This week I did my first eight or so hours of observation hours. On Tuesday and Thursday I drove out to local suburban-ish high school (I think I mentioned how I got introduced to a biology teacher there in an earlier entry). So far I’ve liked it pretty well.

Tuesday I didn’t get to do as much – the teacher’s ninth grade Environmental Science classes were taking a test, and the Human Anatomy/Physiology classes did a lab to look more closely at some of the bones that they will be tested on in class next week. Mostly I just took a look at how the classroom was set up and how the students worked on their lab. I have to say I really loved the huge science classrooms this school has! All but one of them are equipped with projector technology to allow the teacher to use PowerPoint presentations in class, too, which I think is really convenient – and it lets the lecturer do more than present words or extremely simple drawings, which is definitely what my blackboard technique is limited too. (My board handwriting is less than fabulous, too.) The Anatomy students worked pretty quietly in their lab groups too (with a distinct trend toward increased noisiness toward the end of the school day) – although I did notice that most of them opted to look up the bones in their textbook, rather than actually playing around with the skeletons and the boxes of model bones the teacher had set out for them, which was too bad, especially since their test will consist of them having to look at and identify actual bones, not just pictures of them.

I also learned on Thursday that the two Environmental Science teachers at the school plan the course in its entirety together – so that both sets of classes get the same lectures, worksheets, tests, projects, and homework. This both appeals to me and makes me somewhat nervous: I like the idea that both classes will be equally prepared before they move on into the next level of class, and fairly graded – no one gets the “mean teacher” with the extra hard tests and twenty-page research papers while their friend gets the “nice teacher” who assigns one dittoed worksheet a week. But I also realized that co-planning the entire curriculum doesn’t really leave you any room to say, “Well, the students are really interested in this topic, so we’ll spend an extra day on it instead of covering that other less important topic.”

Thursday was more fun. I got to read aloud a pair of case studies about biodiversity and the Endangered Species Act to the Environmental Science classes, and then grade the corresponding worksheets that got turned in before the end of the period. Of course a lot of the answers were obvious “I just want to write something down and be done with this” responses, which the teacher said was pretty standard for ninth graders. I also got to call on my long-distant Comparative Anatomy knowledge to help a pair of girls who came in during study hall to work on the material that was going to be covered on their anatomy exam – I pulled out the box of bones and showed them how some bones actually articulated with each other, which they had been confused by when they were just looking at the book pictures. After that, they dug through the bone box some more; I helped them with terms when I could. (I had to ask the teacher just where the pubic tubercle was).

So far I’m enjoying my time there – unfortunately I realized my future job prospects in the building are dim, since I discovered another student in my cohort has already been subbing there for a while now! I guess I will have to start poking around in some districts a little farther from the City …

Oh, come on, seriously. Again?

I am unbelievably tired of hearing about cases like this. The concept behind freedom of religion, I am quite sure, is not that one has the freedom to coerce others to follow his preferred religion. No doubt if I tried to force my godlessness onto some poor innocent pharmacist such as this one, no one would make any kind of a public stink about it, because [i]we are all equal under the law[/i], and such.

Also? Plan B does not equal an abortion pill, so it's not against your religion anyway. The only people who think it lets a fertilized egg slide right out of the unreceptive vagina are decidedly not scientists. Let me reiterate: Plan B != RU-486. One of these things is not like the other: An abortion, RU-486, Plan B.

