Reminiscing

Don't get me wrong - I do love this year - I have amazing students and teachers on practicum, wonderful classmates and teachers at McArthur, and some really great classes about interesting things that I care about.

But the thing is, it's January. The sky is grey. My Christmas tree is frozen into the snowbank where we incorrectly assumed trees were picked up with compost. And in true uncoordinated anneke-fashion, I just stubbed my toe on the blade of my skates, and it's sore. It is time for a grey January blog post - a look to the past.

I miss undergrad.

I miss the craziness of labs - spilling liquid nitrogen all over myself in my usual uncoordinated style, fearfully believing we had just exploded the only filament of its kind outside of Russia and then realizing that we had just accidentally unplugged it, playing with superconductors (as pictured below), experimenting using my fingers to make a microwave diffraction pattern for several minutes before realizing that I was microwaving my hand, and the list goes on...

I miss those amazing moments when we'd spent all day on a Saturday - my fabulous lab partner and I - organizing our data and doing all the necessary analysis. Then finally, we were ready to plot the data points of some crazy microwave diffraction pattern.... drum roll.... and it actually worked! Everything I learned in my Lasers class about light was really true - it actually happened! And we made it happen with little more than a sheet of metal with a hole in it, a microwave emitter and a receiver! Better yet - we had completed this gigantic lab, and we were still alive!

I miss sitting on the couches in Stirling with wonderful friends, puzzling for hours over Quantum assignment problems that seemed impossible until... suddenly, the solution would jump out of those pages of math upon math! I'd do a little dance, the first year students would look at me like I was insane, and I'd give them that knowing look that (in my head) says, "Just wait 'till you've been here for a few more years..." There's nothing like solving a really ridiculous Physics problem with great friends.

I miss those moments when I would be carefully trying to teach a friend what I thought I knew, and in the midst of my explanation suddenly realize that there was a huge gap in my understanding. Someone else would walk by, and they'd stop at our couch and share another brilliant insight, and then the friend who was originally playing the role of student would pull it all together, make the missing connections, and teach everyone what they'd just figured out. Everyone saw things in a different way, and we needed everyone to make it through those assignments alive.

I know it sounds silly, but I also miss being a pseudo-minority. In Stirling Hall, we were the tiny group of surviving females in a building of males with crazy beards. Baking cupcakes and cookies was a rare and extraordinarily skill, as pictured below:

We were also learned in the art of cheese-arrangements (the piece pictured below was briefly titled "Blackbody Cheese" before it was eaten):

But alas, now I am female teacher number 673. There's nothing special and exciting about being able to make cupcakes or arrange cheese in what must be the most estrogen filled building in all of Kingston. We're supposed to write resumes that "stand out", but there's hundreds of us writing the same stand-out-ish resume, and everyone can make cupcakes here.

I even miss sitting in Mathematical Methods for Physics, desperately trying to understand contour integrals, coming to class despite the worst flu so that I wouldn't fall behind, and pouring over my notes after class in desperate hope for some light bulb of understanding and connection. I remember how stretched my brain felt - like every concept was on different corners of the universe, and my brain was stretched out like silly putty trying to connect these ideas together. I'm pretty sure my brain would ache, just like legs do after a really good work-out.

I miss sticky-noting my binder for all the things that I didn't yet understand, looking at the sea of yellow sticky notes, and telling myself, "This looks impossible, but my Uncle Howard learned this stuff before me, and I have his genes - there's no reason in the world why I can't understand this stuff." I felt like David standing in front of the Goliath of Special Relativity, and I had to keep checking my pulse to make sure I was still alive. And then there was that wonderful feeling of watching the sticky notes be taken out of my binder - being replaced with giant highlighted pictures and equations scribbled everywhere my notes had space for them. I miss that amazing feeling of getting it.

Now I sit in the McArthur lecture theatre and hear that "Students get to choose different formats of assessment in projects. That's what's really complex about this." Complex? I agree the idea of giving choice and autonomy to student's learning is a great one, but is it really complex? It's difficult to juggle, challenging to assess fairly, and time consuming to prepare, but it's not the mind-blowing complexity that I miss so much.

Practicum was great for sure - guiding my students through those incredible ideas like inertia and potential difference (which will likely never cease to blow me away) is definitely brain stretching. It's a whole new level of complex brain stretching to not only strive to make the connections in my own mind, but also to help my students stretch their own brains out to the corners of their own universes, which may have very different gps coordinated than the corners where I found the concepts and concept connections. There is certainly still lots to learn in teachers college. It is challenging and exciting in it's own way.

Yet undergrad was special. And I can't help but miss it on this January day.

Goal Setting

I was working away on my professional learning plan, and it got me thinking about the process of goal setting. We've all been required to set goals a thousand times in our lives, and of course we always trust that it is the right thing to do. It seems to me that the whole process is rather contrived. The process of recording the specifics, measurable qualities, attainability, realism, and timeliness of my goals is actually quite uninspiring - it's no wonder that students and teachers alike have to be required to write goals - the very process of recording the goal seems to kill the passion behind the goal.

It feels very unnatural to me to write a list of goals, but to grab hold of an idea that excites me and pursue it - that is the most natural thing in the world. Maybe the whole idea of goal setting was just invented to make up for the fact that we don't really care enough? In my recollection, the things I've done which I'm most proud of - the things that I have thrown myself into and worked my hardest to do the best job I could possibly to - I never wrote or even spent a lot of time thinking about specific measurable attainable realistic and timely goals for the project. I was just really passionate about what I was doing, so I did it well - it didn't even feel like work.

My specific goals do get done in time, but they lack the enthusiasm and that extra ummph of just doing stuff I care about. Even undertakings which seem like they might require goals, such as planning a conference, a preparing a Physics unit, completing a large art project, organizing a camp, etc - in my experience, I've done these sorts of things better and with more passion when I haven't set specific goals. Working outside of goals allows me to do more than I would have originally set as a goal, rather than just stopping work when I've reached the goal.

I like living by ideals and principles that I firmly believe in, rather than goals. So I've finished my professional learning plan, and I know my goals will get done, but I must admit - the things I feel passionately about will happen first and better.

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