·:[ Teacher Allison R ]:·
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the Friday before break I gave my first unit test in Earth Science…I was nervous as I did not teach the entire unit and was unsure of how the students would do.  As the first section is taking the test I notice that they are taking a long time to complete both the multiple choice and the second part consisting of triangulating an earthquake and short answer questions.  I panic.  What if they don’t finish?  What will I do? 

At the end of the period I collect the test but I do not feel good about it.  They needed more time.  I check with the other teacher giving the test and to my relief his classes are having the same problem.  It isn’t just me.  He told his students to take the test home and finish it over break, it turned into a take-home.  Now I am struggling with what to do.  the first class did not get to take the test home so I feel that I have to continue with the other sections as I did the first and collect the test, even though I know they will not finish. 

Now what?  I am not sure what to do about this.  I want them to understand how to find an earthquake and be able to analyze and manipulate the data.  Do I have them take their unfinished tests? in class?  at home?  Do I help them finish it as a group (essentially reteach it) and then reassess with a different test even though some did finish this one? 

The reading by Gyorgi this week offered interesting insight.  When I first read it I was taken by the forward thinking of teaching and schools, “books are there to keep the knowledge in while we use our heads for something better” and “So what the school has to do, in the first place, is to make us learn how to learn, to whet our appetites for knowledge, to teach us the delight of doing a job well and the excitement of creativity, to teach us to love what we do, and to help us to find what we love to do”.  Would it not be great if this is what truly happened in school?  Then I went back and looked at the date of the article and was surprised, 1964.  Here I am applauding this forward thinking in education and how it could change schools and it is decades old.  So this begs the question what has been happening?  Why is this type of educational theory not wholly in practice?  Why are people so resistant to change?

So after Linda came to talk to us about lab safety I have had a mix of reactions to safety in the lab at school.  My first reaction was that some teachers are really stupid…like the bee sting guy and I would never do anything that stupid.  However, you then hear about teachers being punished for accidents, like the frog dissection case.  There was no way to know about the students allergy, even she didn’t seem to know.  This is when I get mad at people, why would she sue? 

Safety was also a big topic for me last week in school.  ALL of the students in seventh grade worked with dry ice.  They didn;t just watch demos, they actually worked with it themselves.  they were armed with only kitchen tongs and goggles.  I was a nervous wreck the entire time that some kid would either by accident or on purpose get burned.  None of them did and they all had an amazing time, but what if they did?  Did we take all the appropriate precautions?  did we give sufficient warning?  Then the issue here becomes, who decided what is sufficient?  Different people will obviously have different views about what is safe in a lab for students.  It all seems a little overwhelming.

Then at the heart of the issue is students.  We want them to learn after all and sometimes this means taking risks.  I had dinner last week with a person from England who is here with her son for the school year.  he is in seventh grade and her question to me was, when do they actually start doing chemistry using bunsen burners?  in England they use bunsen burners much earlier, like fourth grade.  She then commented on how far behind he will be when he goes back and they will have to get tutors to catch him up.  This really surprised me, they give fire to kids to do science with?  And I guess that is the issue here, we want kids to do meaningful science in school, yet, our legalized society has restricted us to the point where we are afraid to do any real science that may carry ANY risk.  So how do we teach science in all of this?      

So, yesterday in class I tried a new lesson.  I was a little worried about the lesson and feeling somewhat unorganized as I did not have enough time to fully plan for it.  The lesson went great, even better than I anticipated, with one exception…

There is a student in the first class of the day we will call Joe.  Joe is a bright energetic student who enjoys science class and is always willing to participate, I mean always!!  There is no sensor or volume control on Joe and he requires constant feedback and management from the teacher.  While I have taught Joe’s class before and have gotten comfortable with how to manage Joe’s behavior, on Friday he got the best of me.  During the lesson, Joe had a very hard time controlling himself and I had a hard time helping him, in fact at one point I became so frustrated that I made him leave the room, which to me was the ultimate sign of defeat.

Afterwards, I started to think a lot about Joe and why this had happened.  It had not happened before, so why today?  The only thing that I could come up with is that, like the class Joe is in, I really enjoy his personality.  I think he is funny and he usually adds a lot of good energy to the room.  So on Friday when Joe started his usual banter I laughed and played along.  unfortunately this proved to be a mistake.  Joe seemed to take this as a sign that he was the one calling all the shots in the room and did not have to listen to anyone, let alone me.