I’ve been doing some work on my issue brief, which will be discussing the use of student blogging as an instructional method. So far I’m pleased with what I’m finding – the majority of articles I’ve found on the subject are pretty positive. I actually do still want to find an article from the point of view of describing the problems inherent to using this idea – I think finding something like this would make it easier for me to make a case for why such problems are minor compared to the scope of what such a project could accomplish, and/or how the problems can be overcome. The paper will be stronger overall if I can present a view from both sides … and then show why my view is, of course, the correct one …

So far I’ve found a few promising PDFs (thank you, Google Scholar) that I plan to look at more in depth this weekend – mostly from education-related journals. As I said, I also want to find a journal article describing some downsides of student blogging. My other main source (which was actually the first thing I thought of when I came up with this topic) is going to be an interview with P.Z. Myers, the writer of a popular science/evolution blog – Dr. Myers is a professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and he has his students create a class blog when he teaches courses in Developmental Biology. (Developmental biology is, of course, a bit beyond the scale of what I expect from middle or high school students, but Dr. Myers has enjoyed enough success in his student-blog endeavors that I hope he’ll have some acceptably grade-level-transcending words of wisdom for me.)

Besides that, I’ve worked out a basic outline and started kicking around introductory paragraphs. (I have a great deal of trouble being satisfied with these, so I figured I’d start now, and maybe I’ll have one I like by the time this paper is actually due.) Everything seems to be going fine so far, although if anyone has any suggestions about negative articles I would love to see them!

I have been setting up the first classroom observation hours I want to do with a teacher in a nearby town. (One of our neighbors is an English teacher there who introduced me to a biology teacher he thinks highly of when he found out I was starting a teacher education program.) I was surprised when the teacher sent me her daily schedule that the schools there have nine or ten class periods in one day – I had only six when I went to high school!

One difference is that apparently one of the periods is used solely for lunch time, which I think is a good chance to let students socialize and have some time to relax and talk with their friends – hopefully that helps them to be able to behave better when they are expected to be quiet in classes. Forty-five minutes seems like a much more reasonable amount of time for lunch – when I was in high school, fourth period was divided into three parts, during two of which you had class and one where you had lunch. This meant that you only had about twenty-five minutes for lunch, which might be only barely enough to get through the lunch line and eat if you had to buy food that day. It was also annoying and disruptive to have the “B” lunch period, which meant that you had the first half of fourth period, then lunch, then the second half of fourth period. Getting back on track right away after rushing through lunch was not very much fun: students were still in lunch mode for most of the second half of class, and had trouble trying to pick up the subject matter being covered where it had been left off; and teachers had to deal with groggy or fidgety post-lunch learners.

The students in this district also apparently have study hall time built into their day – in fact, on Thursdays there is a special tenth hour specifically built in for them to be able to go over homework with teachers and get extra help that they might need. I think that is a very good idea – I suspect that, by high school, many kids have classes that their parents probably can’t help them with any more. I know that I only had calculus four years ago and I doubt I could do more than the most basic derivatives and integrals any more – let alone after twenty years or more since taking the class. Letting the students have extra access to teachers to answer the questions they have is a great idea to try to make sure as few of them are falling behind their classmates as possible. This system also gives the more advanced students time to get their work done alone if they want to, or even work ahead. And, of course, having time for just working on schoolwork under teacher supervision helps make sure that the schoolwork is actually getting done, instead of the student going home and watching television instead.

The downside to all this is that the district has one of the longest school days in their school conference, which can mean less time for extracurricular activities and less time for homework. But, ideally, a lot of the homework can get done during the study hall time and the special tenth periods. Even though it means a little more work, I personally like the idea of doing as much as possible to make sure the students have the time and the resources to understand and finish as much of their schoolwork as possible. The only thing I can think of to add to the nine-hour days is that, in addition to 6 academic/vocational classes, one lunch period, and one study hall, there be one P.E. class period per day - at least for students who don’t play an extracurricular sport of some kind. Actually I’m not sure how P.E. requirements are set up in this state – in my high school, we had to take either two semesters of gym class or one summer gym class (four hours of P.E. and health a day for five weeks) – not really an ideal system in my mind. I ought to find out if things are different here.

One of the things I heard repeated several times in my teacher ed class discussion about good teachers was a passion for the subject being taught. I think that a teacher’s excitement is infectious – and although, as I recall from both high school and college classes, it can cause some minor giggling among the class, it really helps to involve students in the material.

