Most students point to Walter White as a chemistry anti-hero—using crystalized fulminated mercury, disguised as crystal meth, as a grenade to blow up a drug lord that wronged him. Explosions are engaging, exciting parts of chemistry, yet dangerous to society when unplanned, such as unexpected water heater explosions. This unit will look at the components that make reactions spontaneous and explosive, including energy, enthalpy, entropy, and how they apply to physical and chemical changes. Focus will be on quantifying reactions and phase changes and working on the match concepts connected to kinetics and thermodynamics. To keep students engaged with the complex mathematical components, students will be using each lesson as a way to research and explore exciting explosions, such as that in Breaking Bad, and water heater explosions, building a model of their understanding. After finalizing their model of explosions, students will then apply their model to a community issue, such as air-bag safety. Students will design a safe and effective airbag that incorporates multiple concepts from the unit, and includes quantifications to ensure their safety.

Matter is all around us, but how often do we really take an opportunity to think about the matter that makes up our world? This curriculum unit will allow middle school students to think more deeply about the changes that occur in matter and consider why phase changes occur. Students will first learn about the three states of matter (solids, liquids, and gases). They will then examine the role thermodynamics (energy, heat, and work) plays in phase transitions. Students will practice modeling molecules and describing the molecular properties of each state of matter and compare elements, mixtures, and compounds. Through hands on experiments, students will be able to explore properties of matter. Finally, students will gain a deeper understanding of the law of conservation of matter and chemical equilibrium by writing chemical equations for everyday chemical reactions. Teaching this unit will enrich middle school students’ knowledge and understanding of the world around them, which is filled with matter. Over this 10 day unit students will gain exposure to real-world scientific connections through hands on inquiry, interactive simulations, and catchy songs about states of matter.

Adaptation is a vital topic of study because students, like texts, are always already in process of adapting themselves to their environments. Texts and students change over time according to place, ideology, expectation, medium. New Haven’s achievement gap concerns me like so many other teachers in New Haven: I propose to involve students’ subjectivities and political alertnesses with studies of power and violence, here in Orson Welles’ and Akira Kurosawa’s adaptations of Macbeth . My students have always responded passionately to the play, particularly to the questions of gender it invokes. I propose to study shifts in power and gender roles in the play and the two films. I expect students to finally locate themselves, their imaginations, their critical lenses, their ideologies, their roles, their subjectivities as these elements play themselves out in the narratives I have chosen.

During this unit, there will be several opportunities for students to address their experiences as well as take a closer look at the experiences of those written about in the unit. Students will take a journey into the time periods of Apartheid in South Africa and the Jim Crow Era/Civil Rights Movement in America. Students will be exposed to practices that would be described as “man’s inhumanity to man,” but are often left out of Social Studies textbooks and glossed over-- if ever addressed in middle school classrooms.

This unit will be geared toward my Advanced Placement Literature and Composition class, but could certainly be taught in any survey course of English literature, or a course that examines women’s literature.

One objective, part of the AP Literature curriculum, is to teach historical context. This is always important so that students realize that art is a response to real life, and characters’ lives represent real lives shaped by real events. I also want my students to see connections to their own lives, and that the struggles for equity are not futile, but ongoing and necessary. I would like students also to see that a society that suppresses a group of people, is weaker, not stronger, and oppression is something for all of us to fight. And, I would like to open up some dusty-shelf texts to high school teachers who might not consider teaching them.

This unit will ask students to examine the historical boundaries in law, society, and economics for women in medieval literature, and consider how females depicted in stories from these eras might reveal power and agency that is not revealed in laws or politics. The unit will include the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, poetry from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and stories from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In this unit we will discuss and learn about how batteries work their relation to the field of robotics. We will study the different types of batteries, their differences and their uses. We will also briefly look at the history of batteries and a timeline of different events in the field of batteries. Students will set up and conduct experiments, which will span days to weeks. During this time other units and lessons can be taught. On the conclusion of the experiments the students will recap the lesson and conclude the unit. This unit will be tied into students’ Chemistry courses allowing a better understanding of the chemical reaction that goes into the operation of a battery. This will be tied into students’ math skills and digital media as they will be making small mathematical calculations and viewing video footage.

All things in moderation. This phrase is typically heard in reference to a person’s diet or exercise habits. Given the tremendous rise in social media use among adolescents, moderation is something that can also be practiced in our relationships with the digital world. My theater students' social lives occur predominately online through various social media like SnapChat or Instagram. The relentless comparisons they make between themselves and their peers is correlated to a feeling of unworthiness. In my classroom, I often hear my students say, “I am not good enough” or “I am not as pretty or talented as...” Theatre is an art that should help students find the power of their own voices. However, this can only happen if a student is open to the exploration of the self. What if an oversaturation of social media is blocking my students from digging into their identities because they feel as if their “self” could never possibly be good enough? This unit seeks to guide my students on a journey of self-exploration in order to create a healthier relationship with social media. Ultimately, I want my students to feel worthy enough to participate fully in the art of theatre. For this to happen, my students need to break down the emotional blocks built by social comparisons that happen through social media.

The changing climate is a phenomenon that will affect us all in the future - with a global increase of 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century1,decreasing sea ice in the arctic, rising sea levels, and an increase in the frequency of severe weather events, high school students are sure to feel the effects of climate change. While many students may have heard the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in the news, this unit aims to help students develop a scientific understanding as to what is causing these changes. Through a deeper understanding of the scientific basis of climate change, specifically the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, students will be better equipped to explain the changes that they are observing in real time. It is my hope that through this investigation students will become voices of change in their schools and communities, helping to educate others and get involved in climate action.