Maeghan’s blog

For one of my classes, we needed to teach three lessons to students that are K-6. I recently co-taught a lesson to a 4th grade class in Gates-Chili. It was so awesome! The students had been learning about matter: the different phases and how particles in all of the phases behave. Kristen and I came in with materials for the students to melt chocolate (a delicious phase change!) and also brought in dry ice to demonstrate a phase change from solid to gas.

The sense of wonder and curiosity in young students is just so refreshing. When do students lose that? The teacher of the classroom had popsicle sticks with the student’s names on it in case we needed help choosing volunteers. We didn’t need to use them. Every time we asked a question, hands shot up in the air. Every time we asked for a volunteer, students were jumping at the chance. We had the students act out the particles in a solid, liquid, and gas and every single student got the chance to participate (not because we made them, but because they wanted to!). Students were engaged, curious, and eager to learn.

How often are students disappointed when the fire alarm goes off? Towards the end of the lesson we were giving students a chance to explore the properties of the dry ice, and found out a fire was scheduled. Rather then being relieved for the break from school (like I always was!), students were disappointed that their time for exploration was interrupted.

Younger students are so much fun to teach. Science is so fresh and intriguing to them… they just can’t wait to role up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and try something new!  I wish all science classes were like this. I feel like some where along the line students become jaded with learning, or at least very difficult to impress (or maybe this was just my ninth graders!). I hope if I get my own classroom I can bring this excitement in learning science back. Science is just so cool! It’s not a class that students should dread coming to or find boring… if that’s the case then something is seriously wrong.

Also… dry ice is fun at any age!

For full size images, go here

Well, as I sit here stranded in Maryland (rather than enjoying my first day in Copenhagen), I may as well add my thoughts about Teacher Recruitment Day. I have to agree with John’s Blog (though I think in the life/work imbalance was somewhat more than “occasional”… more like work/work). I did feel very prepared for my interviews due to all the hardwork we’ve been doing and reflection both on our own practice and education in general. I think I did well in all of my interviews. I did not prepare explicitly to interview. I didn’t really look over questions or their “right” answers. I just when, and when asked a question I did my best to say how I felt. I also had an interview with Fairport. The interviewer also told me I had a good answer to the classroom management question, and that Warner must be doing something right (to which I also told him that Warner does not give us a class in classroom management).

Carli’s blog post from TRD expressed similar feelings to John’s and mine. We worked hard, we struggled, we tore our hair out, we did not sleep, we sacrificed our personal lives…. but we were ready. We are ready. Give me a classroom!

I also like the “ps” of Becci’s post. At TRD, we had a little island of Warner students set up at one of the tables. In between interviews we shared notes, helped prepare each other for the questions we were going to get asked. We weren’t purposefully vague or just flat out refused to share with each other. We were all there to help each other out. We all want to find jobs, we all want to give a good interview, and we all want each other to succeed. The highs (and many lows) of this program have brought us together. We have been through so much! I hope that we all, finally, have a chance to run our own classroom next school year.

I am writing this blog post from the Syracuse airport. My flight to Washington DC is on time… from there, who knows?

For those of you not following the story, the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano (say that 3 times fast… or even  once!), dormant for about 200 years, has decided to erupt this week. Now, normally I would think that this is a really cool example of geology living, breathing, and affecting our lives. And it is! But this time, it’s MY life.

A plume of dust has risen into the atmosphere and resides at approximately the same altitude that planes like to fly at. Now, volcanic ash is not good for airplanes. It causes damage to the exterior and when it gets into the engines it melts and coats the hot areas with glass. This causes loss of thrust and engine failure… not really what you want to happen with an airborne vehicle.

Well, anyway, though my flight to Washington is a go, my flight to Copenhagen is still very much up in the air (or not, haha). The official word from the airline is that it is still scheduled, however no international flights are at this time traveling to or from Copenhagen and there is no word when they will resume. Copenhagen Airport has canceled all flights for April 16th. It could be days or weeks until they continue.

So, for the first time in my life, I am a little mad at Geology. Although, at the same time part of me still thinks this is cool… people all around me are talking about volcanos! Geologists are getting some airtime on the news. People are learning about volcanos! People are interested in why this happened and what’s going on. This is a great teachable moment for Earth science. And, whatever happens with my trip, I have a wonderful real life example of how geology affects our lives that i will probably draw upon for the rest of my career.

