For love and groceries

All you need is love... and groceries and rent and utilities and...

When it comes to physics and education, I have more than enough love. Indeed, friends, who endure my random "fun physics moments", might rather I restrain my physics love a little more. I'm currently trying to decide if I should pursue a PhD in physics education research or simply do a masters. I have no doubt that I would thoroughly enjoy the experience - I love the learning environment of the university, I love the research and I love the teaching opportunities. It would most definitely be a lot of fun to work on a PhD.

But I have to admit, love isn't the only factor in my decision. Tuition is higher and funding is lower than I'd planned for, and my practical brain can't help but wonder if a PhD would really be a financially sound decision.

So this semester will be an experiment. I just finished making advertising posters (using my sketch of the learning student, pictured to the left) for my physics tutoring services. I very much enjoy tutoring, so if I find it possible to break even this semester with some additional funds from tutoring, then I expect I'll be confident in diving into a PhD.

The key will be finding students who want regular weekly tutoring, not just cramming before the exam. I will try to be fairly strict about this anti-cramming policy. It's nearly impossible to learn physics in a short period of time just before the exam - it's like learning to play the piano - a student needs to work at it regularly and consistently throughout the semester in order to be successful. It would be terribly unethical for me to charge for tutoring if I didn't have sufficient time with the student to tutor effectively and consistently. As an aside, I do wish companies such as "CourseCram" felt the same way.

Now I know you're probably thinking, "Fabulous! As long as we don't hire her as a tutor, Anneke will finally stop inflicting her physics demonstrations with accompanying jazzy-hands on us." But you should know, I couldn't stop teaching physics to innocent bystanders if I tried. No one is safe from a fun physics moment! I'll try to differentiate between random free physics teaching and paid tutoring though through the degree of planning/preparation, building of ideas upon ideas and of course the direct connection to course material. Here's to hoping I have the heart to request pay to do a job that I enjoy perhaps even more than the customer...

Singing Palestrina & Learning to Teach

There are many aspects of learning about teaching which I love; one of these is the relatedness of life experiences and teaching. An example: in choral ensemble this fall, we learned a piece by Palestrina called Cantabo Domino. It's an absolutely beautiful piece when it comes together, but it was written back in the days before time signatures were a big deal, so it's quite challenging to sing. During practice, it wasn't uncommon for us to be completely off track in within just a few measures of starting the piece. When this happened, I expected our conductor to stop us and have us return to the beginning to find our notes, but he didn't. He kept conducting a mostly silent choir! I tried to come back in, "in vita mea-" no, wait, I wasn't in time with the sopranos. I listened anxiously for someone to give me a prominant phrase so I could find my place in the intertwining melodies of the piece.  Then there it was, the 2nd sopranos singing "delectabor in Domino" - I was back in. And I even got to feel a little bit useful: after the piece was done, one of the other 1st altos beside me thanked me for helping her find her part when she was off track.

Of particular note in this practice was our conductor's unwillingness to give up, even when we had no idea where we were. The atmosphere in the alto section was much less hopeful - we were all ready to throw in the towel. But our conductor just wasn't willing to give up on us; no matter how off track our singing was, he knew that if we took a moment to listen to the singers around us, we would find our way back into the music, and he was right.

I think teaching is very much like singing Palestrina. It is beautiful and thrilling when it comes together, but it is also very challenging to do well. And much like our conductor, teaching does not stop when we make mistakes. I will always be learning how to teach: making mistakes, reflecting on them, and trying to teach better. And though I want so much to be a perfect teacher - always inspiring all my students - I'm not, and those mistakes are part of the process. Bad teaching days aren't fun, but they are no reason to give up - just reason to reflect, listen to feedback from others like a singer does, and come back in.

I feel an invisible pressure (mostly from myself) that every lesson must go off without a hitch, which is heightened through being "that physics pedagogy researcher" in my department. Needless to say, my teaching this semester didn't meet these invisible standards of perfection.  For example, during one of our weekly quizzes, a student asked me about the quiz problem and I second guessed myself. In a non-flustered state after the quiz, I double checked the problem, and it turned out that my physics had been fine, but I felt really silly in the moment floundering and not sure how to respond. In another lesson, I wanted to talk to my students about mental illness in such a way as to normalize it and share some ways to care for themselves and their friends. It went okay, but really not as well as I'd hoped. My voice sounded funny because I have a cold, and something about the atmosphere of the room was distancing them from me. They were courteous, but I don't think I had them really buying in. This was one of the most important lessons of the year to me, and I was very sad to have taught it poorly. When these sorts of classes happen - when I'm not the teacher I want to be - it's hard not to feel very discouraged.

Yet last week, we sang the Palestrina in our concert, and it went so well. As an alto (the most fun part to sing), I got to be right in the middle of six different melodies intertwining, related but distinct, rising and falling together, but separately. Everything came together, and it was a great experience to sing such a difficult piece well.

