YAY BPC!

Check this out!

I have worked for him over the last 2.5 years (and the dude quoted in the article was my teacher 4 years ago), and most of what I had learned about teaching, education, and the construction of knowledge in our society (prior to being in the SOE) was from him. He's pretty neat: check out his personal website.

BPC (maybe controversial in his words, my own paraphrase): "Teachers should not be clients of the student. Teachers are in the relationship building business."

Tough stuff

I'm curious to hear thoughts on this: what do you do when a student is going through some tough times that you yourself have gone through? How do we support them without crossing lines?

Check out our movie!

So it has been awhile-- lots to report.

In the meantime, check out this movie some colleagues and I made-- great team work Bob, Mike, and Susan!

Something I won't forget for a long time...

So it has been a long time since I've posted, and so much has happened. I feel a bit like this right now:

I have started student teaching. WOW is that different from working with college students.

Biggest thing: you can tell college students to not come to class if they don't want to. And it's ok because it's their tuition money.

This is sure an adventure in learning and understanding that I am "teaching students science", not "teaching science to students."

Today I was reminded of this in a new way. Mondays and Wednesdays I facilitate discussion sections for chem. 210 (orgo 1). It's a blast, but it can be tough both in and out of the class (A very tired me grading last night: "Didn't they do this exact problem in lecture about a gazillion times? Why are so many people getting it wrong?") Today, I had 2 chemistry discussion sections, but they all had an exam last night, so today, I had a total of 4 students show up over 2 sections, and they ended up staying most of the time. Yes, there were a few chemistry questions, but the rest of the time we had a chance to get to know one another and talked about chemistry, its relevance to life, which bridged to a really cool conversation about learning/how we learn. One of my students is considering studying chemistry, but he's concerned that if he doesn't get an A in orgo 1, he shouldn't pursue it at all even though he likes it. We then talked about how it takes time and talked about how I see things so differently than I did four years ago, and how we continually learn and assimilate new information, and that it's how we tweak our prior knowledge (or at least recognize that something's amiss) to grow is what's important as we learn in life. It was cool. It's weird to think about the impact we have on people, for better or worse (and this is true no matter what we do with our time in this life, but I'm realizing it more and more every day). Hopefully today was a "for the better" type of interaction, because opportunities like this I am realizing can be few and far between.

Project Ice Cube

This past weekend was the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation (KSTF) annual summer meeting for all KSTF teaching fellows, research fellows, and staff. About 150 people from around the country met to engage in lesson study (a modification of Japan's kenkyu jugyo) with our cohorts and go to a bunch of really awesome seminars put on by our own teaching and research fellows.

I went to a bunch of really useful presentations (e.g., introduction to the "Living by Chemistry" curriculum, student teaching Q & A, how to study teaching videos).

A few KSTF teaching fellows are involved with Project Ice Cube (for more information on this specific project/how to get involved in the future: check out this and that). Check out this movie:



Not only is this a fascinating project, but there are many ways to integrate this into many different science and math classrooms, such as:

• conservation of matter/nature of science
• phase changes/gas laws (e.g., What happens when you boil water at the South Pole versus here?)
• properties of water
• learning about vectors to describe paths of muons
• answer questions like, Why do penguins not get cold feet?

Feel free to ask if you want more details.

Also, what are your ideas on how to integrate the "real world" into your classroom?

Check out this link.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Thoughts?

Science and society... part I

My friends in sociology may appreciate the following... especially because I am a scientist pretending to be a sociologist working on my masters in education. Talk about identity crisis.

Thanks to my new-found twitter glory, I found my way to the white house website [thanks Liz K.!]. I don't think I have visited that site since elementary school, at that was when we had a president that played the saxophone and had a cat named Socks. However, I digress.

I found a blurb on President Obama's official stance on science.

In the past, government funding for scientific research has yielded innovations that have improved the landscape of American life — technologies like the Internet, digital photography, bar codes, Global Positioning System technology, laser surgery, and chemotherapy. At one time, educational competition with the Soviets fostered the creativity that put a man on the moon. Today, we face a new set of challenges, including energy security, HIV/AIDS, and climate change. Yet, the United States is losing its scientific dominance. Among industrialized nations, our country's scores on international science and math tests rank in the bottom third and bottom fifth, respectively. Over the last three decades, federal funding for the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences has declined at a time when other countries are substantially increasing their own research budgets. President Obama and Vice President Biden believe federally funded scientific research should play an important role in advancing science and technology in the classroom and in the lab.