This can be related not only to volcanoes. We also get into atmospheric circulation and prevailing wind patterns. Hundreds of years ago travel was dependent on the winds (sail ships). These days we do not usually think twice about these things, technology has advanced enough so we don’t need to. It’s events like this that remind us how vulnerable we really are to the will of Mother Nature (and maybe we should stop aggregating her as much as we do!).

But anyway, in the true spirit of geology, we learn through the few events we can observe, as much of it occurs on time scales we cannot see. Go to this site for some really amazing pictures of the eruption!

Having just finished my 8-week student teaching placement, I don’t know whether to be relieved or not. Student teaching was rewarding, challenging, and oh so exhausting. I am so glad to have made it through, and I have had some really great experiences along the way. This 8 week placement was really a challenge. Though I made some good connections with students throughout, eight weeks really is a short time period and I did not feel like I connected with students at this placement as much as I did with the student’s at my first placement (which is to be expected, I guess, since I spend the whole half of the year at SOTA).

I’m not really sure what I want to say in this blog post, so here are a couple of things on my mind (in no particular order):

• I am relieved to have successfully completed my student teaching.
• I have a lot of things to catch up on around the house: cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, etc.
• I want to begin substituting ASAP, but need to get hired somewhere. I haven’t heard back from anyone that I applied with via BOCES, and am wondering how to get a position more quickly.
• I need to find a job! Should I be sending out letters of interest? Applications? The online process seems  so depersonalized, should I be driving to all the places to hand someone my application in person?
• I need an interview suit!
• I have to write my unit plan!
• I need to catch up on homework.
• I am going to Copenhagan soon (yay!)… all my work needs to be done first (uh oh)
• I need to start preparing for interviews
• I want to take some time to relax, but have all these things bouncing around my head
• I need to go home in an hour and haven’t  packed yet!

Just when things are seeming to ease up (next week is the last week of student teaching!), stress will find a way. I got home tonight and realized that my computer was broken. It’s more of a physical problem that will prevent me from charging it… I did manage to back up my stuff before the battery died, but now I have a dead computer on my hands and masses of unfinished work to do.

Just when I was going to use my Sunday to get some work done, now I will spend it trying to get my computer repaired. To top it off, I had to borrow a computer from my housemate to even get in my weekly blog (which I am only now able to post because last night I couldn’t remember my password and the reset wasn’t working).

I am not sure how I will manage without a computer, as there are lesson plans to be typed, unit plans to be written, applications to be filled…. Why do these things always happen at the worst times?!

So in pretty much every class we’ve taken at Warner, a KWL chart was at least mentioned as a good way to APK . I figured I’d try it out today as I was beginning a new unit. In fact, I decided to take the whole period to do a thorough APK.

I have to say, I’m loving the KWL charts. The “K”s really allow you to guage the misconceptions, and there are definitely a few “W”s that aren’t explicitly in the curriculum but that you can find a way to touch on so that you can reach the students and what they actually want to know a little better.

I also did a “word splash” where students came up and answered  the question “What’s out there?” I got everything from Planets to Quarks to Black Holes to Gremlins. The students thought they were being funny listing “aliens” in the brainstorm board, but it gave us an opporunity to explore how vast the Universe and how it really is not too much of a stretch to say there is likely life out there (at least in some form).

I was glad I took a full period to explicitly find out where students stand in their thinking at the beginning of the unit. I found that many students did not know the difference between a galaxy and a solar system, didn’t know that our own Sun was a star like we see in the sky at night, and also struggled with trying to comprehend how small the Earth is on the scale of the Universe.

I’ve been working on a unit called “Size and Shape of the Earth.” I framed the section I taught of it around modeling, talking about how we use 2D models to represent 3D space. I noticed that students seemed to be struggling with this concept. Though they could look at a contour map and repeat that contour lines close together make a steep gradient, I wasn’t sure that they were really understanding how 2D and 3D models can be used to represent the same landscape, that you can go from one to the other, and they can be used to show us the same things but in different ways (such as profile and gradient).

So, I ended up doing a lesson with 3D models. Students made a model out of PlayDoh (3D) and from there made it into a contour map (2D). After, I switched the maps around so groups had to reconstruct somebody else’s mountain (go from 2D to 3D). They also had to draw a profile from the 2D map and compare it to the 3D profile.

I think this ended up being a really good visual and activity for the students. I was a little nervous about how it would work out in practice, but while a little messy, it was that organized chaos of a good hands on activity. Here’s some pictures!