This semester has contained those sorts of moments in teaching as well. There have been classes when the students were asking great questions, and classes when I was able to ask them guiding questions and see their eyes light up when they suddenly got it - I love that moment! Last week, I got to teach a few lectures, and they went so well - the participation level was high, with the majority of the time spent in peer instruction during which the students talked with each other to make sense of the physics concepts in specific practical applications. We were learning about rotational dynamics - really tough topics like "what is the moment of inertia?", "when can I think about an object as a point mass, and when can't I?", etc. It was exciting to teach, since these ideas were new to nearly everyone but were still relevant to their everyday experiences. It was very encouraging to see good attendance and participation in the lectures (Though this might have just been for the "special guests": Dr. Suess and Darth Vader, not for me). The students' positive responses really boosted my confidence that I'm on the right track to being an ever-improving teacher. But not every lesson is like that, and that's alright. Even the lessons gone wrong are part of this process of becoming a better teacher - a path that I'll always be on.

It's an interesting journey in that there is no end destination, but there is still a defined path of improvement. That paradoxical nature of learning to teach is challenging in that I will never be the perfect teacher I want to be, but also exciting in that I will always be getting better and learning more.

My alternate NSERC application

I know it's just how the system works. I have a small space on my NSERC application forms to list the experiences which have developed my communication and interpersonal skills. The reviewers are looking for conference presentations, positions chairing committees, classroom teaching experiences, etc. for a good funding application. And no doubt, those sorts of things are important. What is distressing me is not that these things are valued, but what they are valued above.

Where have I learned the most about communication? In communicating with people who are non-verbal, in the complex process of enabling independence with people with disabilities, and most of all, in listening to those who have so much to say of great importance, but don't talk the way I do - those who persevere in communicating despite day after day, sometimes year after year of being unheard. Where have I learned the most about interpersonal skills? In working through tensions among people living in community, in revealing to another person, who feels useless and unwanted, their incredible value and beauty, and in receiving unconditional trust and love from people with disabilities.

Imagine what our world could be if we all learned from some of the greatest teachers of trust, love, forgiveness and acceptance! What an incredible gift we have in knowing these people with intellectual disabilities - I wish that I was more worthy of that honour.

So here is my alternate "Applicants Statement" of my NSERC application. The good one. The one that most accurately answers NSERC's question to describe the experiences that have formed my communication and interpersonal skills.

I'd like to share with you about Audrey (not her real name). Audrey is an incredible teacher of what it means to love, to trust, and to forgive. During the time I've spent with Audrey, she never missed an opportunity to teach me something new and reveal something beautiful about our world. In terms of how we typically assess people, Audrey is unable to speak verbally, she cannot feed herself, she requires assistance to walk and to do most things, and she is blind. Here I will describe just a few experiences with Audrey which highlight how she taught me so much about interpersonal and communication skills. 

Interpersonal skills cannot be just a set of well-timed head nods, "thank you for sharing your concerns" comments, and fake smiles. Interpersonal skills require a genuine love for another person. I'm referring to love, not in a romantic sense of course, but in the sense that the welfare of others must truly and deeply matter to me. This kind of love can only be unconditional - it needs to wrapped in forgiveness in order to mean anything. 

Audrey spent most of her life in an institution. I'm not aware of all of the details of this experience, but from my knowledge of Audrey and of many institutions, it is not unlikely that Audrey spent perhaps 20 years sitting alone. Try to imagine 20 years of isolation. On a tight schedule, an overworked nurse would have probably come by, quickly put food or medications in her mouth, and then would have had to move on, leaving Audrey alone in her dark world of blindness. Her lack of speech would have made it impossible for her to express the pain this must have caused. I cannot even imagine a single day living in such isolation, with no way to make it better.

Audrey has every right to be bitter and angry against the world. And yet, she has chosen to love others, and she is one of the most loving women I have ever met. As an aside, it makes me wonder what our world could look like if nations could forgive other nations with the kind of unconditional love that Audrey can give. But in this alternate application, I'll just describe a bit of the interpersonal skills that Audrey taught me personally. One key aspect of Audrey's ability to love is that it is two-way: she is both strong enough to give unconditional love regardless of past hurts and humble enough to receive it. In knowing Audrey, I discovered the importance of not only my caring for others, but also my accepting love from others, which can sometimes be hard on my pride. Audrey also taught me a great deal about the importance of focused time - of sitting with another person, and being fully focused on relating to them. When I'm sitting with someone who is non-verbal, it is tempting to just start thinking ahead to tasks that I need to do, rather than focusing on them. Audrey could sense if I was not 100% connecting with her, and she kept me accountable. This is of course very important for interpersonal skills - that I take the time to fully focus on the student who I am talking to, so that they know they are valued and their learning as well as they themselves matter to me.

