Also, youtube time.

It's been a while since I've posted any youtube stuff, but here's a few cool things that I want to show the sci-math-tech class, if there's ever time. They usually watch mythbusters, but I think this stuff is actually cooler.

Jamie, a super-villain in the making, who is building a giant robot in his mountain bunker, that he made himself. I love me some mythbusters, but this guy is just crazy awesome. Plus, he's building a giant robot. In a forest bunker. With mostly stuff he engineers himself. What part of completely awesome does that not encompass? None.


Also, some PhD students sent a smartphone to space on the (semi) cheap. I always love seeing the curvature of Earth from space.


Enjoy!
-P.

I am a science-Peter.

So, my sister drew me something for my blog, and I really like it. I have a few other sketches people have done, and eventually I want to set up a rotating banner, when I have a bit of free time to scan them and resize everything.


Commission, "Science Peter" by ~TheJung on deviantART

Things have been really busy lately. I am student teaching 3 days this week, which is also finals week. If I am not asleep, I am busy. I have very little time to myself, but hopefully once student teaching starts I will be able to cordon off a little bit more me-time. Student teaching starts next week, although I will miss a day due to a mandatory job fair. The following week, I finally student teach for an entire week, and then I have spring break to recuperate from everything. It will be hard going away from grad school, which has been my life for the past 9 months, my cohort, a small group of 17 that have become like family to me, and a lead professor who has been both a hard taskmaster and an insightful mentor, but student teaching will keep me busy.

I went to a job fair Monday, which was a lot of fun. I went to employers with the very directed question- "Do you have an online academy?" Against my expectations, about 50% of them said yes. I even met the principal of one, and he wrote "ischool" on my academy, and I will be emailing him soon.

Oh, wait, I haven't talked about online academies in depth yet, have I?

So, online academies. For one of my projects, I had to do a wiki article about a subject of my choice. I chose online academies, as having done IT work in the past and being a huge computer nerd, online anything generally equates to better anything in my book. So, in my research, I actually visited an online academy and got to geek out with the staff, who really reminded me of an amalgamation of IT people and teachers. The building itself was half classroom, half server room, and while a lot of things were still in development, I was very impressed with what I saw. I don't believe online learning is for all kids, but I do feel that a lot of kids benefit from that type of learning over general school learning, and that this online academy did a very good job at keeping the kids motivated by requiring usually one day at the bricks and mortar location per week, and using a vast array of software to help meet students learning needs.

So, going there was sort of like going to Disneyland. Then, I hooked up with the information literacy people, and realized that information literacy and online academies could work amazingly together. That grew to be my general spiel for talking with districts that had online academies. Other districts I just learned about, and there were some that were really interesting.

However, just today, I attended a site counsel meeting where they talked about the state budget. Even with my math and science endorsements, I really can't be certain if I'm going to get a job, much less find work at an online academy. I would go into a political rant about how they need to fund schools better, tax the wealthy, and give teachers free awesome cybernetic implants that allow them to see students brainwaves in real time, but that can come later.

In any case, I'll keep on trucking. I know my niche, and if I don't get there immediately, it's something I will continue to aspire towards, keeping up on the latest news and developments with.

In the mean time, I've been taking over more and more classes. Today, I taught 3 periods, and co-taught the final period, which I will be co-teaching for all of my student teaching, due to the heavy machinery in the classroom that I am not certified to oversee the operation of.

Things I've learned recently, negative first:
-Let students figure things out. Inquiry, inquiry, inquiry. Even in math. If it's an important concept, let it take a while longer to sink in. I had planned an inquiry activity to help students understand why you flip the inequality sign when you multiply or divide by a negative, but I ended up just giving them an example and showing exactly why the numbers didn't fit anymore, rather than letting them figure it out. I think I was so worried about time that I just lost out on a really good teaching opportunity.

-Be willing to discipline. If a student is disrupting learning by being a twerp, send him out.

-Learn how to deal with when students come up to do math equations. They might be confident in their work, but when they mess up, it's very embarrassing. A girl did that, so I had her identify what she did wrong, then had another girl come up and try it, but the girl who came up is very sensitive. I talked with her a bit after class, and she seemed fine, but I want to make sure she is still willing to come up in the future.

-Be careful with the caffeine. I've been drinking a LOT of it lately, and it's not doing good things to me. I'll just leave it at that. Part of it is having finals week along with 5am wake ups, but once I start student teaching, I will really have to work on figuring out a sleep schedule that keeps me going without having to drink a 5 hour energy (intense shot), a caffeine drink, a large cup of tea, and a cup of coffee in a day.

-Do not use the word 'lecture' with middle schoolers. I informed them that I would be giving them a quick lecture on something, and they flipped out. I explained that it was just a discussion, and that calmed them, but now I know that using the 'l word' is not okay with that grade.