This highlights what I believe is just the tip of the iceberg. These are lofty goals: lots of money will be thrown around, and that is great, but there is still one problem. I was reading "The Fischbowl" [a high school staff development blog that can be found here] and it was alluded to below.

...It reminds me of when I was a math teacher. In about 80% of the parent conferences I had with students who were struggling, at least one of the parents would say "I was never any good at math either." While I don't doubt the truth of the statement, it was the fact that they said it and almost seemed proud of it that bothered me (and of course the message it sent to their student). I can't imagine a parent saying "Oh, yeah, I never learned how to read" and being proud of it. It seemed like there was a different standard for math - not knowing math was socially acceptable, not knowing how to read was very unacceptable.

The bottom line is this: how did this culture of... apathy?... come to be? How did math/science illiteracy become acceptable? Didn't anyone else play in the dirt and wondered what made it...well, dirt? Or wondered why a color was indeed that particular color? Or how are we able to continually provide new technologies to the masses [e.g., why the new macs have super awesome battery lives. hint: it's not just because battery technology got better]? Maybe it is a lack of ownership- a disconnect between one's perceived ability to contribute to society and one's actual potential?

Please don't get me wrong; I am not picking on people who really do struggle with math and science. Not do I think we should all be scientists and mathematicians and engineers. However, it troubles me that about 90% of people [with the exception of my fellow colleagues in the MAC program] I tell of my professional aspirations to be a high school chemistry teacher the reaction is a combination of: "really?" or "Chemistry was my worst subject." or "I never liked chemistry."

For those of you who are thinking, "Tracy, if you feel so passionately about this, why don't you do it yourself?". My response: I don't think enough people know what they are truly capable of, nor what opportunities really are out there. And that's one [of more than one] reason I'm pursuing a teaching career that reaches students before they reach college.

I would love to hear what you think about this.

-t

Ni hao [Hello]

This is the second summer that I have worked for the Chemistry REU [Research Experience for Undergraduates] program. Here, I am a resource for undergraduates who come to do research at UM for 10 weeks, having done research for 2 years in the department.

A big part of this program is the UM/China exchange. Three years ago, 3 UM students went to China and 3 came to the US. Now, the program has expanded to both chemistry and biology and the 24 [that would be an 8 fold increase] students arrived about 18 hours ago. After a 2AM pizza party, 2.5 hour [rather extended] tour of campus, a trip to the Arb, and dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings [amazingly only cost just under $500 to feed 26 people], I would have to conclude that the program is officially off to a great start. I am very much in awe of these students. Most are just a year or two younger than me, and they all decided to fly half-way across the world to live, study, and do scientific research for 10 weeks in a country that does not speak my native language. And... most of them came with one [relatively] small roller suitcase. Adventurous and efficient! In all seriousness, it's really cool to watch them joke around, take a ton of pictures in the city, worry about the future [do I really enjoy my field? Masters of Ph. D. program? Should I come to study in America?], and ask a million random American culture questions. It fondly reminds me of when I have traveled abroad and this really shows me how universal the spirit of adventure and exploration is among [what appear to be] two vastly different cultures.

Designing my future classroom.

This past Friday in my Educational Technology, I tentatively designed my future chemistry classroom. It proved to be much more difficult to complete than expected. A crux of my teaching philosophy is based upon the importance of collaboration and clear communication, and piece of facilitating this is the physical environment.

In spite of these lofty goals, my drawing was pretty bare. It had an easily accessible whiteboard in the front. There were lab benches/fume hoods. The room itself was spacious and allowed for free movement of bodies, desks, and [hopefully] ideas as well. In the back of the room, there was a "science resource center" [computers, books, etc.] for students to use as necessary. I did not think about the walls, but I want them to be easily accessible for students to communicate/create artifacts of their ideas [I am a big fan of giant sticky notes].

This description says a lot about how I want to run my class and the expectations I have for my students. I plan to treat my students as the adults they are becoming. However, the students' respect for self and others will determine if this atmosphere will be conducive for learning or a place to babysit teenagers.

It will be funny to see how my views will change after student teaching.

The end of the beginning.

Events in the past week:

1. The death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett.
2. Espresso Royale Cafe will see another week of business [partly] because of my contributions.
3. I finished the first week of graduate school in the University of Michigan's Secondary Master of Arts and Certification program.