Back-to-School Car Talk

This week, the first week back after the holiday break, I've had the opportunity to spend three full days in the classroom. Ms. Tran is out of town for the week, so I filled in for her on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. She left worksheets for the students to work on each day, but I wanted to also bring in a technology discussion for the geometry classes. So, I prepared a talk about "the future of cars", as I thought it was appropriate to our location near Detroit, the recent big changes in the auto industry, and the fact that it's now 2010 and all of my friends back home were asking me on New Years where their flying cars are.

I started by discussing hybrid cars and their benefits and how they work, then moved on to electric cars. With that, we briefly discussed where the electrical energy actually comes from, realizing that most of it comes from fossil fuels anyway and thus it isn't all that much "cleaner" than conventional gasoline cars. I then went on and showed them the UM solar car and talked about the interdisciplinary project and the 2500 mile competition. Many students commented on the safety of this car, which is a huge drawback and reason why we don't see things like that on the road - so I compared the solar car to a Ford Taurus just to show some of the important differences that make a Taurus much more practical than the UM solar car. I ended with a slide each on fuel cells and flying cars - I had found a new article discussing the US military's recent interest in flying cars, so we talked about the benefits and practicalities of the concept of flying cars. This was a rather long discussion, so I split it across Monday and Tuesday.

Second, third, and sixth hours all did very well with this discussion, and they were respectful and listening for almost the entire time. Fourth hour, however, had problems. I had even prefaced it on Monday by asking them whether they would rather have a discussion on cars or just start the classwork, and the consensus seemed to be that they wanted to hear the talk. Since I gave them the option, I figured that they would be respectful of me, but that just wasn't the case, and there were several conversations going throughout the class. I tried to ignore them and I tried stopping and giving "the look" until they stopped, but as soon I started talking again it was like I opened a floodgate to talking again. So, after this happened a couple of times, I just stopped. I said, "Okay, I can't do this. You can work on the classwork for the rest of the hour." After some initial protests, it actually seemed to suit all but one of the students fine (although several of the students didn't even touch the worksheet and just socialized for the entire class period). I didn't even try to resume the discussion with this class on Tuesday, and I'm not sure that I want to even try with this class in the future. They have always given me a hard time, and with all of the different approaches I've tried, I just can't find a way to get through to them. Perhaps my efforts will be more efficiently spent just helping these students with classwork and homework.

On Friday I didn't have a talk prepared, so I gave them the hour to work on their classwork, while I walked around and answered questions. I asked at the beginning of 2nd hour whether they thought the car talk from Monday and Tuesday was interesting. Only two people responded - one with a quick "no" and another with a "somewhat." This surprised me, because they seemed interested and almost all of them paid attention for the two twenty-minute-ish sessions. So I asked them what they'd like to hear about in the future, and the only response I got was "bombs" (which I do plan to talk about, as I did research on explosives as an undergrad). Sixth hour had several people say that it was interesting, but still at least one said "no." They gave me a couple of suggestions, and I'll try to address their interests in the future, but I'm realizing that I can't please everyone simultaneously (and there are some people that it seems like I can't please at all!).