What is most frustrating to me about this experience is not that it happened.  I recognize why this happened.  However, that I was not able to fix it.  Even now as I sit here writing I am having a hard time thinking about ways in which I could have regained control without resorting to him having to leave the room…   

In preparing lessons for my student teaching placement, an option for the lesson includes involving the community in a meaningful way and also making the lesson culturally relevant.  While we talk about this a lot in classes, I am at a loss for how to do this in the community I am in.  The community that my students live in is mostly white, middle-upper class.  I thought it would be easier to identify with a community that I am a part of, but I am realizing that maybe I am too close and take for granted some of the aspects that make the community unique.  It almost seems that it would be easier to notice how to integrate community and culture in a classroom where the students are very different from me, rather than the same.  Anybody have any advice on this?  Any ideas on how to integrate the community and culture into the science classroom.    

I am also looking for cool lab ideas to do with dry ice….

This last week was particularly difficult for me as a student at Warner.  The stress of completing projects and preparing to be observed for the first time this year has reminded me of how difficult this is to student teach for a second time.  It is hard to teach in someone else’s room, especially after I know what it is like to have my own.  I am really struggling with finding the benefit of doing this and starting to wonder if this is truly worth all of the effort.  I think my frustration is that there seems to be no place for me.  I don’t really fit in with the preservice teachers because I have done this once before and the problems and issues that they are having I have already had a chance to work through.  However, I don’t fit in with the current teachers either because I am not a current teacher.  I don’t have the freedom to choose my lessons and really know my curriculum and students as I am not permanent.  So my issues and concerns lie somewhere in the middle where no one else seems to be and nobody is quite sure how to ”deal” with me.   I feel as though I have taken two HUGE steps backwards and am starting to wonder if I will ever be able to move forward again.       

How do people learn science?  I am not sure there is any way to really answer this but I will of course offer my thoughts and opinions as they are now…First of all I think that learning and knowledge formation are personal and individual processes, basically it is different for everyone.  People have different learning styles, some are auditory learners, some visual learners, some tactile learners, etc. and many learn best through a combination of these learning styles.  So for knowledge to form there has to be access to science content in many different ways.     

Further, the individual learner needs to interact with their environment.  They need to be allowed the freedom to pose their own questions and seek their own answers to the scientific phenomenon and content they encounter.  In addition they need to be encouraged to construct their own knowledge based on connections between the science they encounter and their own personal lives.   

People learn science by becoming part of a community of learners.  This community will serve as a place for individual learners to share their personal knowledge and become familiar with the existing theories and practices in the scientific world.  This interaction will prompt people to share ideas, seek alternative explanations, and pose new questions.  

I am still trying to work out all the details in my head about science and learning and this seems to change often.  But maybe that’s the point…knowledge requires change.

The discussion of rules by Cassandra and John is great!!  I know I revert back to my elementary school experience a lot and it probably gets old, but there was always a lot of emphasis on rules.  In fact it was always the mark of a great elementary teacher when they have only one or two rules for the room and they were always constructed by the students (and in their language) rather than created by the teacher.  Now I am not sure how practical this would be for the secondary setting, if at all, rules are still very important.  They say a lot about who you are as a teacher and the environment you want in your classroom.  I guess I think about it like this, if I walk in somewhere and they tell me all the stuff I can’t do, I immediately have a negative feeling about the space.  I feel that they are not really interested in my needs as a person and have very low expectations of myself and the others in the room.  It creates an us versus them atmosphere instead of a community.

Thinking back to the first day of school in my CT’s classroom, he in fact did not even discuss rules and there are no posted rules anywhere in the classroom.  While this may seem like a recipe for disaster, there has never been a time when I have thought to myself, gee I wish he had posted the rules for the room.  Instead my CT talks a lot of expectations as part of everyday classes.  Whenever an instance may come up, he reminds the class or student of the expectations and gives them an opportunity to succeed.  In fact, he does not always even use a seating chart.  Students are given the opportunity to sit where they like and are responsible for their own behavior, if they can’t handle it, they are simply moved, they know the expectation and for the most part they accept this responsibility and behave appropriately.