Audrey also shared with me much about communication. Typically, when I sing and play guitar, it's just about enjoying a nice song. Audrey taught me that music is all about connecting with people. I would sit down beside her, and she would hear me opening my guitar case. Her head would tilt a bit to the side as if to ask, "is that the sound I think it is?" And from the first chord, her face would light up in the most beautiful smile. She'd lean in towards me so her ears could be as close to the sound as possible. But it wasn't just about hearing the sound for her; if we played her music on a CD, she didn't experience the same joy (though the music itself sounded much better than what I could sing). Singing with Audrey was to communicate with her, so I sang with her all the time - outside on walks, during personal care, and of course during our evening guitar time. And I am intentionally using the phrase "I sang with her"; Audrey may not have been able to verbally sing along, but she participated in the music much more fully than most people who can hum along. She taught me by example, how to communicate enormous gratitude, to share a joy for the beauty of the world, and to connect with another person - all without using words.

Audrey's lack of verbal language encouraged me to pay closer attention to her sometimes subtle communications, which is a highly transferable skill particularly for teaching. Only the bravest students will tell the teacher how they are feeling in a course verbally, but all of the students will share their concerns and fears non-verbally - all the teacher needs to do is know how to listen. I have much more to learn about listening, but I am very grateful to Audrey for the lessons she taught me on communication so far. 

Giving and receiving trust is essential to both good communication and interpersonal skills. To assist Audrey in transferring to her wheel chair, I would start by explaining where we were going and then say something like, "Audrey, will you stand up with me?" And she would reach out her hands - these beautiful weathered wrinkled hands with her palms up and open. In those hands was her trust, freely given to me. She trusted that when I lifted her, I would not drop her fragile frame. She also knew that I was trusting her not to lunge to the side which could seriously hurt me as well. She trusted that wherever I was taking her, it would be good, even though I don't know how much she could understand of my description of where we were going. It is a huge honour and responsibility to be given someone's complete trust - particularly from someone who is vulnerable. For me, this is one of my greatest motivators - to know that someone trusts me; it would break my heart to let them down. For successful communication and interpersonal connection with students, trust is essential. Like Audrey, my students need to know that I will do everything I can to not let them fall. Also, just as I trusted Audrey to stand up with care, my students need to know that I am trusting them to put their best effort into learning physics. And like Audrey, my students need to know that in this course or tutorial, I am taking them somewhere worthwhile. 

There is so much more to write about on this topic. I could describe what I have learned about genuine and continual encouragement and thankfulness from a beautiful woman, who is the only person to never miss a chance to excitedly tell me that she liked my leading worship in church and has thanked me at least once or twice a week for the last year for a painting that I gave her and her sister last summer. I could write about the lessons in patience and perseverance even in the seemingly unimportant things from a man who could only communicate by blinking because he was paralyzed except for his eyes. I could write about what I have learned from a good friend of mine with aspergers, who has many gifts, one being that she has a remarkable ability to accept herself and others simply for who they are. I could share what I've learned about truly listening and valuing what others say from a woman who seems to string non-nonsensical words together, but then suddenly out of this string of words, she speaks something profound. This is truly just scratching the surface. If I began to describe what I have learned from the many people with disabilities who I have had the great honour to know, I would be writing a novel.

So why is it that titles, such as "support worker", don't look well on most resumes or NSERC applications requiring interpersonal and communication skills? I think this is because readers, who haven't had the opportunity to experience the field, see support work as simply cleaning and feeding people. But just to write that makes me cringe. To be a good support worker requires continual learning and growth in interpersonal, communication and many other skills - it was inspiring to see the ability and commitment of my co-workers who have made this challenging work their career. Of course, the adjective "good" is necessary in that sentence - technically, it is possible for a support worker to completely blind themselves to the value of the people with disabilities they see everyday, and simply perform routine tasks without thought of the person in front of them, but this was certainly not the norm among my co-workers.

So truth be told, this post isn't really about my less than impressive NSERC application. It's about what our lack of valuing work done with people with disabilities represents. It reflects a society which far too often views people with intellectual or other disabilities as a group to pity or avoid. It represents our tragic failure to learn from people who could change the world with their ability to love. Gosh, that makes me so so sad.

In the end, I couldn't help myself - I just couldn't leave all this out of my real NSERC application. So my "support worker experiences" did make it squeezed into at least one tiny line on the real application. I hope that the reviewers have also known a person with a disability, partly so that when they read that short line they understand that really, what I am describing is the paragraphs above. But mostly, I hope the reviewers have known a person with a disability, so that they can be as fortunate and blessed as I've been.

Becoming Human

I’m currently reading the most beautiful book by Jean Vanier. It’s a series of lectures he gave entitled, Becoming Human. It’s not explicitly related to education, but I think his insights are very much worth sharing in this blog, none-the-less. So, here’s my take on the first chapter.

Vanier writes that loneliness is an essential aspect of being human.  We can cover over loneliness by surrounding ourselves with busy work, but it is always still a part of who we are. Loneliness can by a force for good, however - we can give our lives meaning through occupations and volunteer work that makes us feel useful and needed. It can lead us to creative expression and even lead us to seek God. Vanier describes an experience of God as paradoxically both satisfying our thirst for the absolute and at the same time whetting it, leaving us seeking more. I think this is certainly true in my experiences. I write my best songs, paint my best art, and often accomplish my most meaningful work when I am lonely. And the feeling of loneliness is often a reminder to me to take more time for my relationship with God. I appreciate that Vanier doesn't write loneliness off as a purely tragic thing; he acknowledges both sides of this essential aspect of human beings.