The good!

-Note student's skills and interests. A few cheerleaders were in the back of class, practicing a cheer. We had just studied blood, so I asked if this was 'the blood dance.' They proceeded to put together a quick 'b-l-o-o-d!' hand motion cheer. When I saw them again in 6th period, I asked them to do more, so I let them get their science notebooks and start using the vocab words to put together a cheer which they will get to perform before the exam. They are not getting any grades for this, but they are so psyched.

-Let kids know that you care about their learning, and that you want them in your class. That means a lot to them.

-Talk about stuff you're passionate about. Today was a more relaxed worksheet day, so a few kids finished early. They wanted to throw a ball around class, and I told them to mention areas of science they were interested in. Minutes later, I was explaining the Large Hadron Collider with them. I later overheard my cooperating teacher saying, "Wow... I could learn stuff from him." The few students I had were completely engaged, and wanted to learn more. I told them to start reading Scientific American online. It was a really great moment, and I want to make more moments like it. With 8th grade, the standards don't cover a lot of really amazing stuff unfortunately, but if you can find time to bring it up, it's totally worth it. In fact, that cool technology-modern applications bit is something I want to incorporate as much as possible, even if it does occasionally require more standing and delivering, which is not in vogue right now.

-Let students into your life a bit. Don't be afraid to tell them little tidbits of your life, so long as they are appropriate. They want to know you, so let them know you, so long as it doesn't interfere with learning.

AND

-Keep student learning as your bottom line. If something is helping learning, great. If not, it has to go.

So, that's where I am. On the horizon, I have lesson planning to learn, classroom management to master, and assessment to acquire. And always, I could be better. That's what's fun about it. I told my cooperating teacher, that is one of the things I like the most about teaching, is that it's challenging. I tend to learn things very quickly, and gain some degree of competency at them with ease. Academic work is rarely challenging, and if I take it at my own pace, it is usually very quickly digested. Teaching is a completely different realm, one that is molding me slowly as I try to master it. I love it.

-P.

Social justice, information literacy, and online education.

So, I recently started networking with some people in my area involved in social justice education, as well as some people working at online academies. I have a very strong passion for information literacy- that is the ability to find, evaluate, and utilize internet sources for educational purposes, believing that by creating an info-literate society, we can have a better educated populace. The standards focus that exists in so many schools often robs teachers of the ability to make the subject matter relevant due to a need to simply cover the gross amount of material stated in the standards so students will pass their tests, but often times that coverage lacks meaning and relevance to their lives.

That's where information literacy comes in. By finding ways to incorporate webquests that have students doing research online and utilizing the various resources the internet provides to construct their own learning, I feel they are better prepared for our wired world.

Anyway, I hooked up with some social justice people, who introduced me to a media specialist at a high school. His job is to incorporate webquests into curricula that teachers bring him. We talked for a while, and he said that with my passion, I should be getting a degree in library sciences, so I can do a job similar to his. It was amazing what he had done to the school library- it went from being a typical school library, empty most of the time, to a place that was full of students, with his office at the center of it- he described himself as the hub of information, and he was. He was often being interrupted by students asking for help with flash drives or trying to access websites that were being blocked by the school firewall. Most of the computers students were on were being used to research papers. It was amazing to see, and we both geeked out at how cool the setup was.

I want to do that, perhaps not on the same scale as him, (not yet) but with my own classes. I've got this crazy passion for teaching students how to become autodidacts using the internet, and while I realize that most students aren't going to become information addicts, I want them to at least understand how to do research online, and take their education into their own hands. I really feel that many schools fail kids- they do not teach them the skills they really need to succeed in any specialized field, or even the prerequisites, and so the responsibility falls on them. Many rich kids do well simply because their parents can afford to make sure they obtain the skills they need, but for the rest of the kids, they have to make their own opportunities, and the internet is probably the best resource they have for that.

I'm not saying kids need to stop going to school and start using the internet to learn everything*, quite the opposite. School is still important, and the role of the teacher is a very major one in terms of being a mentor, educator, and guide, but one of the skills I feel kids need the most these days is the ability to use the internet as a resource, and many teachers do not know how to make this happen, which is why media specialists like the one I met today are so handy.

One area where I feel this information literacy can fit in perfectly is online education. Another group of people I've been networking with are teachers at an online school in the district I'm student teaching in. We talked a bit about information literacy, and they were in agreement that it is something that needs to happen more, and a possible area that they could really enhance their curriculum. I'm beginning to think that, if I learn to really get good at teaching online literacy, I could make a portfolio based around online education and hopefully land a job, as ever since I started talking with the online school people, I've felt that's the direction I want to go. The idea of being able to work one on one with students, without being distracted by the entire class and the other problems that occur in a crowded building, you can get down to the nitty gritty concepts and address misconceptions more directly. That's not to say there aren't a ton of problems with online academies as well, I just have this huge passion for educational technology that makes me feel like this might be a really good place for me in the future.

