Fun and interesting lessons

CONGRATULATIONS, Anneke, that's a comment you certainly want to keep for a long time.  Great that you have such an early indication that time well spent pays off richly.  We can't go at that pace every day of every month and year, but we can aspire to doing it almost every day, and students definitely appreciate it.  I expect it's your planning AND your personal style of interacting with the students that earned you that wonderful complement!
Yours,
Tom
http://aweekinsantiago.blogspot.com

An Encouraging Day

Whew - what a busy week! One of my students said the kindest thing today though: "You really put a lot of time into your lessons to make them fun and interesting, don't you?" After spending nearly every waking hour lesson planning, teaching, or after-school activities - getting to bed after midnight most nights and waking up for the long commute at 5:30am every day - it was so encouraging to hear that one of my students genuinely appreciated the work I put into his class. It made the exhaustion of this friday night worth it.

As for the website - it has been going alright. I've been surprised that the students aren't actually as computer literate as I expected - they've had some simple technical issues with using a website that surprised me. I've brought my laptop into class to show them how it works, and that seems to be helping. Of course you can send the link to the website to others - the interesting links might be particularly useful for lesson planning. It's always hard to find that perfect video. The pictures of the week are all just photos from my labs, but some of the pictures inside the day-by-day note are just random pics floating around on the net.

Website

Well done, Anneke--obviously I need to start putting photos in my websites!!  And your efforts to get students to take responsibility for missing class are impressive--I look forward to hearing  how it plays out.

What would you think of sending your link to your site to others in physics, in case they want to attempt something similar?

And where do you find your photos??!

THANKS,
Tom

Website!

Just a quick post to say that I'm testing out using a website with my Physics students: https://sites.google.com/site/sharbotlakephysics/.

In my first practicum, I spent HUGE amounts of time helping students catch up on missed classes during lunch, prep period and after school. My students quickly learned that they could get one-on-one teaching if they missed class, which increased the incentive to miss class.

So the new policy is this: if a student misses class, they will first download the blank notes from the website, read the pages in the text, ask a friend to help them fill in the notes, and do the homework. Then they can come to ask me questions. I hope it will increase responsibility for their own learning. So far, they have responded very well to the idea of a website.

School to Community

I'm very excited to start my second placement, returning to my 11U/12C Physics class in the mornings and the School to Community class in the afternoons. I miss my great Physics students, and can't wait to dive into Electromagnetism with them (Karyn has a great idea for building speakers out of Tim Horton's cups, wire and magnets, which I hope we can try!). And I am especially looking forward to working with the School to Community class, which is the topic of this particular post.

I love even just the name of the School to Community class: isn't that what education should be for every student? A place where students can learn useful skills that they know they will use in their local community, and a place to practice those skills by doing helpful things for the community. In my high school, the School to Community students learned about taking care of the environment not by sitting in a desk and studying the greenhouse effect, but by actually caring for the environment practically: they ran a recycling program in the school. It is certainly a challenging class to teach, and I greatly admire the creativity, dedication, and care of the School to Community teachers who I've met. I think that special education teachers are truly leading the way for good pedagogy, which could (I think should) be incorporated in different ways into any classroom.

I'm looking forward to finding out how they are learning to capitalize on their strengths to do the important things that they were born to do. It takes a lot of creativity and patience to help students learn to develop and expand these strengths and abilities, and I am really looking forward to observing and practicing in this placement. I have so much to learn in this class! Most of all, I can't wait to get to know the students. I've seen amazing encouragement and valuing of differences in School to Community classes before, and I'm very excited to be introduced to this new classroom dynamic.

A bit of a background: I know that I'm very biased. Working with exceptional students has been my passion for a long time. I was fortunate to grow up with a wonderful friend, who was later diagnosed with Aspergers, who spent countless hours dreaming up creative stories with me. She's also a computer genuis, and so in the days when I was still in the ancient computer game world of "pipe dream" and "worms", she introduced me to the new world of "civilization" and other such games (As an aside, she's still a computer whiz, and has gone on to study computers and cognitive science in university). We had a lot of fun together as kids. She showed me the brilliance, but also the social pain of living with Autism, even though neither of us knew that her challenges had an official label. There were times that I didn't understand why she would react the way she did to social situations, but there was an unspoken understanding that it was okay. That friendship taught me a lot about seeing people for the amazing resilient, determined, brilliant people who they are, and tossing the negative lenses school culture can use to view people with exceptionalities out the window.

This friend continues to inspire me, but she isn't alone in doing remarkable things with her abilities. I had the privilege of growing up with several other amazing people with exceptionalities. The oldest sister of one of my best friends has the most beautiful heart, and despite her disability, every time I see her, she always has something encouraging to tell me. Her smile can brighten any sad day. When I was very young, my Opa (Opa is Dutch for "grandpa") was suffering from Alzheimers Disease, but could still humm along when we sang hymns and kept his laughing twinkle in his eyes. I started working at camps, with respite care, a group home, and volunteering at hospitals and retirement homes, where I've gotten to know many many more wonderful people with exceptionalities. I could talk all day about the amazing things I have learned from these remarkable people. I met a young woman who had learned to handwrite, draw beautifully, shoot arrows, independently drive her wheelchair, hold the attention of a whole room, and so many other abilities - all while being paralyzed from the neck down. I currently meet with a brilliant man who can hold each letter in every word of a complex sentence in his head for long periods of time while he spells each letter through blinking. I've met a woman who is both non-verbal and blind, and can communicate genuine love in ways that I admire and aspire to. I've met person after person after person who has done and is doing amazing things by capitalizing on their strengths. Any time I stop and think about it, I am overwhelmed by the remarkable people I have the wonderful privilege to know.

