt and I went and videotaped Chris's class today. We didn't observe the class while it was happening (too distracting), so I am just here to record the rest of what we observed.
Chris teaches at McClure Middle School, which is right up on Queen Anne (we walked from SPU). Queen Anne is a nice urban neighborhood. The building is not new, but is well-kept, and the classrooms seemed well-equipped (by public school standards... the computer lab had eMacs, if you remember those). The students were an orderly and pleasant bunch, more ethnically diverse than I would have guessed (still majority white), and had that nutty range of heights that you only see in middle school. I did not see a single cell phone. Maybe they are not allowed.
The classes we taped were 6th grade classes, and today they were doing electric circuits. Chris has three of these classes in a row, 49 minutes each with a three-minute passing period. She did not allow us to tape the middle class, which apparently includes a bunch of very distractible students. Indeed, those students discovered the microphones taped to the insides of the desks, and (as Chris told us later) they did nothing else for fifteen minutes but look for more things. I feel bad that we caused a disruption. The other two classes were relatively uneventful, fortunately, and when we peeked in, we saw groups of four students engaged in plenty of science discourse. I am optimistic that we'll get some useful episodes.
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