Fifth Week

This week continued to reinforce the ideas that I have previously expressed. Most of the work that we did this week was for the digestion test that I helped develop. We ran it a couple times and each time presented new problems. I looks like I might not be here long enough to see the benefits of this experiment. I would consider this whole experiment to be very inquiry based, from its development to its practice, and the biggest thing I noticed in terms of bringing this process back to my classroom is the enourmous amount of time it has taken, at least when put in the perspective of class length, school year and the amount of ideas that are required to be taught in a given year. I think that because of different pressures, we aren't likely to let students in the process of an inquiry experiment finish. Maybe some students finish or reach a point where they can use the data to support the concept being covered, but each lab group could be different in terms of completion time, problem solving ability and different problem events that might occur for one group and not another. I think it is hard to do real science in the timing systems in place in school now, but I think this experience has helped me prioritize what parts need to be done and I can work at fitting them in the current timing system or look into different timing systems.

Fourth Week

At the beginning to the week, we had a meeting to discuss how projects from other divisions of Kemin are progressing and it was interesting to see how the different parts of this large company communicate with each other. Most of the week we continued to do tests for another lab to help them acquire data.

We also continued to work on the development of the digestion experiment that we would be running next week. We had a couple meetings to get ideas together and to problem solve. It was fun to be part of it. At the end of the week, I got to help write the protocol for the experiment and it really seemed to mean a lot to me by the time we got to that point. From getting ideas from literature, to the handful of brainstorming meetings and finally to put it all together on paper for the first trial of the experiment. I expect it will have changes that will need to be made and problem solving that will need to be done. I've learned enough this summer to know to expect this and I'm look forward to working on it.