So that is where I'm coming from, and hence my excitement for this great opportunity to teach in a School to Community class. Yet, while I know that I am certainly biased by these positive experiences, I was still quite taken aback by several of the responses of others to my good news that I'll be teaching in a special education class. There seems to be a surprising misconception that the School to Community class is somehow not a "real" class or "not as important" as an academic Physics class! I think it's quite the opposite: in many cases, I think the School to Community classes have really got what education is all about, far better than some Physics classes! I'm hoping to take what I learn about differentiated instruction and teaching concepts that are applicable to real life in this placement and apply it to my Physics classes, since I think special education is leading the way for all education. There couldn't be a more "real" class in the school.

I'll keep you updated on what I learn there!

Dewey

How fortunate that I mentioned Dewey and that may have nudged you to listen a little differently to the lecture!  Hope you get a chance to read him a bit too.  I see you can read Democracy and Education online at http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/dewey.html
You are certainly convincing me that you are one of those occasional (rare?) people who really gets it about the words and the tune going together!  I really enjoy how much you are writing and how well you are writing.
There was a time when how well one could teach was considered in selecting people to teach in this faculty. Now all that matters is your research potential and how much you have already published.  And there are research seminars for faculty and graduate students but rarely are there any seminars about teaching.  I did manage to get a "Teacher Education Affinity Group" going and meeting from time to time but that seems to have faded away--perhaps writing this will encourage me to try to revive it!
Thanks for brightening my day with more refreshing insights into the complexities of teaching!
Tom

Dear Dewey

I laughed when you mentioned Dewey, Tom. One of the lectures in September and another one today was about Dewey, but I must admit I initially wrote his philosophy off as being not related to my personal philosophies because I took away the incorrect notion that Dewey didn't support creativity and relating school to life. I think I interpreted the September lecture this way simply because Dewey's philosophy was presented in a very disconnected-from-life experience. I listened more closely to the details of the lecture on Dewey today, and sure enough - he is all about learning from inquiry into genuine life problems! It's amazing how much the style of teaching impacts the message that gets remembered, eh! Consciously or not, I related Dewey's philosophy to the feeling that the lecture created. When I listened to the September lecture, I was feeling: "This sounds like a lot of fancy words about Dewey's life and wife and history; that doesn't relate to me, and I can't do any creativity thinking here", and so I connected Dewey's philosophy to the feeling I experienced of irrelevance. I was totally off the mark about Dewey! Thanks for prompting me to give Dewey a second chance. I also fortunately have a friend in philosophy who defended Dewey as well. It's reassuring to know that Dewey understands everything I've been feeling and experiencing.

This was also a good reminder of the method being the message. Emotions in class are extremely powerful teaching tools. For example, when we cancel variables in problem solving, I make an ka-boom explosion sound effect. I've always done this for both my own learning and my teaching (with different volumes of ka-boom's depending on the situation - I even ka-boom quietly in my head during exams). Why? Because it's exciting! I'm not just cancelling a random greek letter with another greek letter, I'm picturing a giant hot air balloon which was accidentally filled with hydrogen gas instead of air, exploding into an awesome fireball when the flame is ignited (all people standing a safe distance back, and wearing safety goggles of course)! That mass on the bottom of the fraction hit the mass on top, and now they are both cancelled in a giant exciting explosion!! And cancelling variables should be exciting, because when we cancel out variables, we're getting closer to narrowing in on our solution! Goodness, I'm getting excited just writing about it!

Excitement for excitement's sake isn't the point, however. I believe this excitement actually makes me a better problem solver: if cancelling variables reminded me of visiting the dentist, I'd do it when necessary, but I certainly wouldn't go out of my way and rearrange my equation to make cancelling variables possible. But since cancelling variables is so exciting and fun, my eyes are jumping around even the biggest scariest equation on the look out for ways to simplify it, and of course, once I've exploded a few variables, the answer usually just falls right out of the giant cloud of fire. I want to help my students develop their own images and positive emotions when they learn any skill in Physics, so my method of teaching needs to be one that induces positive emotions and images.

Now that I'm on the topic, I might as well mention another point this experience learning about Dewey brings up in my mind. I was reminded today how extremely important it is for teachers to not just believe their message, but to believe in their message enough to actually do it. It sounds ridiculous that a teacher would try to teach us that the only way to learn is through inquiry into life-related problems using a teaching method that was not at all inquiry-friendly with few connections to real life. But it happens - even with very good teachers. In today's job market, I can't imagine Queen's hiring anyone less than highly experienced, well-established, knowledgable, and talented teachers. I feel quite nervous to judge these teachers because they are so much more experienced, knowledgeable and skilled than I currently am. But as can be observed at McArthur, even some of those great teachers can easily disconnect their philosophies of education from their actual teaching styles. Therefore, even if it seems obvious, and almost ridiculous to write down, I'm going to write it - mostly as a way of keeping myself accountable. I'm going to practice what I preach. If I truly believe that creativity is essential for learning and using Physics (and I do believe this), than my students are going to learn in creative ways. My philosophy of education is not just going to be something that I have written down in my portfolio somewhere: I'm going to believe in it enough to actually use it.
Aside: It's interesting how much learning in one area of life influences another - I feel like I'm preaching out of James 2 right now (the gist of that chapter is: "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds...You believe that there is one God. Good! Even demons believe that - and shudder"). Disconnecting faith philosophies from real-life actions, such as loving people, has disastrous results (which do happen all too often!) for Christians. So maybe that's why I feel strongly about making sure my philosophy of teaching lines up with my practice.