On an unrelated note, I love how open source teaching is. Teachers, very often, love to share their stuff. Whenever I go up to a teacher and inform them of my status as a newbie teacher, they ask me if I have a flash drive, then proceed to fill it with every lesson plan they have. It's a great boon for fresh teachers, especially when they have great worksheets and activities. Saves a ton of time, as I don't see why I should reinvent the wheel if something great is already out there for free. I wish there were some central internet hub for teachers where they could exchange standardized lesson plans, as the teacher websites I've seen that feature lesson plans tend to have them in no formal order, and the plans are either minimal and incoherent, or overly complicated and detailed. That's why I like getting them on flash drives, the teacher can usually explain their methods, and it becomes a lot easier to understand what's going on.

Anyway, I think that's about it. I'm sorry if this post seems a bit disjointed, my computer crashed halfway through, but thankfully blogger autosaves drafts, so nothing much was lost.

-P.
*See next paragraph, where I endorse online academies, where kids stop going to school and use the internet to learn everything.

Lessons learned

So, I have bombed a few times, but every time I bomb, I learn something new. Here is a quick list of things I've found myself doing that other student teachers should try to avoid.

-Be aware of what students know. If you're only coming in a few days a week, and the teacher entrusts you with a lesson, don't assume to know what the students know and don't know. I tried to run an activity where students had to answer some questions. Turns out, they hadn't covered any of the material previously, so they were floundering, and I was so busy doing one on one help I didn't notice the entire class falling apart. So, figure out what they know. Formative assessment and unit context.
-Don't get distracted when you have the class's attention. I did that a few times today, where I used the attention-getting signal, then completely blew it by seeing a student raise their hand asking for help, and forgetting that, hey, I need to remind them to finish in 5 minutes.
-In math, if the students need to write out all their work, so do you. I was trying to do systems of equations in my head, and while I can do that to some extent, I still make mistakes. Better to write it out instead of making a fool of yourself.
-This is more geared towards middle schoolers, but applies to everyone: Don't assume they know what to do, because they don't. You need to be painfully explicit with directions. The really amazing thing is, they listen and obey most of the time.
-Learn when to ask for help, or when to separate students. Don't be afraid to ask students if they need to move. Often, they will say they do. If they aren't doing the work, move them. If they're making some noise, but the work is getting done, it's your call.

Also, after class, I visited a local online academy within my district. I've become acquainted with two of the staff there, and we enjoy talking. The bricks and mortar location is a strange mix between a server room and a classroom, and one of the teachers reminds me of an amalgamation of an IT guy and a teacher. The more I learn about these types of schools, the more I want to get hired in one. The idea of using web based education to create that hard focus on content matter is amazing, plus the idea of cutting out the classroom management and simply focus on curriculum design and personal motivation, that really appeals to me. With that in mind, I've decided to make that one of my ideal jobs, and steer towards district placements as much as possible. On the bright side, the connections I made at the online academy seemed very happy to help, as they really like to see someone who is there because they are passionate about that type of learning, not just because they got RIF'd. They also gave me some really good suggestions on how to enhance my resume, which I will probably pursue over student teaching if there's time, and if not, over summer.

Also, I'm meeting with some social justice educators about internet literacy tomorrow. I've been holding off my social justice post for a while, but once I've had that conversation, I'll probably have a cool post ready.

-P.

For lack of free time.

I know my last two posts have been fairly insubstantial, I'll try to get enough time to write something meaningful later. Still, this last week has been brutal. There was a comic book convention over the weekend, and I decided that, despite it being nearly finals week and the dark shadow of final projects looming over my head, I should go. So, in addition to doing 3 days of student teaching and 4 days of class, I took the challenge and plowed through several of my final projects, rendering them to rough draft form. I earned my comic con.

The con was great, it felt wonderful to reconnect with some old friends and be reminded of my life before grad school. Then, at the end of the con, I got news that my grandmother had died. I had known it was coming, but it still came as a shock- my grandpa on the same side had died a few months prior, and these things usually happen in pairs.

I took yesterday off, and went into class today. I crashed and burned for one period, which is bound to happen sooner or later, but improved by the next prep. I learned that I need to understand the context of student learning, and teach within those parameters- I went into the class not knowing what the students had covered, and expected them to be able to do work based on material they hadn't touched. The result was... Well, bad, and I didn't correct it in time. I learned. I feel awful, but I learned and applied it next period, which went much better.

I'm honestly getting to a point where I'm very tired, but grad school slows for nobody. I just want to get to student teaching, get through it in a positive fashion, and enjoy my summer.

