Teaching and Learning – Max

My Senior Project consisted of two main components, a teaching component and a learning component. For my teaching component, I was Preethi’s teaching assistant for her 10th grade physics classes. For my learning component, I attended Kelly’s 11th grade Sustainable Energy class and conducted an individual research project on lasers, specifically laser cutters. These components worked together to answer my essential question because doing these things provided me with an opportunity to learn about a new topic while teaching others, and I was able to observe how, if at all, my learning/study habits and abilities changed due to the possibly different mindset of teaching as opposed to the mindset of just being a student. This project challenged me because I am often uncomfortable around people who I don’t know, and working with 10th graders pushed me out of my comfort zone in this way. Additionally, it challenged me academically because I have never done a research project completely independently without a teacher being involved in the process. This project built on my prior learning and knowledge in two ways. First, more generally, my prior experience in the Physics 10 class and physics overall. Physics is my favorite subject in school, and I have learned a lot about it during high school, which gave me a strong foundation for helping to teach 10th graders, especially since I had already taken the Physics 10 class and still have all my notes. Second and more specifically, my 11th grade science course gave me prior knowledge in regards to my research component. I took the Physics II: Waves class last year, which gave me a strong foundational understanding of properties of waves, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the basics of how lasers work. Having this prior knowledge allowed me to have a strong start for the research project I conducted. Finally, this project incorporated one if not two of the 4Cs. First was critical thinking, which I needed to have in order to conduct a thorough and well researched project on lasers, and second was courage, which I needed to have in order to step out of my comfort zone in order to interact with and teach people who were not familiar to me.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my Senior Project. Every single aspect was an utter joy from beginning to end, and I learned a TON while doing it!

First, some answers to my essential question. Teaching has affected my learning in several positive ways. Seeing how others process knowledge, especially when I am one of the people who is responsible for conveying it to them, has made me more aware of my own learning processes since I was able to observe them in others. It really helps to follow a deliberate order of ideas to be able to get the best understanding out of a learning experience. That way, one idea feeds into the next and so on, allowing you to not only learn from the new info you’re getting at each step on the way, but your previous knowledge can teach you by connecting dots for you. The second step to that is backtracking whenever you run into an idea you don’t know, following that path to get all the base knowledge and context you need before continuing. Having a mindset of teaching whatever I was learning to others, like my parents, during senior project made me more motivated to learn things. Normally, I’d just learn things for myself, and even though I love to learn, curiosity alone isn’t a particularly active motivator, and the extra boost of feeling that others might depend (at least to a small degree) on the knowledge that I have to gain kept me fully invested in going as far and as carefully as I could during my three research weeks on lasers. Finally, when I explained what I knew to others, be it momentum and forces to 10th graders or lasers to my parents, it was like studying my notes in a way; going through what I knew out loud and analytically really helped me to understand it better. For example, when explaining how to read net force vs. time graphs to one of my tenth grade sections, afterwards I had a better understanding of why the formula for finding impulse and the area of a net force vs. time graph were related. I don’t doubt that I knew that in 10th grade when learning it for the first time, but I feel that now it has been more solidified and it’ll stick with me for longer.

Second, my research project. I learned a TON about lasers, so much so that somehow I had enough to write a 19 page paper on it, and I even left some stuff out because it didn’t quite fit into the rest of what I was talking about. So in this post I’ll just mention a couple of the things that were particularly interesting to me. First, laser cutters don’t actually cut anything. They transfer energy to the atoms or molecules they’re targeting, increasing their temperatures extremely quickly and causing a phase change from solid directly to gas. Second, lasers used in tattoo removal are SUPER interesting. They have a wavelength that is more easily absorbed by the granules of dye used in tattoos than skin, and as such they only operate in extremely brief pulses, so as to minimize the risk of skin damage since the skin still does absorb them. The pulses heat up the granules of dye under the skin, vaporizing only part of them. However, the temperature change happens so fast that it creates violent shockwaves in the granules, shattering them into tiny pieces, making it easier for the immune system to break down. So really, lasers don’t remove tattoos, they just break them into bite-sized chunks for the immune system. Finally, and to me most interestingly, the E=mc^2 equation for calculating energy only applies to things with mass. At some point in the middle of my research phase, I thought about this equation and the fact that photons don’t have mass but do have energy, and so I did some digging. Turns out, after a few manipulations to that first equation you get E=pc, where p is momentum of a particle. This is the equation used to find the energy of something without mass. However, there is still another hiccup; to find the momentum of something, you multiply its velocity by its mass. This is obviously a problem, because as previously stated photons and waves have no mass, so now we need a massless momentum equation. That equation is p=hf, where p is momentum, h is Planck’s constant, and f is the frequency of the wave. This whole thing showed me that when looking at the physics of massless things like photons and waves, there’s a whole different world of calculations and values to consider, and this just made me even more disappointed to end my research phase and start writing my paper. Regardless, I’m so happy with what I was able to learn!

Third, the Sustainable Energy class. While this class was certainly impacted by the online learning factor, I was still able to learn some valuable things from it. First, a lesson about my own learning. I have a tendency to draw on past knowledge and understandings before I try to explore and apply new ideas because it seems like the safer option. Having realized that, I’m going to try to get past that going forward. Second, I learned a lot about circuits. The activities we did with the circuits PhET simulation in the past two weeks have been very interesting, and I learned a lot about how current through a circuit is affected by different variables, such as battery strength, number of pathways, and lightbulb quantity and placement. Finally, the abundance of podcast and case studies we did throughout the class helped me to better understand the nature of power and electricity in the world we live in, and how people both benefit from it and suffer from it.