So all that to say, thanks for the encouragement to look a little closer at Dewey! He does have a helpful philosophy after all. I just need to dust it off the powerpoint slides, and put it to good use in my classroom.

VERY impressive discussion!

Thanks, Anneke, for some excellent reading--quality and quantity very impressive.  Keep up the good thinking!  I'd be interested in what you see as some of the positions other students occupy in between the two extremes. I've never read enough of John Dewey to be sure, but I think he argued 100 years ago that school and life must be interconnected.  Obviously, his message did not carry the day, and we continue to have curricula that focus on the facts and ideas that students must learn with little or not attention to the connections between the ideas and everyday life. The student perspectives that you describe are ones that they have been taught--by their former teachers. Quite unintentionally of course, by teachers who weren't making the efforts you describe to at least create problems that the students could at least have a chance of connecting to everyday life.
THANKS for some great reading, keep up the good thinking!
Tom

School vs. Life

Since finishing my first practicum, I've been talking with people and thinking a bit about how the students in my science class thought about school in relation to themselves. I saw two extremes: students who thought of school as a definition of themselves, and students who saw school as unrelated to their lives. In between, of course, I saw the many students who found themselves between those two extremes. For this post, however, I want to focus on the students at the two extremes because they have taught me a lot lately.

Some students (as a generalization, this seemed to be more true of some of the young women in my class) adopted school as a very large part of themselves: they spent their free time doing school-related activities, they defined themselves by their marks and therefore experienced even a slightly low mark as a failure of self, and they put school above everything else in life. This view of school was positive in some ways - the students who saw school as an extension of themselves had more commitment to work hard and generally set and met high achievement goals. They produced excellent work which met each expectation I had outlined precisely. This view, however, also posed challenges for those students - they tended to put school above learning, and tended to be more concerned with what was on the test than what they were curious about. They also put a great deal of stress on themselves - when failure in one assignment means to be a failure as a human being, it is clear where the stress and fear of failure comes from. I am worried both about their personal health living with that stress, and the limits on creativity that the fear of failure places.

Other students (again, as a generalization, the students on this end of the scale tended to be some of the young men in my classes) saw school as completed unrelated and disconnected from their life: their conversations even in class rarely centered on any school activities, low marks didn't phase them, and they didn't see value in learning for their life: school just got in the way of life. This way of looking at school was positive in several ways: the students had no fears of failure to squelch their creativity, the students were motivated by authentic tasks only, so their way of thinking challenged me to make my assignments and problems highly relevant to their lives - a teaching practice that I think is very important for all the learners in my class. The students who didn't see value in school for it's own sake were like a sounding board for me to make sure that my questions were truly relevant to them. Unfortunately, the disconnect between school and life was problematic as well, especially in the area of responsibility. These students had an unstated belief that if they fell behind or missed an assignment, it was fully the teacher's responsibility to make sure they were caught up. These students were rarely taking the opportunity to improve their learning skills because they had trouble making the connection between becoming good learners and becoming successful contributing global citizens (whatever that means to a young man who just wants to go huntin', and doesn't yet realize that he's learning an important skill of providing for a family). I am worried for these students too. They have so much potential, but they will need learning skills and a stronger sense of personal responsibility for completing work to reach that potential.

But after all those student observations, it really wouldn't be fair to finish this post without looking at things from the other side of the desk. Who teaches students that school should either take over life or be completely disconnected from it? In one year, it could be me in those shoes.

I'm on my way to becoming just one of the many white female teachers that every boy and young man sees in front of the classroom as he grows up. Why should he connect school to himself, when the whole institution is clearly a "girly" thing? Starting in elementary school, where the proportion of female teachers to male teachers is even more ridiculous, boys see plenty of female role models engaged in learning and teaching, but very few men. I think that their thought process - that school is not related to their gender - flows reasonably (though very unfortunately) from their observations.

Also, I think there is a common thread between the challenges faced by students who embrace school as synonymous with their personal identity and students who see little connection between themselves and school. That common thread has a lot to do with the set up of our schools: removing students from life into an institutionalized building in which it's hard to give learning context.

