What do you do on the First Day of Physics?

So I'm in the midst of the first day, and since I have no papers to grade or meetings to attend I'm free to reflect a little bit on this beginning.

Historically Experimental Physics has been the hardest of my classes to teach, and this year it's second period, but so far there's an extraordinarily excellent vibe in that class. I mean, I know it's only been one day, but I think the first day is pretty telling about the rest of the year.

So what do you do on the first day of school?

3 things:
Get some information about the kids, their interests, and their folks' contact
Go through preliminary stuff... Syllabus, Safety Contract, the Wiki Contract
Do an Agree/Disagree activity.

This is where we set up a continuum in the room from strongly agree down to strongly disagree, and then put out statements like:
Science is fun.
Scientific progress is good.
One theory is better than another if it explains more phenomena.
The universe is infinitely complex.

I really like it when we get to examine some of the ideas the lay unspoken at the heart of science. Wouldn't it be great if we reverted back to calling science "natural philosophy"? hehehe

So far so good!

Agree/Disagree and Facebook

Yesterday and today I've been doing an Agree/Disagree activity, which is where I put a statement on the board and then students move themselves to sign that indicates how they feel about that statement: Strong Agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree. And then they discuss their opinions.

So for your reading enjoyment, here are the statements I put on the board.

• I like science.
• Scientific Progress is “good”.
• One theory is “truer” than another theory if it can explain more observable phenomena. -Karl Popper (my paraphrase)
• There is no rule in physics that is not violated at some time or other. - Paul Feyerabend
• There’s no such thing as neutral observation. - Thomas Kuhn
• If humanity continued forever, someday we would know everything there is to know.
• Someday soon we will run out of oil.
• Vermont should build wind farms.
• The world has more people than it can sustainably support.

They had a hard time with the Paul Feyerabend quote citing that they just didn't know. So I'll probably change that to some other Paul Feyerabend quote.

Also I took an informal poll about what Web 2.0 sites my students were familiar with:
many had experience with myspace,
none one was familiar with livejournal or xanga,
EVERYfreaking one of them has facebook, which is good to know since I now know what common language to use, e.g. "the wall", applications, commenting, "it's like writing a note", etc.

Interestingly, I only know of 3 other teachers in the whole district who have facebook accounts (total of 4), two of us at the high school, one at the middle school, one's the middle school tech coordinator lady. Hmmmm... what does that say? That we live in different technological worlds? For many that's probably true.