Unfortunately, while loneliness can inspire creative fulfilling work and faith, it can also birth apathy and depression. When a person is unsuccessful in filling this hole of loneliness with anything, they can give up. They can begin to believe that there is nothing they can ever do to make the world better of find any meaning in their life. This sort of loneliness, Vanier describes as "a feeling of not being part of anything, of being cut off", and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether the person is alone. This is too often the case for people with disabilities, or for people who are disabled by their life situation of poverty or discrimination, since such people don't always have as easy access the positive growth opportunities that loneliness could inspire them into. 

Vanier describes loneliness as a paradox; we need connectedness with other human beings to quench our loneliness and bring us feelings of security and order. Yet that same connectedness can stifle the positive loneliness which encourages us to take new creative paths. So how do we live with others in this paradoxical world? I like how Vanier puts it,

"All humans are sacred, whatever their culture, race, or religion, whatever their capacities or incapacities, and whatever their weaknesses or strengths may be. Each of us has an instrument to bring to the vast orchestra of humanity, and each of us needs help to become all that we may be."

Vanier's ideas aren't specific to education of course, but they are easily relateable. As a teacher, revealing to my students what instrument they play well is a great responsibility and honour. Of course, by the time my students have reached first year, they've done quite a lot of figuring out what their role in the world is already. But I don't think this revealing ever stops in life, so I hope that I can be a part of that for my students at their current stage of life as well. Showing them their uniqueness, and striving to understand who they are and where they are in their life - these things encourage the inspiring creative side of loneliness. Vanier specifically mentions the importance of celebrating the person for who they are and the abilities they do have. Pity is the opposite of empowerment - regardless of ability.

It is also my role as an educator, to guide my students away from the tragic side of loneliness and towards community with each other. Creating community is one of my biggest goals with my students this year. Of course, I intend to build community in the context of teaching them a good conceptual understanding and strong problem solving skills, but I want to make sure they all finish the year with the community that they need to grow those skills and conceptual understanding in the future.

I am trying to structure my tutorial so that my students each feel that they are an essential contributing member of a team with a common goal. That's a big learning process for both me and the students! It's been a challenge for me to set up the teams, and especially to set up my physical classroom space (which consists of 70 chairs, with mini desks bolted to the floor in rows - it's taken a lot of different attempts to try to make this a space for collaboration as you can imagine!) It's also taking time for the students to figure out how to solve a problem in a team, and I've definitely seen lots of bumps so far in tutorial. There are cultural barriers, the challenge of being humble enough to ask for a friend's help, and issues of impatience with team members who aren't "getting it" quickly enough. It's not easy to learn to value the different contributions classmates can make, but I've seen enough successful teamwork and improvements in teamwork to trust that we're learning how to do community as a class. And I'm excited about that.

Don't pull the weeds in this studio

When people ask me what I study, I do try really hard to fight the temptation to ramble on and on about physics education research, but you know how it is - sometimes I can't help but let it slip out. And it really is exciting stuff (I like to think); I get to look at the gender gap in physics, and try to work my way through the complex weave of issues that contribute to this gap, with the hope of finding some positive solutions. Specifically, I'm looking at the impacts of physics self-efficacy (which just refers to how confident you are in your ability to do physics) on the success and retention of women in physics. A lot of very fascinating research has been done in this field, and I am quite looking forward to learning more.

So yes, admittedly it just happened now; it really is so hard to mention physics education research without rambling on for at least a paragraph. This blog post, however, is about such a rambling that happened recently when I was talking with a person who teaches in the engineering department. I assumed that as a female educator in a similar field, she would be enthused to hear that such research was going on in a nearby department. But her response to my excitement about self-efficacy was:

 "Oh, well you know, in engineering, our students aren't touchy feely like that."

I didn't know what to say. How could an educator completely ignore study after study done on engineering students showing that they are touchy feely like that?

Through educators who think this way, we have created a "weed-out" system, without taking the time to think about how this affects our students' self-efficacy or the future of engineering as a whole. In this type of system, which views students as disembodied transcript numbers, professors have even been known to say,

"Look to your left. Look to your right. One of them will be gone by Christmas."

Of course, we like to think that in such a system, we are weeding out the academically "weak" students - these students would make poor engineers anyway, right? But I believe that such a system is actually hurting or even eliminating the innovative, collaborative, ethical, and diverse engineers - the very engineers who we need to discover solutions for the challenges to be faced by our changing world.