For example, think of our art classrooms which are located in a factory/institutional setting? It's true that VanGogh did produce some great art while he was institutionalized for insanity, but I can hardly see that as an ideal location to do art! I'd love to exchange art classrooms for art apprenticeships. I would expect that there are many local artists who would be happy to pass on their love of art by taking on a small number of students as apprentices. Of course there are logistical challenges - would it be possible to find enough varied placements for students to try many different kinds of art? And the uniformity and standardization of education would be left floundering, no doubt. But students could be with real artists doing art that matters! At the very least, the art classroom needs to be incorporated into the community - otherwise, what is the point? It's far more valuable to learn colour theory by designing and painting a mural for the kids wing of the local hospital than to colour in boxes on an exercise sheet, which will be dropped in the garbage immediately after class. It's far more valuable to learn perspective by designing and building a stage set with a false sense of depth for a local theatre than to do the three standard practice exercises in one, two and three point perspective. The list of ways to connect the art classroom (even if true apprenticeships are not feasible) to the community could go on and on, and I hope to make use of as many local opportunities as possible when I teach.

It's not just art classrooms, however, which need to be relevant to community life. The same connections to the real world can and should be made in every class. Physics is an especially wonderful subject, since it truly is a description of how the real world works. In my first practicum, I had the opportunity to try various ways of building connections with students. It's a nerdy past-time, I'll admit, but I do love writing funny Physics problems about real people, so on my first day, I surveyed the class to find out what their hobbies, interests, and goals after high school were. Then, nearly every example, homework, quiz and test problem was about them. I used the activities they told me they enjoyed, and wrote practical problems that they encounter in their everyday life, particularly in the activities they find the most fun. It's a nice first start at making connections because it's very easy to do. Rather than copying out the irrelevant problem copied from a textbook which can't possibly relate to a unique class: "A projectile of mass, m, is launched with an initial velocity of 100m/s at an angle of 15 degrees. Where will it land?", it takes just an extra few minutes to write a problem: "Bill shoots a 0.5kg bullet with an initial velocity of 100m/s at an angle of 15 degrees. Will it hit a deer standing 0.6km away?" I got very positive feedback from the students about using them in the problems we worked through, and they tended to pay more attention and make more problem solving attempts when they were the star of a problem. It's an easy strategy to make connections with real life, and it worked well, so that is definitely a keeper.

While it was fun and helpful to use relevant problems, however, I don't think that simple strategy is enough to fully alter the conception that school is either disconnected from life or consumes real life. Students need to do more than just solve problems about their real life; they need to use their solutions in the world. It requires a lot more time and energy, but I want to give my students opportunities to do things that matter. They could design a system of solar panels that we will purchase for the school. I want my students to invent a small energy efficient stove to be used on camping trips. Physics is truly ideal for such practical applications, in which the completion of their school project actually makes a difference in their life, because the real world is exactly what Physics strives to explain. I really want to focus on those meaningful applications in my teaching.

When we connect the classroom to the community, not only do students, who feel that school is irrelevant to life, begin to make motivating connections, but also students, who consider school to be their life, can see a broader goal for learning than simply good grades.

And in my opinion, that's where education gets very exciting.

Take the prize, Anneke!

I'm swamped by 3 visitors here from Santiago this week, but so glad I read your posting without postponing longer.  You've nailed it!!  I won't try to comment at length now--hopefully we can discuss next week.  You can find Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk on ted.com, it's very good (and funny!).
Perhaps many secondary teachers teach in less inspiring ways because it is such a huge challenge to try to regain lost creativity...  The challenge is to pinpoint where the problem really becomes serious and try to intervene there.
Thanks for excellent reading, I look forward to talking in person!
Tom

Memorize, memorize...

One of my students made a wonderful statement the other day. She was working on the review problems I had written for them, when she looked up at me and said, "I'm never going to be able to do Physics. I just can't memorize all the steps to solve a problem!"

She's an excellent student, who has the school game figured out. She has achieved straight A's in every subject... until Physics. She's stumped now because the method of learning that she has been taught for the last 13 years has completely failed her in this subject. Why do we wait until students reach Grade 11 to tell them that Science isn't about memorizing a whole bunch of facts and regurgitating them on a test? And now that she's learned for years to put away her creative mind, how do I teach her to put that creative thought in the drivers seat?

I remember when I met Physics in Grade 11. It was intimidating at first, and I didn't do so well at first (mainly due to my stubborn refusal to learn how to rearrange equations - a useless skill, or so I thought...), but it wasn't long before I fell in love with the subject the same way I already loved art. I fell in love because in Physics, there was finally more than one way to do things! The teacher no longer penalized me for inventing some ridiculous way of solving the problem rather than writing out all the steps they had shown me on the board. I was encouraged to look for more than one creative way to a solution, and it was so fun. But when I think about it, had I been a "good" student; had I listened to my math teachers when they just handed me formulas for permutation and combination, rather than spending hours and hours along with pages after pages of zero's and one's trying to work out those formulas on my own; had I spent my time doing all the assigned monotonous problems that were all the same and showed all those same steps for the same problems rather than writing some crazy poem; had I learned in the way we (for the most part) teach - would I have loved Physics? Or would it have been the same agony that it is for my top notch students right now?

I came across a great little video today that speaks about education and the arts, but it might as well be talking about Physics. It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded%EF%BB%BF. He says that we nearly ALL start with a huge capacity for divergent thinking, but that decreases as we age. And he argues that many of us are educated out of this remarkable creative possibility. It's a rather sad thought, especially for the creative subjects..... Wait - are there any non-creative subjects?!?

