Soothing music plays in Emily Skrobko’s eighth- grade science class as 21 students settle into desks grouped in fours. A few students distribute work sheets.
A projector displays the day’s lesson: “I will be able to explain what happens to mass in a closed system.”
Skrobko raises her hand and begins counting. By the time she reaches five, all eyes are on her.
First, the daily trivia question:
“What do we call an animal that eats plants?”
And an answer to yesterday’s question: A group of tissues working together to perform a specific job in the body is? Hands shoot up. “An organ,” says one student.
Before any discussion of the day’s lesson, Skrobko leads the class in CSAP practice. The problem describes students traveling on a bus and noticing traffic changes during their trip. They are to write a “valid scientific question that could be asked in this situation and suggest a way the class might investigate the question.”
Skrobko tells the class this is a four-point question.
“What is the purpose of this question? What do the test makers want you to do?” she asks.
Once students have completed the CSAP problem, they retrieve their “Interactions With Physical Science” textbooks from a shelf. In the back of one book, tape and paper cover an “N/S” scribble, the mark of a Denver gang.
Amid the occasional giggle and chatter, Skrobko, a fifth-year science teacher, raises her hand and begins her “high five” count. Students settle and focus. When a measure of sugar is dissolved in a measure of water, the combined mass will increase, decrease or stay the same, Skrobko asks. Say two precisely measured amounts of chemicals are mixed, what will happen to the mass?
The students flip through their textbooks and write three steps that summarize how they would determine changes in mass in the sugar water and chemical mixture. Soon, teams are measuring 20 milliliters of sodium sulfate and 20 milliliters of calcium chloride and weighing covered containers of each on mass scales. They do the same with the sugar and water, carefully noting each measurement in notebooks. Jason Blevins, The Denver Post