• Firstly, such a system weeds out students with a strong sense of ethics who care about their fellow student. A student who genuinely cares and tries to help their classmates succeed does poorly because this kind of cut-throat system requires that your fellow classmates to do worse than you so that you can "win". 
• Secondly, we weed out minority groups using subtle and sometimes even overt discrimination as described in Malicky's A Literature Review on the Under-representation of Women in Engineering. We make sexual jokes about women in engineering - we mean it all in fun of course, but objectification can not help but wear down a person's self-efficacy. In lab experiments, a woman can find her role in writing down the data rather than actually using the equipment because of the unspoken assumption that she is not as good at engineering as her male lab partner. Women who do persist in the sciences can find themselves acting more masculine than they might like to blend in. In my observations, the discrimination towards students with faith backgrounds in the sciences is even greater than that towards women. Students and professors toss in jokes or even overt insults directed towards people of faith, often leaving those who believe in God with a damaged self-efficacy and a strong sense that they are not welcome to study the field that they love.
• Lastly, we weed out those with new innovative perspectives. I believe that creativity needs a positive environment to flourish. Any artist will tell you that their studio space is essential in their creative process - some artists need to listen to music, some need to be in nature, some need to be in community with other artists, I need tea, chocolate and natural light - the specifics of the studio differ, but the theme is the same: artists need an environment which uplifts their soul to produce great work. I believe that creativity in engineering design requires the same uplifting environment. How can a "weed-out" atmosphere, in which the constant fear of "I'm not smart enough" plagues many students, be a studio space for engineering innovation?

I think we need to take a step back, study the literature on self-efficacy and the gender gap in engineering and science education, and re-assess the sometimes unspoken, but still prevalent "weed-out" attitude that exists in the sciences and engineering.

Thoughts on Teaching in the Tutorial

I find that teaching does something ridiculous to me. It's similar to the effect of drinking five cups of coffee before entering a ball pit. I sometimes think that if I could step outside my body while I'm teaching, and watch, I'd surely be saying to myself, "who is that?" This afternoon, I found myself quite literally leaping over chairs, acting out graphs with my body, and feeling ridiculously gleeful when my students experienced success in their problem solving. I honestly don't know how it happens; before tutorial, I was really quite tired, but as soon as the students walked in the room, I was on cloud nine. I can't help but wonder, is teaching secretly some form of a caffeine pill?

I'm still on the fence about how effective this high degree of excitement is for student learning. For some students, the excitement seems to be contagious - it gets a positive atmosphere in the room which spurs them on to learn more and have fun while learning. That is of course exactly what I love to see. For other students, however, I'm afraid that it distances them. The student who is really struggling doesn't want to see someone else having a jolly good time doing physics. They need a TA who comes along side them to meet them where they are at, in the emotional state that they are experiencing - a TA who they can relate to. This is of course much easier one-on-one; when a student approaches me individually with a stressed look on their face, of course that automatically changes my approach with them. But in the classroom, I am finding it very challenging to be the sort of TA that each of my very different students need.

We started our first tutorial with a great POE from Tom - the one with three tracks: (A) has a ramp followed by a hill, (B) has a ramp followed by a flat stretch, and (C) has a ramp followed by a valley. They all start and finish at the same height, but their paths are different. It's a fun POE to talk about kinematics, misuse of conservation of energy laws, and how the normal force can change the horizontal velocity when something is rolling (unlike a projectile which has the same horizontal velocity all through its path). The students got right into it! As soon as they entered the room, ten minutes before the start of class, they began investigating the tracks and trying to work out a solution. I love working with these students - you couldn't possibly ask for a better class.

During the first round of tutorials, I used this POE as a stepping stone to kinematics/ dynamics, but I also used it as a way to draw out and validate the curiosity they all have as physicists. Once we had discussed as a class the various possibilities for a little while, I asked them to vote if they would like to actually observe what happens, or just move on to the rest of the tutorial. Of course, all of them really wanted to see what really happens - and made this very clear to me verbally when I pretended to suggest that it didn't really matter. I was able to encourage them to hold onto this curiosity that has gotten them here studying physics. I shared with them briefly about my undergraduate experience - how my learning community of friends and my curiosity and love of learning made undergrad a truly enjoyable and enriching experience. Of course, after all this, we did observe which ball won the race, and everyone was surprised and interested. Three of the students explained why things resulted in the way that they did.

After this, we dove into problem solving. I had used another combination of my supervisor's and Tom's great ideas and cut up a giant sheet of whiteboard material into 2ft x 2ft whiteboards for teams of 3 students each to use to work out problems together. I gave the teams one of two different problems to solve and 40mins to solve them. One of the problems, given to me by my supervisor, was particularly successful in getting the students really thinking:

Before the Golden Gael’s football game this past Saturday, the quarter back was warming up by tossing the football straight up in the air and then catching it again. Determine the percentage of the total flight time during which the football is in the top half of its trajectory.

 I love this problem because there are no numbers! Of course that was the student's first response too: "I can't solve this without any numbers!" It was also a great chance for them to see just how essential it is to have a really good picture and well defined variables with useful subscripts. Of course, all of the groups required considerable support/questioning to reach the solution because it's not an easy problem. A few students came up with some creative approaches too.