So the most important question is: What do I do now? I'm learning how to teach high school, not elementary school, which means that I have little control over the first 8-10 years of my future students' education. I need to take these students who tell me that they "never be able to do Physics", and show them the beautiful creative gifts they've had their whole lives, but simply haven't exercised often. And then we have to work through what may be a rather challenging process of getting those creative abilities back in shape together.

I'm a little scared. And I wish I had A LOT more time with my students. But I hope in this last week of October practicum, and when I come back in December, I'll be able to give them at least a glimpse of how much fun learning can be when you don't have to "memorize the steps" - when you think conceptually about a situation, make exciting connections to what you know (and what you want to know!), draw a few colourful, helpful and pretty pictures, and then invent "steps" (which may be entirely different from your classmates, but equally correct) so that you're solution actually works and makes sense in the real world rather than the abstract academic world. Whew. That's a big job for me. I think I'll start with working on my questioning skills, keep the discussion and POE's rolling, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Thanks for the nudge!

Hi Anneke,

Broad spectrum seems to put it mildly--what an exciting range of student behaviours and attitudes!  Nice work getting the students doing pushes and pulls!  feeling is believing???  Being nervous is part of being shy??

It's been so long since I've drawn on an overhead that I'm sure I too would find it much harder than the board, though there were years when I used an overhead a lot.  EVERYTHING takes practice??!!

Well done on doing a POE and getting some correct predictions AND explanations.  How did the attempt to "discover" F=ma go?  Don't forget the idea of a=F/m as a way of putting the equation that comes closer to experience!  Where did you get edible chalk?

You really are having a good time and it sounds like you are doing quite well.  I really appreciate all the detail in your account, and I'm glad you've recorded it for revisiting.  Things will look so different after another 2 weeks.

Have a great week!
Tom

Teaching and Learning

The students in my grade 11 Physics class are just great. They are all so different - one is a perfectionist who is more concerned with grades than learning, while another couldn't care less about grades, but told me he is in the course to learn how to accurately predict where his bullet will land for the upcoming hunting season. One student has an amazing creative innovative mind but struggles with the math to move from ideas to real solutions, while another is great at the math but has trouble understanding concepts. One answers all my questions, even if he knows his answers are wildly wrong, while another barely opens her mouth even when she's quite sure of her answer. For a class of only 6 students, there couldn't be a broader spectrum of students. And they are so much fun to teach.

Today was the second day of our forces unit, so we spent the class learning about free-body diagrams. We acted out the freebody diagram of a "system" (one student) experiencing an applied force from the "environment" (various combinations of students pulling and pushing on the poor "system"). It was fun for the kinesthetic learners in the group to move around and be the free-body diagram, but the more shy students were a little nervous about the activity. It's a challenge to think of ways to engage such a small class with so many different learning styles.

After acting out each free-body diagram, we drew the corresponding free-body diagrams and calculated the net force in a chart using the overhead projector. I had no idea drawing on overheads was so difficult! I thought it would be far easier than using the blackboard, but not at all. I definitely need some more practice with that!

Next, we did our first POE (Predict, Observe, Explain) of the Forces unit! It was a fun one, and I think the students were interested and engaged. I showed the students how I could hang two spring scales side-by-side and suspended a mass from both spring scales. Then I showed them how I could hang one spring scale above the other, with the mass hanging from the lower spring scale. The students had to decide how the force shown on the spring scales would differ between the two situations. I was so impressed! Even with only one day of studying forces under their belt, several of the students could accurately predict that the side-by-side springs should read half the force of the springs hung in series, and give me a clear explanation (without all the correct terms, but the right concepts) for why. Yet other students questioned them, and didn't quite believe it until they saw it, which was a great eye opener for them. I'll definitely use that POE again.

We ended the class with some practice free-body diagrams of the students in the class riding horses or parachuting, and preparation for a formative lab tomorrow. I'm quite excited for the lab - we'll be investigating the relationship between force, mass and acceleration by pulling students on a cart through the cafeteria. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun, and hopefully by the end of the day we will have discovered F = ma!

The best part of the day today, however, was actually just the very start of class. Yesterday, I had the students share their hobbies with me (so that I can make them the main characters in the problems I assign), tell me a few aspects of forces they want to especially study (this seems to be an astrophysics group!), and share with me what they believe makes a great Physics teacher. The responses for what makes a great teacher were varied and all very helpful, but the last one made me smile - one student simply wrote "insanity". So when I was chatting with the students at the start of class about how I'll be working to live up to these expectations, I strolled over to the chalk board, picked up a conveniently place piece of chalk and popped it in my mouth. It was of course edible chalk, but it was a really fun moment to laugh with the students before we dove into free-body diagrams today.

So all in all, I was happy with how today's class went. The students seemed to be interested in the material, and they're beginning to grasp the concepts. I need to work on my note writing skills for sure, and I ran out of time to finish everything I hoped to finish, but that's what learning is for.

Wanna Draw?

My first placement is in Physics, but I was chatting with the art teacher who I'll be working with next semester while the school was doing a colour house competition. Of course it was the usual affair - around one quarter of the school actively engaged in the activity, one half passively and obediently watching and one quarter heading back inside for free time at their lockers and in the cafeteria. 

