Isloation: How to Become a Better Science Teacher?

We all know the situation with public schools supporting teachers these days. The situation is, in a word, disappointing. Teachers get paid less than their peers with similar degrees. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only 3 OECD countries pay their teachers less (when compared to other professions requiring the same level of education) than the United States. As a side note, any teacher who wants to get angry should read this (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_50.htm), where it is comically suggested that teachers work 36-40 hours per week. If you assume I don't work in the summers or over Christmas break for 1 second, both of which I do, you'll get on average more than 40 hours a week. I call baloney. [The sad part of that study is also that Raleigh is mentioned explicitly as having one of the lowest teacher salaries per hour in the country]

In any event, many teachers feel unsupported both financially and professionally. Many teachers report feeling isolated in the classroom. With paperwork piling high, administrators breathing down your neck, parents not caring, and students suffering from little motivation to succeed, it creates an enormous pressure that cracks about half of new teachers within a few years. So how do teachers survive? Moreover, how do you survive whilst getting better at your job and at making positive differences in the lives of children? The answer:

Image: http://www.kcalfm.com/includes/wordpress/kelli-cluque/2011/09/27/for-one-thing-who-doesnt-like-doritos/


OK so Doritos can get you through the tough times, but they don't do much in the way of professional development. As it turns out, there are a number of options to get better at your craft. Here are my top 3, followed by a personal note.

#1) Use your colleagues
Stand up. Leave your room. Look out the hallway. Do you see those other doors? Other teachers live there, and some of them don't bite! Partner up with teachers in your subject and arrange to meet with them weekly, either at school, over dinner, or even over a beer on the weekend. I can't understate how important it is to get to know your fellow teachers. Not only might you get useful ideas for in-class activities, you can also get advice on how to conduct your class and swap stories about classroom experiences. I talk with my chemistry teacher every day and consider her to be one of the greatest assets at St. David's. Even if you don't think highly of your co-workers, get to know them and maybe your outlook will change. Or maybe they are demon-people and you can purge their evil souls. Always worth a shot.


#2) Join a Community of Practice (CoP)
Sounds like edu-speak to me. Skeptical? I understand. But you've read this far so you might as well finish the job. A Community of Practice is a group of individuals who convene to improve upon their craft. This could be the engineers who meet every other day in an office building or the group of painters who discuss form at a cafe. Try to find an existing CoP online (something like this: http://prettygoodphysics.wikispaces.com/) or in person (through teachers at your school or nearby schools). Or start one yourself! Inevitably, there are flaws in your teaching that you can't see and won't improve upon unless you network with others and seek their feedback.


#3) Use your students
So often I have heard teachers complain their students aren't getting something. They aren't bright enough or working hard enough. Although it is true that there is only so much a good teacher can do, it must be said that that amount is a whole heck of a lot. Quick quiz: what correlates more with student performance at the end of a class: socioeconomic status, race, school, region of the country, public vs. private, or teacher quality? You guessed right - socioeconomic status.

Sorry so it is teacher quality, yes. What I'm getting at is that oftentimes if most of your students aren't getting it, it's probably YOU that aren't getting it. Set up some structure for your kids to evaluate you. This could be an anonymous box outside your room, an anonymous submission online, or an anonymous evaluation forms during or at the end of a school year. Remember - keep it anonymous so that you can get more honest responses. Although you will get some silly responses, (my favorite was the kid who said I ruined music for them permanently because I told them that sound waves were patterns of compressed and rarefied air) for the most part you'll get useful feedback. If you see a trend, that means you should consider changing your style or at least better communicating why you do what you do. The kids you teach are very smart and will often give you invaluable advice if you let them.


Though these 3 steps are incredibly useful, it must be said that improvement first and foremost comes from within. If you want to be Mr. Awesome at your school, you must be committed to pulling many 60+ hour weeks. You have to re-create a lab for the third time to get it just perfect and you have to re-think every lesson plan to get the students even more jazzed this year about kinematics. To really get better, you have to put your job as a huge priority in your life. Teaching isn't a job you put down when you drive home, it's a calling. Live it, breathe it, and just as importantly, enjoy it. Let's all be a little bit more like this guy:

Image: http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/30-awesome-teachers-you-wish-you-had (warning, some foul language)

Friday Competition

One of the most effective teaching methods I have encountered - ever - is a good ole' competition. In particular, I love doing competitions on a Friday. Student mood is always good: the weekend is waiting in the bushes and dreams of sleeping in and hours of Facebook are at hand. As a side note, the vast majority of students say when I ask if they have any cool plans for this weekend "not really." Bunch of boring little tykes those St. David's ones are.

In any event, kids are a little extra restless on a Friday and so I had the fortune of running some sort of problem-solving activity or competition in 3 of my 4 classes today. They split into teams of 2 and got a white board. I posted a problem on the board and dramatically revealed it. Before doing so, the kids knew that the first group to get it right would earn the best thing I could give them: my laptop. So the kids went hard to work for me, sweating out the problem with their partner. The rule was if they submitted and got it wrong, they were out permanently. Thus, there was an extra incentive for being careful. They also had to show their work. OK so I gave a piece of candy to each member of the first group to finish. No laptops were harmed.

