Work and Power Lab

This lab for a grade 11 physics course encourages students to express their interpretations of a situation involving the physical principles of work and power in both written and numerical formats. This lad could easily be expanded through the inclusion of a writing activity that would ask students to consider the scenario presented in the worksheet's final series of problems and to compose a narrative of the "race" between the two individuals in question that incorporates appropriate terminology and demonstrates student understanding of relevant physical processes.

Call of Cthulhu Character Creation

Peterson identifies character development as one of the most difficult aspects of narrative construction for student writers, and her views on the matter align with both my observations of student work and my limited experience with creative writing. Developing well-rounded characters who are more than pawns of the plot through realistic dialog, narration that is at once both revealing and subtle, and actions that are justified by previously-established motivations while revealing previously unseen elements of a character is incredibly difficult.

My experience with tabletop role playing games has led me to consider character prior to the development of a plot. The series of steps that players and game masters follow at the outset of a game in some ways seems to mirror the process of character construction in a written narrative, possibly offering students a scaffolding activity for their attempts to create believable and fully-realized characters. A role playing game - Call of Cthulhu, for instance - begins with a shared understanding of setting, principle themes, and the ideas that the author wishes to explore. Firmly set upon this common, solid ground, players develop characters, built around a flexible template that can be expanded or contracted as desired, considering history and attributes. A co-creative process of plot development follows in which players and narrator together construct a story that responds to character-driven choices - assuming that one does not play for a "railroading" GM. This process could be adapted into a classroom context in order to train students in some of the basic techniques of narrative and character development while engaging them in part of a game. The random nature of character generation in a tabletop RPG demands creativity in the formation of personalities, characteristics, and backstories. For instance, how do we account -- historically, physically, and psychologically - for a charisma roll of 4? What does this number translate into for a particular character and how does it affect him or her over the course of his or her life?

With proper guidance, students at a sufficiently advanced level could use games such as Call of Cthulhu in order to gain a better sense of the logical and emotional bases for the characters that they seek to develop for their written narratives.

Narrative in the Physics Classroom

David Booth's vision of enhanced literacy in Whatever Happened to Language Arts depends largely on guiding students to make connections between literary and historical narratives and their personal life stories. In some way, all the tales that “we” tell become a part of “us” both as a collective and as a collection of individuals. Students must be guided to “[find themselves] in story,” for“as personal storytellers … we learn from the stories of others and we take the truths out of these narratives .… our stories connect us to the others in our lives” (52). In order to reach students and create lasting, critical readers and thinkers, we must guide them to relate to, and to internalize, the narratives that we present to them.

Throughout my practicum placement in a university preparation grade 11 physics classroom and a university preparation grade 12 physics classroom, I attempted to explore the narratives that surround the discovery of certain fundamental principles of physics on both an individual level and on the level of the academic discipline itself.  The qualitative and subjective data that I collected through these explorations and student responses to them suggests that the use of narrative and framing techniques can connect abstract principles of the discipline to students' lived experiences, increasing students' immediate engagement in the classroom as well as their short and long term retention of information.

In one specific case, I introduced the concept of kinetic energy and couched its mathematical derivation in a narrative involving historical developments of cannons and the technological advances that improved their design. After having obtained the students' interest – based on a subjective assessment of their engagement in the class by monitoring levels of noise or “chatter,” inappropriate student-student interactions generally, and eye contact between myself and my students – I introduced an hypothetical narrative regarding cannon-based warfare. One side in the conflict had developed cannons that fired cannonballs of twice the mass, and the other side had developed cannonballs that could be fired with twice the velocity. As an impartial third party, we were tasked with determining who would win in such a conflict, all else being equal. Applying Kinematics, the work-energy theorem, and basic algebraic manipulations of established formulae, we then found that the latter group had the advantage.

In a second example, I then used the definition and formula related to kinetic energy in order to determine the energy that would be released by a collision between Earth and an actual Near Earth Object of a substantial mass, moving at a substantial speed. The value of energy released was so large that it had no significance in itself, so I related it to the Tsar bomb, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, by describing the energy released by its explosion – equivalent to the energy released by an explosion of a block of TNT approximately 320 m³, or as tall and as wide as the Eiffel Tower. The energy released by the collision between Earth and the Near Earth Object was almost five times that which was released by the Tsar Bomb's nuclear reaction. Several students approached me with questions regarding this example and tangentially related physics subjects. Not only had they absorbed the fundamental principles that I had sought to teach them, they had begun to make connections between the physics and their experience and background knowledge. As a

result, they appeared to enjoy the lesson and were eager participants in the ensuing problem-solving session and discussions.

The power of narrative that David Booth identifies can indeed be exploited in subjects other than English. Couching the principles of physics in narratives or real-life examples drawn from student experiences not only makes the material more relevant to them, it also generates engagement and in turn helps to curtail behavioral problems – an engaged student is less prone to act out. Given the ease with which Booth's theories related to narrative were applied in a physics classroom, I am eager for future opportunists to explore other strategies – that were originally intended for application in the limited context of an English course – in diverse and new settings.

Works Cited

Booth, David. Whatever Happened to Language Arts? Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Publishers Limited, 2009. Print.