The art teacher noticed this and found me some pads of newsprint, conte, and oil pastels, and suggested I encourage the students who weren't participating to draw. I didn't really expect anyone to want to draw - when I was a student, I was terrified of those other kids who seemed disinterested in school. I'd never dream of inviting them to draw with me - they'd tell me to F-off or something, wouldn't they? But I tried it. And I am so disappointed in myself for underestimating those students. They didn't even think twice. "Sure, I'll draw something" "I don't know what I'd draw, but why not - I can try." Soon there was two tables full of students drawing in the cafeteria! They kept drawing right into lunch, and drew some really great stuff. Many thanks to the art teacher for encouraging me to just ask people to draw with me!

Practicum Goals

I can hardly believe October is here! Monday is my first day of my teaching placement, and I'm very excited! There are so many things I'm hoping to observe, practice and learn over the four weeks that I am in the school, but I'll try to narrow this down to the ones I intend to work on first. These are:

1. I plan to develop my ability to motivate my students to strive to do their very best in both academics and personal character. It's a big goal I know, but I think intrinsic motivation in these two areas is very important, so I hope to make as many strides in this direction over the next four weeks as possible. Practically, I intend to nurture this self-motivation by establishing a positive rapport with the students, so that they know I am on their side, helping them achieve their goals rather than forcing them to learn what I tell them to learn. I hope to make those connections through extracurriculars, simply chatting before and after class, engaging them respectfully during class, and connecting the classroom to their world - be it farming, skateboarding, etc. I want to foster an environment where we take time in class to discuss or (for shyer students) write anonymously about specific ways that we have shown or will show good character growth, and encourage each other in that. I want to provide my students with a glimpse of how amazing and beautiful Physics is through POE's, connections to the arts and creative writing, and other engaging activities so that my students will have the opportunity to fall in love with Physics.

2. Hand in hand with developing intrinsic motivation to learn academics and strong character, is of course providing the environment in which the now motivated students (hopefully) can learn and practice these things. I want to work on my communication skills, so that I can explain and facilitate the discovery of Physics in a way that is easily accessible to students. I want to help my students set realistic and specific goals for themselves in terms of what aspects of their character they want to further develop. I hope that since I have such a small class (only 7 students!), it will be easier to work with each student on his/her personal learning goals.  

3. I intend to make as much use as possible of the expertise of those around me. Even in brief conversations with teachers, I've learned a lot from them. So I can't wait to see what I can learn when I'm in a staff room of experienced teachers, discussing ideas with my associate, and commuting 2-3 hours everyday with other teacher candidates who are also bubbling with ideas.

There are so so many things to learn, but I do hope to make the a good sized dent in the mountain of learning over the next four weeks. I can't wait to meet the students and teachers on monday!

From Graffiti to Bullying

Thanks for the gentle nudge, Anneke.  I really appreciate that you are writing at times other than when I ask you to!  I thought your presentation of Graffiti was one of the most engaging we have seen across all the PEEL presentations--something about drawings/diagrams that engages more than mere words.  I'm sorry you missed Barbara Coloroso's amazing performance, and I'm very sorry that you experienced bullying yourself for as long as 7 years.  Small wonder that you could write so insightfully and at length about the problem.
Do you know how many people are reading your blog?  It looks like you will have a very impressive documentation of your year, which is exactly what I was hoping for (even though you had the blog before I had the assignment!)
Yours,
Tom

Alternative Responses to Bullying

I was unable to attend Barbara Coloroso’s talk about Bullying in the evening of Peace Day at McArthur, and I was very disappointed since this is a topic that I feel strongly about. So I picked up some available information from the Faculty of Ed. to read about bullying on my own. I was stuck today by a very consistent line of thought in all the articles I read: STOP the bullying.

It struck me as an interesting and positive response to bullying, but maybe not the most successful response. I’m not suggesting for a second that we shouldn’t worry about bullying; bullying has pushed far too many kids into terrible depression and tragic suicide. Bullying is absolutely a tragedy of our schools.

But it is also no simple problem to solve: there are many forms of bullying that are almost impossible to detect (from the teacher or parent’s perspective), let alone stop. I do agree that it’s important to try to decrease bullying, but even more importantly, I believe we need to be teaching kids how to respond in a healthy way to bullying when it happens - because it happens. It doesn’t help students - who have watch unsuccessful after unsuccessful attempt on the part of teachers to end bullying in their school - to tell those kids that the only solution to their pain is to stop the bullying. When trying to eradicate bullying just isn’t working, I believe that with good supports at home and/or school, students can not only survive the bullying but also thrive and grow through those challenges.

I write from the experience of approximately 7 years of verbal/emotional bullying. Some years were better than other years, and there's the maybe years after the fact that might still be classified as bullying. But in the worst years, I greatly regret to say that I had some experiences of being the bully as well. Those years had a profound impact on my life in both positive and negative ways. Every person’s experience with bullying is very different, and I can only speak from my own experiences, but I hope and pray that I’ll be able to support the struggling students in whatever school I teach in, and share the lessons I learned through bullying with them.