Incredibly, both classes with this competition were able to get 2 challenging, never-seen-before problems done in 12 minutes total. I was so impressed with them. Not only did it shake away the boredom of lecture, it also got them doing some problem solving mental reps. Furthermore, they were communicating like pros. I saw kids discussing strategy, saying things like "you can't use that equation, we don't know the final velocity" and "can we assume the final position is also zero?" Not only that, they got so INTO the physics. Honestly, it was adorable.

Fellow teachers - I encourage you to use competition whenever you can. Do you have any great stories of doing this in your class? I'd love to know.

Grains of sand, stars in the sky

Disclaimer - I promise not to make every post overtly Christian. My faith is so important to me, but at the same time I don't want this blog to be considered inaccessible to nonbelievers. That said, the inspiration for this post came from when I read the Bible this morning.

I am reading through Genesis and got through this passage this morning: 

I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.

What would you rather have? Offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky or as numerous as the grains of sand on the earth? Which is a bigger number? This is a classic exercise in the difficulty in describing big numbers. We just aren't equipped to fathom the difference between big and huge and absurdly huge and holy Batman that's a big number huge. 

So which is bigger? Surprisingly, there are more stars out there than grains of sand on this earth. Proof? Carl Sagan said it. :)

This blogger (http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html) estimates there are "2000 billion billion grains of sand". That's 2 x 10²¹ or 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains! A Yale astronomer (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/12/01/the-estimated-number-of-stars-in-the-universe-just-tripled/) estimates there are 300 million billion billion stars, or 3 x 10²³ or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. According to these estimates, there are one hundred and fifty stars per grain of sand on the earth. Yeah. I'll say it again.

There are one hundred and fifty stars PER grain of sand on earth. Mind = blown.

Going back to the Genesis quote, this means that it was entirely superfluous for the angel of the Lord to mention the number of sand grains. Come on! Either that or a ton of stars were made in the past several thousand years. In case you couldn't see my face as I constructed this post, that was sarcasm.

I'm going to now collect a bunch of sand, because apparently it is a rarer thing than stars. By a lot.

Science and Faith

Welcome to my blog! Thank you so much for visiting. I highly encourage you to send me questions and comments over this site. I'd like for this to be more like a conversation than a static interface filled with self-indulgent musings on our cosmos.

To begin, I'd like to focus on a question that I get fairly often: "as a science teacher, how do you manage your belief in Christ with your belief in science?" Many people see this as a dichotomy, a one-or-the-other thing where you can't possibly merge the two. Personally, I find no problem whatsoever and would argue that my belief in science enhances my religious faith.

I do believe that God exists and that, ultimately, He is the creator of our universe. At the same time, I believe firmly that there is no scientific or logical proof of God's existence. I go by faith and faith alone. I feel that most of the perceived conflict between religion and science occurs when people try to argue for a scientific proof for or against God. Why is there this need to apply scientific arguments to a completely non-scientific entity, religion? Science is conducted by taking observations through our 5 senses or through technology we have developed to enhance our 5 senses (telescopes that can see non-visible forms of light, microscopes, DNA analysis, etc.). How can we possibly use our senses to describe God? He is beyond sense perception. End of story.

Furthermore, there is perceived conflict when people interpret the Bible completely literally, despite the fact that much of the text is meant to be allegorical. Was there a flood that covered the earth that 2 animals of every kind survived by being on Noah's ark? Did this literally happen? Ultimately, I don't know, though there is no physical evidence to support this having happened, at least on a global scale. There are all sorts of problems for species surviving with only 2 pairs of genetic material. There are also problems such as how did Noah feed every species on the planet for over 200 days? How did they not eat each other or die from rampant disease in such a small place? Moreover, how did they live back then if there were no NHL games? I think it's problematic to try to explain stories such as this in a scientific context. I consider this to be a worthwhile tale, but I don't think it is worthwhile to argue the specifics of the story to be fundamentally, physically accurate. 

All of this does not go against God. The fact that we can't prove His existence does not mean he doesn't exist. If God clearly existed and appeared to us every day, we wouldn't have need for faith. The game would change completely; we would no longer have to be faithful, we would essentially be forced to accept this religion. If God wakes me up every morning, I would take Him for granted. I believe there is a purpose for God's mystery and for His logical elusiveness. Lately in my life, there have been many tiny coincidences which have given me a lifetime of reason to believe in His existence. The path I have taken has not always been filled with 100% belief, but my path has made me who I am and I wouldn't change it for anything. 

One last thought. I commented earlier that my experience with science has enhanced my religious faith. I see doing science as a way to gain small insight into God and into his creation. The majesty of our natural world only grows greater and greater with time. Having love for our amazing auroras, our splendid spiral galaxies, and our boundless black holes makes me teem with excitement and wonder. I thank God every day for giving me another 24 hours to explore His creation.