After our 40 minutes of problem solving in teams, I had the students find their lab partner (who did the other problem), and teach them how to solve the problem they did. I like this strategy because it requires every student in the problem solving team to have a firm grasp of what is going on. Knowing that you have to teach this problem to someone else really motivated the students to participate in the problem solving.

I had a specific plan for these teaching partners. Last week, I made a lovely colour coded spread sheet to set up optimal lab/teaching partners. We had given the students a diagnostic test on the first day to determine where they were at in their understanding. The spread of overall grades was huge - from 33% to 100%, and everything in between. I took the questions from the test and divided them into questions which tested an understanding of inertia, of Newton's 3rd law, etc. This was a very imprecise science, of course, since most good physics questions require students to synthesize more than one idea, but I did my best. Then I matched students who achieved approximately only a 15-25% difference in their overall score, but scored very differently on the different aspects of the test. For example, I would put a student who achieved an overall score of 75% but achieved 100% on inertia problems and only 50% on 3rd law problems with a student who achieved an overall score of 55%, but achieved 100% on 3rd law problems and only 10% on inertia problems. My thinking was that the lab/teaching partners will be able to teach each other, but neither partner will get frustrated as the one who is always helping the other, since they both have different strengths. So far in the first two tutorials, this appears to be going well. I have yet to decide if the gains have been worth the significant amount of time that I put into sorting the data from the diagnostic test.

The second tutorial followed a similar structure. This time, we started with a brief class discussion about their feedback from an online get-to-know-you survey I had put out to them in the first week. They had shared with me what they love about physics, what they were most concerned about in the course, their plans for the future, and their hobbies (so that I can make them the stars of my tutorial problems). We specifically addressed the top three concerns they had brought up:

1) Keeping up with the workload
2) Maintaining high grades
3) Worries about having an incomplete math background. 

We chatted about some strategies to keep up with the work, maintain high grades without obsessing over grades, and I asked them for their advice with how to bring their math skills up to speed.

Following this, we entered the usual pattern of team problem solving with the whiteboards followed by teaching your lab partner how to do the problem you solved. All this went quite well - they were comfortable with the system, and did a great job solving the problems and teaching each other.

The difference with this week's tutorial was that it also ended with a quiz. I had written a quiz problem that I was really quite pleased with: it was about a student playing piano - one hand is playing a scale (consecutive notes) at constant speed, and the other hand is just starting to play a scale accelerating from rest. The question was to draw a position vs time graph for the two hands relative to the piano, and then to draw a graph of the right hand's position relative to the left hand. The final part was to find the time when the hands met. I thought it was a really fun question - the students would get to combine their understanding of position vs time graphs with their understanding of relative motion, and that would feel oh-so-rewarding. I definitely had my head in the clouds on this one.

The students really struggled with the quiz. One girl was actually shaking for the full half hour and several were visibly distressed. I felt so badly. In the end, I was able to find enough part marks to pass all but one of the students, but these students are used to getting 98% on physics tests - a 50%, even though it was on a quiz worth next to nothing in their final grade, was really hard on them. I think it's a very positive and important thing for them to be highly challenged by the problems they do in teams - this stretches them in an environment that has all sorts of supports. I didn't intend, however, to give them such a difficult problem in the already stressful situation of a quiz assessment.

I think I need to begin the next tutorial by apologizing. I hope I can also use it as a bit of teaching about teaching for my con-ed students - to share with them one of the challenges of teaching is to think like a student - and I didn't do that very effectively in writing the first quiz. While the students do need to be able to solve problems of this difficulty by the time the midterm arrives, it wasn't fair of me to expect them to be awesome problem solvers, able to synthesize different concepts, on the very first quiz. I hope that my apology reassures them that I have no desire to "weed them out" of physics, that I care about them, and that they aren't stupid.

I must admit, I'm glad that I'm not a doctor. As a teacher, I make a lot of mistakes, but at least there's always that next tutorial to try to set things right again.

Sweet and Savoury Motivations

I went to a teaching development workshop the other day, which was a great workshop. I learned a lot and made some great connections. However, I was also given all sorts of information on how to get a fancy certificate for attending. And it got me thinking and realizing that the sugary motivators that are held out before all of us from high school on through our undergrad are really no longer appetizing to me. I don't need to hear that this line will look extra pretty on my CV or resume. The sweet symmetry of a 96% on a transcript just doesn't thrill me anymore. I don't need a certificate - not even if it has a pretty gold seal. Even a neatly rolled up degree to collect dust under my bed doesn't feel very motivating. I don't really want to make any more money than I could make by leaving school now. So as I enter "grade 18" as you could call it, I feel like I've eaten so much of this false motivating candy, that I'm feeling a bit ill from it all.

So then, what happens when these sweet motivators are no longer motivating? Why should I work so hard to research physics education? To pour hours into my TA work? To complete paintings? To make music? To plan study groups? Why am I here, and why am I doing this?