Bullying, especially over the long term, can inflict painful emotional wounds that are not easily repaired. But it can also be a huge opportunity for positive growth. For example, there is a powerful lesson about determination and stick-to-itiveness that students with adequate support can learn. Often, parents move their bullied child from school to school to stop or flee from the bullying. In their attempt to avoid the bullying, the child learns that he failed in the 1^st school to be liked and accepted, failed in the 2^nd, failed in the 3^rd – in effect, the child learns that there is no where in this world where he belongs – a thought which can tragically lead a child towards suicidal thoughts. I was very fortunate, however, to be able to remain in one school. Even though I experienced bullying there, I had the positive experience of knowing that at the end of my elementary school experience, I was not a failure. I learned that can make it through difficult things without giving up or running away. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for running away; sometimes the bullying really is just too severe for the child to handle, and leaving the school is necessary. But whenever I encounter a long term challenging problem, I am so grateful for the lessons I learned while being bullied: that while this may be hard, and it may even be hard for a long time, there is no reason why I won’t be successful in the end. With the right supports and encouragement at home and school, I believe kids can use bullying, an inherently negative experience, to learn a positive skill such as how to persevere through life’s challenges.

In addition to learning determination, with support, I think students can learn self-awareness and self-control over their own cognitive patterns through the experience of being bullied. For me, the main trigger of bullying was not the stereotypical bullying due to ethnicity, disability or economic background, but simply my own social awkwardness. I’ve always been awkward, and I’m now quite happy to say that I always will be. But I wasn’t always okay with my awkwardness. Here, bullying first taught me a negative lesson - to bully myself for days over one tiny social mistake. But years of experience with bullying gave me an opportunity to practice being aware of my self-bullying and purposefully challenging and changing my thought patterns. The typical thought pattern I first learned was, “I did this stupid thing. I am such a terrible person. No one could ever want to be around me”, but being aware of those kind of self-bullying thought patterns makes it possible for the student to see just how ridiculous they really are. With time and practice, students can learn to reframe their thoughts into, “I did this stupid thing. That is pretty funny. And my friends probably think it’s funny too.” Reframing situations has been for me a very challenging thing to learn, and there’s been plenty of times when I still slip into the original thought patterns that I learned. But the self-awareness and reframing skills that I learned as a means of survival during the experience bullying are very helpful to me in the everyday whenever I face not-so-constructive criticism. I’m still learning of course, but nine times out of ten, I can now say I actually really like my awkwardness. It’s a funny unique part of me that I value, and I wouldn’t give it up for any amount of “fitting in”.

Finally, the most powerful lesson that I believe can be learned through bullying is empathy. In our society, people who are hurting often work very hard to hide their struggles, and sadly they are too often successful. Students who have experienced bullying know the subtle signs of emotional pain because they have been there. For the rest of their lives, they have the incredible opportunity to genuinely empathize with others in a unique way. They can be naturally drawn to the person who is lonely in the crowd. They can come along side people who desperately need someone to understand what they are going through. For me, bullying opened up the wonderful world of working with people with disabilities. One of many examples of this was my friendships as a child: I naturally became good friends with another girl who was struggling with exclusion and bullying – years later she was diagnosed with aspersers, and I’ve greatly valued the understanding of autism that she taught me ever since. Those experiences with bullying have shaped my whole career path in a very positive way towards working with people with exceptionalities. I hope that I can not only see the students who are struggling emotionally and socially in my school as a teacher, but that I can also teach them how to grow through those experiences to deeply empathize with others.

Bullying is a very difficult issue to eradicate, but I do believe that in situations where attempts to stop bullying just aren't working, there are alternative solutions. I believe that bullying can be turned on its ugly head and used to benefit the child rather than harm him or her. It is so important that we do not look back on our experiences of bullying with contempt or bitterness, nor encourage kids who are bullied today to see themselves as victims, but rather that we teach them how to cope and grow through the experience. Bullying is 100% wrong. There’s no doubt about that. But it happened and it happens. I believe that a very essential aspect of my role as an educator is not only to try to stop bullying, but also to equip children with the supports and tools to grow positively from the experience when is does happen. I hope and pray that someday, even if my students can’t say “Ms. T’s class was so awesome”, they can say, “It was a hard year when I was in Ms. T’s class, but she stood by me, did everything she could to support me, so I learned a lot about life that year, and I’m a better person for it.”

Graffiti Method of Teaching

On monday, I had a wonderful opportunity to try out Graffiti teaching with the ideal class - a room full of passionate Physics educators. The Graffiti method came from the website PEEL in Practice (http://peelweb.org/index.cfm?resource=pip), and I applied this method to a unit review of optics.

We started our class with a bit of introductory discussion about how everyone's weekend was, what they did on the weekend, etc. Then I explained that this was a review class, and I divided the class into 4 groups (2 or 3 students in each group), and gave each group a sheet of paper with a moderately challenging question that had multiple answers. The questions were:

- What is reflection? Explain using an analogy.
- What is your favourite electromagnetic wave? What properties and/or applications make that wave your favourite?
- What is refraction? Explain using an analogy.
- Choose an application of the lens. How does the lens work in that application?

The group talked and decided on an answer, which was written down in pretty coloured markers on the pages of paper. After about 3 minutes, the papers were rotated to different groups. The new group was then told that they could "cheat" off the previous group - they were encouraged to use the previous ideas combined with their own ideas to answer the question in the best way possible. The papers kept rotating until every group had a chance to write.

Then I switched up the groups and redistributed the papers. The new groups' task was to summarize what the class knows about refraction, reflection, electromagnetic waves, or lenses depending on what sheet they received, and present this summary in 1 minute to the class. This is what they came up with!