Finally, I learned a lot about teaching. One of the many reasons I really wanted to do this particular Senior Project is that, at least at this point in my life, I’d really like to be a teacher when I grow up, and acting as Preethi’s assistant teacher gave me very valuable experience with teaching and exposure to what it’s like. I got a lot of fulfillment, and I really felt like I was able to help the students learn. I also learned several strategies, most important of which is that when the students are doing practice problems, you don’t tell them what steps to do; you ask them questions to nudge them in the right directions, and that both helps them get the answer and understand the concepts that are being utilized in the problem. An added bonus is that the teacher really isn’t doing anything, just sparking thoughts in the student’s head. One of the biggest things I gained from the whole Senior Project experience was a small boost in speaking confidence. After leading several in class discussions in both sections of Physics 10 I was teaching, I’ve improved a lot in my ability to talk in front of and even lead a full class of people without trembling or stammering every second word. I think that this is still an obstacle I’ll have to deal with, but this practice has been a valuable first step.

In short, I learned more during this six week project experience than I did in some year-long classes I’ve taken in my life, and despite the fact that I was absolutely petrified about Senior Project at the beginning of the year, I can’t think of a better way to have spent quarantine! Thank you so much Preethi for giving me this opportunity, thank you to the students of 10C and 10A for allowing me to be your student teacher, thank you to Kelly and the 11th graders in the Sustainable Energy class for letting me join you this trimester, thank you to Shafeiq, my advisor, and Jonathan and Sergei, my cohort leaders, for supporting and believing in me while I did my Senior Project, thank you to my friends who I was able to talk to during the planning stages of my Senior Project, and thank you to the entire LREI institution for incorporating this into senior year and encouraging and supporting its students every step of the way! I’m sad to end my final academic endeavor at this school, but I’m glad that it happened.

Throughout my Senior Project, I was able to learn a lot about the answer to my essential question, and I did find some answers to it. I found that teaching others and observing how they learn and what is effective for them helped to make me more aware of my own learning processes, and as such I was more able to adjust them to provide the best learning experience possible for myself. When I taught things I was learning to others, doing so reinforced my own understanding of the information and I was able to learn by explaining. Learning with the mindset that I would teach the information to others made me more motivated to learn it and learn it well, since I wouldn’t be the only one depending on my ability to learn the info; I had to learn it to help the people I was teaching, and helping others is a powerful motivator. I think my essential question, written at the top of this post, was a very good framing device for this project. It was something that I was very interested in looking into, but it also allowed me to do two things that I really, really enjoyed: have a first real teaching experience, and take a very in depth look at an academic subject I’m really interested in. I don’t think any other essential question would have allowed me to get as much out of the experience.

I definitely met my goals for Senior Project. And while, yes, I was able to answer my essential question, for me that was more of a requirement than a goal. The assignment was to devise an experience through which I could answer a question, and I did. My goals, however, were more tied to the experience itself. First, I wanted to get an idea of what it’s like to be a teacher, and I definitely did. Being Preethi’s assistant was a wonderful experience, and going into breakout rooms to answer questions and explain ideas through prompting questions rather than blunt exposition was really informative and valuable for me, since I want to be a teacher when I grow up. Second, I wanted to learn about lasers and write at least an acceptable paper about what I learned, and I definitely did that. I learned more than I could have dreamed of about lasers, about how they’re made, what they are and can be used for, and their limitations in modern society both due to the way they are made and how they interact with a given target. I was also able to produce a comprehensive paper explaining what I’d learned, and for once I had a really good time doing it since there were no stakes attached to it. The only goal I didn’t meet was getting better at talking to people I don’t know. While it’s true that I didn’t know most of the students in the 10th grade physics classes I helped teach, and I got a lot better at talking to them, that was because I got to know them. If I hadn’t, I would still be as nervous talking to them as I was during the first few classes, so I definitely still have to work on that.

I grew a lot in how I learn, and how I will learn in the future. I learned that true understanding is demonstrated by being able to effectively explain an idea to others, and I learned that the best way to get to that point is to follow a deliberate and constructive learning process, where one idea feeds into the next, and so on and so on. This way, you have all the context for the main idea you might need to explain a given topic to someone at almost any level of understanding. I’m also a lot more confident in my teaching abilities, which was to be expected with the experience in teaching that I got. I’ve learned several important things, such as making sure to focus on teaching through asking questions and prompting critical thinking whenever possible, but also that sometimes there are things that need to just be explained, and to be as patient as possible since understanding comes differently to everybody. I obviously still have LEAGUES to go before I would even consider myself a “good” teacher, but now I’m also more confident that this is what I want to do. It was really fulfilling to help the students learn, and I really enjoyed answering any and all questions they had, even when completely unrelated to physics when they’re waiting for class to start.

If I could do Senior Project again, the only thing I would do differently is do it at a different time, so that I could have a real classroom experience of teaching. As much as I got out of the online classes (which is a lot), I think I could have gotten even more from in-person teaching and interacting with students.