I think that my motivation at this stage of my life looks much more like what I was motivated by when I was in kindergarten. And while I loved chocolate in kindergarten too, I like to think that my motivation both then and now is surprisingly more savoury and longer lasting. When I think about the things that drive me to get up in the morning and do life, these are the motivators that I think of today:

1. I love people. I want to give someone the precious gift of a place to belong. I want to see my students feel comfortable with themselves and confident in where they are headed. I want to see them smile. I want to see my friends feeling beautiful, and my family feeling important. People are surely the warmest motivators.
2. I'm curious - so curious that I remember spending a full year in elementary school trying to work out the formula for permutations and combinations since (fortunately) no one had told me that such a formula already existed. I just wanted to know how many different phone numbers or license plates there could be. And now that the grades and CV lines and certificates, which had sparkled often brighter than my curiosity in high school and undergrad, have lost their shine, I feel like that beautiful curiosity is able to motivate me more and more. 
3. I love to be loved. The approval, especially of those who I particularly look up to, is as important a motivator for me now as my kindergarten teacher's "that's a beautiful painting" was. It still means so much to me when someone tells me they felt connected or touched by my art, or that they learned something exciting in my class. Maybe it's childish, but I'd be lying to say that love and approval aren't still a very significant motivator for me.
4. I need meaning beyond my tiny life. Perhaps here is where my kindergarten theory diverges a bit. To be honest, I don't recall a deep need for meaning in kindergarten. But I certainly am highly motivated by it now. I want to have done something good with my life - something that could impact people in positive ways for years to come. I want someone's life to be better because of my life. I want the world to be better because of my life - at least by a little bit. I want to make God smile.

I see many different motivations in my first year students. Of course, many are highly motivated by marks - so much so that they would choose a boring course over an interesting one just because they think they could achieve a higher grade. But I think there are quite a few students who are motivated by things other than grades, and I'm looking forward to getting to know them better and finding out what these other motivators are.

Back in School

Hi Anneke,
What a treat to see your blog appear on my screen!  THANKS for all those insights on your first day.
DID YOU GET INTO THE SINGING???  Sure hope so.
I really look forward to reading about your first class as a TA!--and the reactions to the 3 tracks!!
I won't write more now because I have 3 proposals due on Monday (2 with other people) for the conference I run every 2 years at Herstmonceux Castle.  Have to be sure I'm on the program!!
Best,
Tom

The First Day!

It's very good to be back to school.

I love the excitement of the first day - the campus flooded with students, including my wonderful brother. It will be great to study with him again. The new students are eager and early to lecture. The returning students are chatting with their friends about the good ol' days when they were in first year. My brother was hobbling on crutches as he broke his ankle on Friday, but he was cheerfully eating his lunch on the bench of the phyics building's sign none the less.

I had the privilege of meeting the first year students I'll be working with in their first lecture today, and I can't wait to get to know them better. They have that hesitant but hopeful look about them - like they aren't quite sure what to make of this yet, but they're going to give themselves an honest chance to learn. A few of them are con-ed students, a few upper year students, a few people just giving physics a try, and lots of people hoping to study physics in the future. I can't wait to get to know them better and learn each of their stories - right now, I'm just doing my best to work on nailing down names and programs of study!

It was nice to sit in on the first lecture - the professor does a great job of getting the students to feel as ease and comfortable to laugh. It may take a bit of work/time to get them truly building community with each other. He started with a good exercise of putting them in groups according to which residence they live in, so that they have someone they know in rez who is also in physics. However, when they came into lab later that afternoon, they were dead silent with each other. We'll see what happens, but I hope that by continually putting them in learning communities in class, in the lab, and in tutorial, they will eventually build that community themselves. I love talking to people (I strike up conversation to random people for the minute that I'm waiting in the line at Timmies), so I sometimes have trouble understanding why two classmates would sit beside each other and not talk, but I know we all have different levels of comfort with that sort of thing (and perhaps we've been told 4000 times in school not to talk to our desk-neighbour...)

Another part of the first lecture that I particularly enjoyed - the professor was providing his reasoning for why he will be using interactive "peer instruction" teaching methods instead of traditional lecture. He did a brief activity in which he had the students write down something they are very good at (many students wrote "playing guitar", etc). Then he had the students write down how they learned that. Then he asked them how many people learned what they are good at by lecture? Did they watch their music teacher play the instrument? Clearly, they learned to be experts in that field by doing not just by passive listening. It was a quick activity, but I think it made the point clearly and effectively.

One thing that is of significant concern to me in the class is the fear factor. Today reminded me of just how terrified I was in first year physics. One of my high school teachers had told me that physics, and specifically physics at Queen's, was very very hard - I'll never know if he was subtly suggesting that I wasn't very bright or if this was a generalization for all students. But either way, it really made me scared. And that was exactly the look I saw on so many of my students' faces today. I want to sit down with each of them and tell them that physics does not deserve the bad reputation it so often gets. I want to tell them that it's okay if you don't understand everything right away - you aren't expected to! It's like learning an instrument - you don't play Beethoven after studying piano for a day. But they are used to courses like Biology where they can just sit down before the exam, memorize everything they need to know, and do fine. Physics isn't like that - it's a skill which you need to work on a little bit every day - and it's okay if you're not super pro at it the first time. I want to sit down with each of them, hear their fears, and help them work through those fears. If I had a genie, I would wish for 63 hours of extra time to spend an hour with each of them.

