Energy 2 Day 3 morning summary (mostly about work and pie charts)

This morning they started out by introducing themselves, where and what they taught, whether they had used any energy theater or anything else from last year in their classes, and how it had gone. Several teachers said that they had used energy theater. Several said they had not (in many cases due to implementing new curriculum and having too much to worry about), but that they intended to this year. A few said they had implemented other aspects of the curriculum, such as the algebra project or PET diagrams. A few had adapted energy theater to other topics.

Then they discussed a series of questions about the Van Heuvelen article on work that they read last night, in small groups and large groups. The most interesting and fruitful question seemed to be one about whether you can represent work with a pie chart. My group suggested different methods, such as having work be a slice of the pie, having work be an extra slice in addition to a whole pie, having separate pie charts for work and energy, or having the pie chart change size as energy is added or taken away. In the end they decided pie charts were not a very good way to represent work. Based on Leslie's comments and the large group discussion afterwards, all the groups were having interesting discussions about this topic. Jake suggested having a plate with empty space around the pie.



Leslie thought the work pie chart discussion was really interesting because they were grappling with the limitations of a representation and when it was and was not useful. I saw this and also how it was example of how it can be really difficult to distinguish between a quantity and the change in that quantity, not just with work, but with velocity and acceleration, flux and change in flux, etc. Hunter went in a completely different direction, I think because he saw the central issue as the difficulty of visualizing/understanding work, and said that this was a perfect lead-in to a discussion of metaphor. He asked them to read a section of Lakoff and Johnson on metaphor theory, to lead into a discussion of what kind of metaphor work is. I don't think they got back to work, but they had a lot of discussion about what kind of metaphor time is, and what kind of metaphor learning is. The teachers really got into the metaphor stuff, much more than I expected.