I realize that the success of this can be due in part to this particular school culture.  The expectations in my CTs room do not vary greatly from that of other rooms and the school in general.  The students here are used to this type of structure and for the most part find success.  I can appreciate that this may be very different for other schools and student populations.  However, I think that no matter what “rules” or expectations you decide on for your classroom, students have to know that you are fair, reasonable, and most of all want them to succeed.  

I have to start this post with a memory of where I was one year ago today, in Buffalo buried under a record amount of October snow and considered one of the lucky ones with power. I have to say that I have seen a lot of crazy weather in my day but the October storm, that was on Friday the 13th by the way, was the craziest weather I have ever witnessed. I had never heard “thunder snow” nor really seen a blizzard and lighting all at the same time. Definitely one storm I will always remember…and was certainly one season change I will never forget!!

So I talked with several people about why the seasons change and the phases of the moon. It was very interesting to hear highly educated adults try to BS their way through an answer while little kids were able to give a clear well thought out and mostly correct answers. I started this quest with my parents, since I had easiest access to them. Now this was not really a fair gauge as both are scientists and one is an amateur astronomer. However, I did manage to stump my mother a little as she struggled to recall the exact science behind the seasons and the moon, in the end she was successful. My stepfather, the astronomer, looked at me as if to say duh, who doesn’t know that!

So I decided to extend my search for misconceptions to others and I went to my sister and her kids. I started with my nephew who is in 4th grade and he surprised me with his answer to the moon phases. He quite simply told me, Aunt Allie, its just the part that we can see. I was shocked, he had never been taught the material but had already been able to make a pretty accurate conclusion about the way the phases of the moon works, at least it’s a start. My sister on the other hand had many misconceptions about both the seasons and the moon. In fact she even threw out the cloud answer that we heard in the video. When I asked her if she ever learned this in school she replied; if I did, I don’t remember!! This seems to be the key point here. People’s ideas about this sort of everyday phenomenon seem to be so entrenched that even if they are taught the correct way, they really do ignore and or dismiss completely anything they may have learned in school.

My sister also started talking about places where the season change is not as dramatic as here in the North East and this got me thinking about misconceptions and where you live. The video and all of us asked people here in the NE why we have four seasons, but what about people who live near the equator, I wonder if their ideas about season change is different than ours? Do they even have any conceptions about it at all as it is something they don’t experience in their everyday lives? Just some food for thought!!

This week was a big week for the field hockey team I coach because we had three games in four days.  It was exhausting for the players as well as myself.  You may be wondering why I am writing about field hockey, but I feel that my coaching this week has forced me to reflect on who I am as a person and a teacher.  The lesson I learned came during a very intense game with the number one team in the area.  They play hard, aggressive, and dirty.  They came in expecting to roll over us and we gave them more than they could handle.  While we were never winning during the game, it was very close.  This is when at the end of the game one of their players blatantly took her hands off her stick and pushed our player from behind resulting in her flying through the air and landing face first on the turf.  No call was made as the ref was looking the other way.  And my player simply got up and without even so much as a nasty word continued to play her game.  Now many things went through my mind as I watched my player fly through the air.  First I was upset that the ref did not immediately card the girl and toss her from the game.  Then I was furious with the other player, what kind of person does that?  Then I quickly realized where my anger was truly directed and has since remained, at the other coach; the ref truly can’t call something they didn’t see, the player is still a kid who made a bad choice, but the coach…Not only did she not do anything about her out of control player she actually commended her at the end of the game!!  This is when I realized what kind of coach and person I am.  To me that behavior is never tolerated, to blatantly try and hurt someone else for your gain is never acceptable.  If any of my players did something like that they know that they would be pulled immediately from the game and certainly not commended for their actions.  They know that I will always hold them to a higher standard, which I hope will benefit them later in life.  This experience made me realize how important my actions in the classroom are.  As a teacher, like a coach, it is my job to teach students content (science, filed hockey) and I had better be prepared to know my content well because they will challenge me.  However, equally as important is my job to teach students about life.  They will look to me to as their teacher and coach for guidance when they are presented not only with a question about content but also with a choice in life.  I have realized this week that the expectations I have for my students are not something to consider lightly, I never want to be that coach on the sidelines watching my player make a bad choice.