I did my teaching today at New Lexington HS for our bioscience unit. I decided to get pretty involved with mine and squeeze a lot of stuff into an hour and a half. The whole lesson started yesterday when I made biodiesel in my kitchen in about 10 minutes. Biodiesel needs to sit for about 24 hours to separate from the glycerine, so I had to have some ready for the lesson today.
It was a mad rush to get from Columbus to the school this morning, and also to pick up some supplies at home and at my sister's house on the way. After I got to NLHS, I had my dad take me to the fairgrounds. I stole one of the tractors and took it to the school, then hooked it up to the dyno. After I got everything set-up for my teaching, I learned that I was going to have significantly more students than I originally planned for. I expected to teach about 15 kids two times. I ended up with the teachers combining the classes on me (about 30 kids) and then bringing a science class down to take part as well (another 20), for a grand total of about 50-60 kids. I expected 30 for the whole day! The second go-around, I had two ag classes and the science class again, but there were only about 35 or so this time.
I started with a discussion about biodiesel basics and the chemistry of biodiese. We talked about some advantages and disadvantages of using biodiesel, then moved on to discuss safety and the process of making biodiesel. Finally, we split into groups and the kids made biodiesel. The process of making biodiesel is very simple. If anyone has any questions about it, feel free to ask me (I'm a seasoned pro - I've done it twice now). It is a very cool activity for students to do that they will remember. I used the biodiesel to open a network to other bio fuels and other biotechnologies.
The last activity that we did was the coolest part. I mixed the biodiesel that I made yesterday with some petro diesel in about a 50-50 mix. I pulled the fuel line off the tank and ran it into the bottle of B50 (50% biodiesel, 50% petro). We started the tractor and made a dyno run to get our baseline horsepower. After the system had switched to B50, we made another dyno pull to get our numbers on B50. The tractor picked up 2hp on B50. For the second class, the biodiesel, which was now B75 due to how I mixed it, made 1hp less than petro diesel.
I was very happy with the results. Everything went smoothly and a bunch of the kids really enjoyed this. I have a feeling that when I'm teaching, this will be an activity that I will be doing with my kids. It is simple, works great and really gets the attention of many of the students.
Now for the announcement of my big news! My big news is that next week's blog should be interesting for each of you blockers. If I get the time, I will have something special in my blog. If I don't have time, then I'm sorry you took the time to read this paragraph.
Also, keep feeding the fish. They have been getting neglected lately.
Wow John, that sounds like an awesome lesson! You definitely know your stuff!
ReplyDeleteThat's great you're flexible and can adjust to changes like having more kids than you planned for. (That wasn't very nice of them to do to you though!)
I'm not gonna lie, I was a little sad by the fact that there wasn't any big news. You had me hooked with the title (like a good interest approach) but then you left me hanging...