In my "research time", I did a few more modules of the online ethics course for researching students, and ran around campus on the ever on-going search for a test of student's self-efficacy. This is a much harder task than you might expect! Such tests seem to be either very expensive, unavailable or unknown to the many librarians I've spoken with, but I'm not giving up hope yet! The plan for tomorrow is to try the psychology building - I expect they'll have more insights there.


The evening of my first day, I had an encouraging audition! I'm very much hoping to sing with the choral ensemble this year, but priority goes to undergraduate music students. Encouragingly, however, the conductor seemed very pleased with my audition - here's hoping that not too many other alto II's in the music program tried out! I would absolutely love to sing again if I can. I'm on pins and needles until the list is posted in the music building tomorrow!

Soup

In preparation for this fall and just for the love of a good Physics book, I've been reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics (which are a great fun read that I'd highly recommend). In one of the earlier lectures, Feynman asks a good question:

Does blowing on your soup cool it down? And perhaps more importantly, were our mothers right when they told us this? 

I just loved reading his explanation - it ties together so many different concepts in Physics - the idea of "breaking free" of forces reminded me of escape velocities for a rocket to "leave" earth; the idea of looking at averages to see macroscopic properties reminded me of the beautiful nature of Physics in taking the most complicated system, and finding ways to talk about it in simple terms. So I thought I'd share Feynman's explanation in my own words - enjoy! Note that there's also a lot more going on in the cooling down of soup than described here, but this part is my favourite, so we'll have to save the rest for another day.

To keep this explanation prettier, we’ll pretend your soup is made of water only, though we know there’s delicious chicken and noodles in there too. If the water is cooling down, the chicken and noodles will cool down too, so it's fine to just ignore these in our explanation. (But definitely don't omit the chicken and noodles from your recipe or you will have rather bland soup!)

First, let’s think about what will happen to your soup whether or not you blow on it.

Molecules everywhere are always moving. In fact even if you cool a substance down (by slowing down the molecules) to absolute zero, the molecules can’t stop moving entirely – if they did, they’d violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which is a real crime. So molecules in everything just keep jiggling around.

Here you have a bowl of soup – in it are lots of water molecules, which are all attracted to each other. What attracts them? Well, if you look at a water molecule, it's a little bent, and you may recall from chemistry that this leaves one positive and one negative end (aka. it's a polarized molecule). So the negative end of one molecule is attracted to a positive end of another, etc, and we see all the water molecules "staying together". A really lovely example of this "sticking togetherness" is a raindrop. 

Even though the water molecules are all staying together, they are definitely still jiggling (because, as we just learned, molecules are not allowed to take a break from moving). Now, what we call the temperature of the soup is really just a fancy way of describing the average speed of these jiggling molecules. Naturally, (and for the word "average" to mean anything significant) some molecules must be moving faster than average and others a little slower. And - now here is the dramatic part you've been waiting for - every once in a while, a water molecule is near the surface and is moving so fast that it has enough energy to break free of that attraction to the other molecules around it! (Quick analogy: it's a bit similar to when you throw a paper clip past a magnet - if the paper clip is moving slowly, it'll just stick to the magnet, but if it's going fast enough it will have enough energy to escape the force and continue on it's merry way.) So back to our story: away flies the energetic little water molecule into the air above the soup - and this is evaporation.

The story of evaporation is pictured below. I couldn't show speed in a still image of course, so I illustrated faster molecules as having bigger smiles, because, well... I just like to think molecules are happier when they're moving fast - it seems more fun.

Now things get quite interesting. Let’s think for a moment about the molecules who are left behind when evaporation happens. In the above paragraph, the soup just lost one of its most energetic/fastest moving molecules. So the average speed of those left behind must therefore go down. It’s not that the other molecules have physically slowed down – it’s just that one of the fastest molecules is now gone, so when we take the average speed of those left behind, we see that it is lower. And since the average speed of the molecules directly tells us the temperature of the soup, the temperature must go down a little bit with every speedy molecule that evaporates.

After a little bit of evaporation, however, something else interesting happens. Remember that so far, we have not blown on the soup, so we can consider the air above the soup to be pretty much still. More water evaporates. The air above the soup gets more and more humidified. Eventually, the air will form an equilibrium with the soup where some water molecules are evaporating, lowering the temperature of the soup, and others are condensing back into the soup, raising the temperature of the soup back again. So we run into a problem where our great cooling mechanism of evaporation is not as being effective as we'd hoped.

What happens then when you blow on your soup? You are blowing away that humid air, so that the condensation happens less. That equilibrium of condensation/evaporation can no longer be established, so all the soup can do is keep evaporating! More evaporation means the average speed of the water molecules in the soup goes down, meaning the temperature of the soup goes down. So our mothers are correct! But then again, why did we ever doubt?