On the bright side, I have started accepting 'Science Peters,' which are little doodles of me doing science. At the comic convention, I asked a number of artists to draw headers for this blog, portraying me doing science. I got a number of submissions, and will upload them eventually. If anyone reading this has any ideas, I'd be glad for them.

I have a lot of stuff to talk about, including open source teaching, social justice and the internet, and worksheet websites, but right now, I'm too tired to continue writing.

-P.

Still busy.

Got a working draft of 2 out of 3 final projects done today. About 20something pages of typing, and I'm dead exhausted. One was a report to put into a teacher wiki on Online Academies, while another is a genetics unit plan. One tidbit of the genetics plan I'm proud of I'll share here, although I should specify the situation: Unit on genetics, I've just defined the biological species concept, i/e a species is defined by organism's ability to produce viable offspring. Previously, in my cooperating teacher's class, we had done an activity where we used the story of an accident prone transhumanist boy named Sammy to get students thinking about the definition of life. Well, I decided to do one about his brother, Tommy.

---

Is Tommy Human?

Last Unit, we studied a boy named Sammy who throughout the course of his unlucky life, became a robot. We used the definitions of life to determine at which point he was no longer alive. Poor Sammy had a little brother, Tommy. Tommy was not quite as accident prone as Sammy, although he had weak bones due to a genetic disorder he was born with. In this activity, we will be studying Tommy to determine at which point he is no longer part of the human species. Use the definition of species to determine whether or not Tommy is human, and explain your answer.

At age 16, his doctor told him that there was an experimental genetic treatment that had just come out for his disorder. Tommy, excited at the prospect of being able to play sports without risking a broken bone, signed up, took the treatment, and his bones started growing stronger. Is Tommy human?

At age 18, Tommy got sick. The treatment to fix his bones had given him cancer, and the doctors, fearing a lawsuit, decided to cover any medical treatment he might need. One brilliant researcher determined that with enough resources, he could alter Tommy's genome so that his body would be able to fight off any cancer easily. Tommy received the treatment, and got better quickly. Is Tommy human?

By age 24, Tommy had gone to college for biology, and was working in a genetics lab, researching new treatments to alter human genetics. He created one that would allow his eyes to see much better than a normal human eye, and used it on himself. In the process, his Iris turned a pale white color, making him look strange, but he could now see an ant crawling across the floor, 40 feet away. Is Tommy human?

By age 36, Tommy was quite the sensation. He owned a genetic treatment company that he started with the money from his eyesight invention. He had developed a new treatment that would allow humans to breath underwater. Instead of being patient and testing it properly, he administered it to himself. It worked, although after properly testing the treatment, Tommy found out that any children he had with his wife had a 50% chance of not being able to breed, although Tommy was still able to have children. Is Tommy human?

By age 68, Tommy had tried all sorts of new genetic treatments on himself. His skin was a dark shade of green, as he could photosynthesize, and got his food from the sun. He was able to breath underwater, and hold his breath for over an hour. His mind was smarter than any person who had ever lived before him, and he could see in total darkness. He designed one last genetic treatment, one that would stop him from getting any older. The treatment worked, although he found out that as a side effect, he realized that any children he had would have a 100% chance of being unable to breed. Is Tommy human?

By age 153, Tommy left Earth with his brother Sammy, whose computer program had been uploaded into a spaceship. Tommy had received so many genetic treatments that he looked more like a giant spider than a person. He was so biologically different that he could no longer breed with humans, although he could produce fertile offspring with genetically enhanced creatures like him. Is Tommy human?

---

Thoughts? If there are any teachers reading, feel free to use it. Teaching is open source. Also, since I made progress, I get to see Shatner this weekend. I don't think I can afford his autograph, but I at least want to see the guy at some point in my life.

-P.

PS- Biopunk lesson plans has to be my favorite tag ever.

Busy!

Sorry for not posting much. I went in Monday-Wednesday this week, and taught for at least 50% of that time. I've been making a lot of mistakes, but finding that when I teach the same lesson again the next period, the mistakes diminish greatly. I'm also getting a hang on classroom management, but seeing my cooperating teacher take the reins to teach something... It's humbling. Good teaching seems so effortless, but it really isn't.

Also, my final projects are all coming to a head, so that's eating up my free time. And there's a comic convention this weekend, and William Shatner is going to be there. I really would like to see William Shatner at some point in my life, so I've got to make it. If I can make good progress on one of my final projects by that point, I will allow myself to go. And frankly, I need a good distraction, these last few days have been some of the most stressful in recent memory. Thankfully, the head prof has acknowledged our stress, and is being understanding, bumping back due dates a few days here and there for sanity's sake.

Anyhow, I've got a lot to talk about, but right now, I'm far to exhausted. Thanks for reading.

Also, a little treat: Asteroid discoveries between 1980 and now. It's very pretty, and pretty awesome.


-P.