A Story About Weather and Teaching

Cross-posted from William H Calhoun

Physics as Story

I think of physics as a kind of story. It's actually a huge collection of stories, the result of working to understand every physical phenomenon under the sun (and beyond). In the physics classroom I am therefore a storyteller, and I endeavor to help my students become better physics storytellers.

Certainly in physics there's a specialized vocabulary that can be assembled into stories, but I also think of graphs, diagrams, and even equations as kinds of story. As with any good story, there is an art and a craft to both the understanding and telling of physics stories. Physics stories just happen to be demanding in particular ways.

High school students already know how to tell many kinds of stories. I teach juniors and seniors, and they tend to tell certain kinds of stories about the events in their lives. For instance, many of them have begun driving cars, or are about to, and there is a lot of interest in and concern about driving. Some have already had scary experiences and close-calls; few have an accurate understanding of the physics of what they are doing. A natural entry point, then, is to ask them about their driving experiences. Various instructional activities give them the opportunity to refine and change their stories. If a student can tell a solid physics story, by whatever means, to whatever extent, then that student is demonstrating learned knowledge of physics.

A Worksheet as Storytelling

An instructional tool I have used for a long time is the vocabulary worksheet. You know the kind - there's a word bank, and you fill in the blanks to complete the sentences. But my worksheets have a different twist. Most of the words in the word bank are used several times. Each blank is numbered, and if a word fits the blank, it fits all the blanks with that number. This allows me to avoid writing disconnected sentences with only one or two blanks. I can write a coherent paragraph, a whole short story. Sometimes toward the end of the worksheet the sentences are mostly just blanks waiting to be filled in. The repetition of words and phrases becomes an important part of adjusting to the new vocabulary.

After everyone finishes, we read the worksheet out loud, one student per sentence. Sometimes we'll go around the room twice. If there are diagrams or equations at the bottom of the sheet, interpreting them is part of the reading. The students really enjoy the challenge, even by the end of the year after we've done two dozen or so of these. Here's one:



These worksheets can be difficult to construct. I have written an Excel spreadsheet that helps me construct them. It allows me to just write the sentences as naturally as possible, while it keeps track of the blanks and the numbering and the word bank. You can download one here. You'll need to Enable Editing, and then Enable Content. Then click on the button labeled "Help."

The Story of Weather

So what about the weather? I have a few favorite physics topics, and weather is one of them. The problem with broad topics like this in the physics classroom is that students are struggling to learn the basic concepts and tools, and weather is a really complex topic. Still, whenever there is a good opportunity, I'll try to link some aspect of weather to whatever we're working on.

The topic of heat and heat exchange is central, for instance, to weather. Before students can begin to comprehend this story, they need to master some basic ideas and vocabulary about heat. In my classes, this work tends to happen toward the end of the school year. If I have a class that seems ready, and there's a bit of time in the busy end-of-year schedule, I have a special worksheet for them.

Or rather I've been planning a special worksheet for which there keeps being not enough time to finish and use. Not enough time for the last two years. This year, because I knew I had the students who could benefit from it, I really hustled to finish this special worksheet.

I started with a simple but long vocabulary worksheet which tells the story of how the interaction between the atmosphere and the sun's radiation results in a rainstorm. The worksheet is simple because there are only six words in the word bank! But there are 20 sentences. After I finished the basic worksheet, I got the idea to use diagrams of the entire heat process that would parallel the sentences. I used diagrams from the National Weather Service's lovely tutorials on weather called JetStream. I edited the diagrams with Photoshop, and then used Adobe Acrobat Pro to assemble my worksheet.

I decided to split the page vertically and have the running vocabulary/story part on the left half and the images on the right half. I then put fill-in blanks on the diagrams which corresponded to the vocabulary. Normally my worksheets are black-and-white, but I decided to keep the images in color and to print the worksheets using a color printer. This emphasized the "special" aspect of this worksheet (and the students who got a worksheet all said "Ooooh, color!")



While the students were working on it, I looped a time-lapse video on the SmartBoard that showed a collection of rain-clouds billowing way up into the atmosphere. It was the last vocab worksheet of the year. As usual, we read it aloud once everyone finished.