Finally we ended with some discussion about how effective the class found the Graffiti method, and I received some very helpful feedback. The "students" told me that they felt rushed - they would have appreciated 5 minutes instead of 3 minutes to work together as a group answering the questions. They said that they felt engaged and involved in their learning, and they appreciated the different colours and the freedom to draw or write on the paper. Some of the "students" especially liked the fact that they were allowed to "cheat" off the other groups' ideas - this made exchanging ideas more fun. They also appreciated the relaxed start of the lesson with a little chat about the weekend before launching into the activity.

Interestingly enough, the Think, Pair, Share method of teaching which happened to follow my Graffiti lesson is strikingly similar. It was interesting, however, to see how very differently such a similar teaching style could be taught very differently by another teacher. In his lesson, he used Think, Pair, Share as a unit opener to get students to think about a concept, and he appealed more to the auditory learners whereas I went straight for the visual learners. It was helpful to see how a similar method could easily be tuned to different learning styles almost unintentionally due to our own personal learning styles.

Beautiful painting!

Thanks for sharing your latest work of art, Anneke!!  I like it a lot.  What do the two sisters think of it?

Interesting that we talk about art helping with other subjects, but rarely see physics that way.  I guess we have to go for physics for its own sake.  And doing physics seems quite a long way from doing art.  You have two wonderful teaching subjects!!

Tom

Personal Creative Practice

In my art class, we’ve been talking mostly about the why of art education – instrumentalist theories which describe how art education assists students with other academic subjects such as math and english, and essentialist theories that explain why art is important for its own sake. Mixed in with our discussion of art education theories, our professor has also slipped in his own words of wisdom as a teacher.

One such piece of advice that particularly stuck out to me was to maintain our personal creative practice. It seems obvious, but I can see it being very easy for me to get so busy planning lessons and organizing student art shows that I run out of time to actually make art myself.

In light of that, the picture of the two sisters I was painting this summer is finally dry!

It was a really fun piece to paint – they are both such beautiful women. I hope this painting can capture some of their radiant personalities.

First Day

What a great way to start off this year of teachers college! Bagpipes and the town crier opened the education year, and by the afternoon we were learning useful tools for teaching. Our Physics teacher used the Predict (and explain), Observe, Explain model (POE) for teaching, but with a particularly great strategy during the prediction aspect.

The problem he presented to us is illustrated below:



The three ramps shown above each descend by the same amount. Which ball, released on the left side of the ramp, will reach the right side first? Or will they all end at the same time?

The great part about how the professor taught this lesson was in how he asked students to predict what would happen. With a room full of rusty physics teachers, everyone was nervous about giving the wrong answer, as would be the case for our future high school students. So, rather than asking us what we thought would be the fastest ramp, he asked us, "If someone were to believe that the first ramp would yield the shortest time, what might they use as their reasoning? If someone were to believe that the time would be same no matter what ramp the ball went down, what might be their reasoning?" etc. It took away the fear of being wrong, and enabled us to engage in a productive learning discussion.

I do believe this will be a great year :D

ps. So how do you think someone would be reasoning if they chose the blue ramp to yield the shortest time? The yellow one? The red one?

Underpainting

I'm playing around with the idea of letting the underpainting show through in my art in a painting of two sisters that I'm working on right now.

Usually, when I paint people with oils, I would put on the fun colours that give skin it's vibrancy in a thin layer with a flat brush. Then I would take a large round dry brush and do the sophisticatedly named "dab-dab" technique, which simply involves blending the colours together by dabbing the wet paint with a dry brush. The result is an all skin colour smooth face with a soft texture.

I don't have anything against the dab-dab technique, but in this painting, I'm painting two vibrant people, so I wanted those stronger colours to stick around. So this is an experiment in letting the underpainting show. I'm stopping after the flat brush step - just getting the colours on there, and not dab-dabbing them until they all blend into a skin colour.

At first, I had to tone down the blues; the two sisters were looking like something out of Avatar! The challenge will be to make these blues, yellows, and reds believable as real aspects of skin colour.

In some ways, it may be an false exaggeration to paint skin with these colours. But I think, letting the underpainting show is perhaps and even more honest approach than smoothing everything together. We'll see how it goes!

Well, enough writing about painting - I'm off to paint some more this afternoon!

Blogging Begins!

So here goes my first blog post! Perhaps it would be good to start with a little What, When, Why, and such.

The What: It's a blog about whatever I'm learning, exploring, pondering, etc. I expect that most posts will be at least vaguely related to wonderful students and of course the fabulous subjects, Physics and Art.

The When: I'm super excited to be starting teachers college this fall, where I'll be learning how to teach Physics and Art.

The Why: I'm hoping to keep a scattered sort of record of some of the things I love about the world's two best subjects here. I called this blog Birefringent m&m's after a Lasers class study session with a great friend, during which we taught each other about birefringence using m&m's as our tasty model. I believe learning and chocolate always belong together.

The Who: I'm a nerdy sort of artist with a passion to see people with disabilities reach their potential. I have a lot of dreams for my life, and a God with even crazier dreams. I love a lot of things a lot.

And that's basically it. I hope you enjoy reading about what I'm learning and teaching!