First Day of Class

What a day, what a day. First of all, I feel our introduction and collaboration with the students/teachers during the morning was very helpful. I spoke with Tomme, Nicole, Todd, and Christine. Todd isn't the most outgoing from what I could tell but he can be very task oriented. At one point during the "Rights/Roles and Responsibilities" exercise Nicole and Christine became side tracked from the work and began chatting of personal matter, and Todd in response semi-politely interrupted by saying, "One responsibility we could put would be staying on task," while gesturing towards the white board. Nicole is very outgoing and willing to take control of the situation right off the bat. For Tomme and Christine I was unable to get an idea of their habits.
After coming back from lunch I was in for a brutal lesson in the importance of coming back early. The student that previously had worn the mic during the morning session left the mic on the table while they went out into the lobby to practice their energy theatre. This left Ben and I recording the same group which in a way was somewhat helpful but not quite as productive.
The groups then present their Oscar winning Energy Theatre routine. They are showing the energy transfer of a gymnast on a spring board. What I really thoroughly enjoyed for some strange reason is that even though the task had rings to represent the different points of energy transfer one group thought outside the.... rings (Oy vey). For the transfer of energy into heat during the gymnast's routine one of the students would remain in the ring that that particular energy would be present in and after a minute or two would step out of the rings. Doing this represented the energy going into the rest of the universe.
I am really interested when students or people for that matter bring in more advanced ideas than was expected or when they stumble onto significant ideas during their tasks.
I wonder what impact would giving a Middle School student literature on the ideas of special relativity or quantum mechanics have on how they think or go about solving problems. This sort of learning is what drove me towards the unrelenting world of physics. I had no scientific background but I wanted to be smart like Einstein (now it's more like a combination of Einstein, Feynman, Tesla, and Chuck Jones). So I went out and read books to do with time dilation, relativity, and all these amazing ideas that not only encouraged me to keep trudging through my work but it also showed the importance of things like simple algebra.