I don't know how you teach chemistry without a periodic table, but when I forget to bring the one I made for my lessons, I feel its absence. I was very happy to have it tonight - it gives a visual side to chemistry which is QUITE necessary.
I've been drawing up extra exercises for my 10th and 12th graders, which have been going over very well. They are afraid of being underprepared for the exams, which I understand. I promised to help out my own turma today by writing exercises in mathematics to be done outside of school, in study groups that they organized. I opened up their notebooks to "Properties of Logarithms". They were given 9 properties of logarithms, without much explanation (or so it seemed) as to how they relate to the exponents that they describe - so I'm sure they don't understand what they're doing, which doesn't make it any easier to understand HOW to do it. And I discovered that one of the properties they're given is just WRONG (a log sub a b = b ---- that was Mom trying to write without a subscript), but I have yet to find a math teacher so that I can discuss this with them.
What happens when you see errors like this is usually that the teacher will look at it strangely, look in their notebook, point at the formula in their notebook and say "Well, it's right here, I didn't copy it wrong", with a slightly confused look on their face. Then, your conversation usually ends with "Yes, that's very interesting. Must be a problem with what MY teacher gave me. I've never seen that before."
And THAT'S what scares me. I feel that, in an American classroom, some student would jump on that immediately, if not proving it wrong then at least asking the teacher how it works. But the whole hierarchical system has seemed to run amok here. People become teachers without any real training to be teachers. You can randomly appoint someone a "chefe" and they will automatically be given more respect and responsibility, regardless of how much of it they truly deserve. And you're ALWAYS looking for the "chefe". So even if the teacher is wrong, they're considered the only authority and so can claim 100% correctness.
Peace
John