Besides merely being more animated (and thus more interesting to watch), an excited teacher is also more likely to put more effort into the curriculum, both out of the love of the subject and the desire to get the students more engaged in it. I think a class is certainly going to respond better to bunch of colorful demonstrations, hands-on experiments, outside-the-textbook readings, relevant current topics in the news or other media – much more so than to a text-on-whiteboard lecture day after day. Various activities designed to target different types of learners are better able to reach the wide diversity of students that comprise an average classroom. Those sorts of activities take much more time to select and prepare, though, and so it’s more likely that a teacher who is honestly passionate about the subject is going to do them.

Because of real interest in a subject, a teacher is also more likely to be more of an expert in that field, due to outside reading and a variety of previous related courses at the undergraduate level. This teacher is more likely to be able to answer a student’s question regarding the subject, and also to be able to refer them to related topics they may find interesting or to literature that will help them explore further information on their own. They are more likely to have their own library of media related to the topic – I remember how much I enjoyed perusing classroom libraries when I was in school. These teachers are also likely to have the depth and breadth of knowledge to be flexible enough to bend the curriculum toward what students would like to know more about – such flexibility helps to increase student interest. Interested students are more apt to become proficient students than bored ones, too.

It goes without saying that enthusiasm for the subject is a pre-requisite for, and not the be-all-end-all, of teaching excellence. Proficiency in the subject matter is also crucial; as are creating critical thinking, discussion, and collaboration among students, systematic organization, and fair evaluation methods and rubrics. It is my belief, though, that an underlying love of the material helps a teacher to build these other elements into their work.

Right now I really, really love science. It’s my hope that I can encourage that in my future students too. The one thing I really worry about is losing enthusiasm over time or in the face of a class that I just can’t get involved in the subject material. I hope just having even one or two students per class that seem to want to know more will help keep me on track with finding new and better ways to teach and including the best up-to-date material possible.

Lately I have been following with some interest (and despair) the story of a student named Matt LeClair in Kearny, New Jersey. At the public school he attended, Matt had a history teacher, Mr. David Paszkiewicz, who liked to devote some time during his classes to things other than actually teaching history: things such as telling his students that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark and that evolution and the Big Bang were bad science; things such as describing how only Christians could go to heaven. He even went so far as to single out a particular Muslim girl and point out that she was going to hell.

Matt tried going to the school board to discuss the problems he had with this use of class time. The administrators sat down with him and the teacher – and the teacher flatly denied using school grounds to proselytize. At that point Matt produced CDs of recordings he had made during Mr. Paszkiewicz’s class, which contained, in what was definitely the teacher’s own voice, all the evangelism that he had claimed not to do.

It would be nice to say that the school and the community came down hard on the side of separation of church and state, and took corrective action against the teacher. It would be nice to say that Matt has gotten thanks from his peers at school. But of course that isn’t the case.
Mr. Paszkiewicz is still teaching history (although hopefully with less poor science and religious education mixed in); the school district has purportedly taken “disciplinary action” against him, but has not said what that action was – a slap on the wrist, a fine, sensitivity training? Matt LeClair, on the other hand, has received threats of death and violence from anonymous people in the district (and probably the country, as the story has hit mass media). People have written letters to the editor in support – of the teacher, that is, not of the student.
The icing on the cake of this story? The school board has banned the use of recording devices in classrooms from now on.

I don’t want to sound like I don’t think teachers should have the support and endorsement of the administration they work under. In fact I think that having such support is crucial to the teacher being able to function as an efficient instructor, especially when dealing with parents who think the material is too hard/too easy/too inappropriate for their children. But I don’t believe that support should be unconditional, and when presented with indisputable evidence of inappropriate instructor behavior, the administration needs to make it clear that they are on the side of the complaining student. To take hazy and undisclosed disciplinary action against the teacher, while professing what an outstanding instructor he is and how he has full administrative backing – while removing the only way a student has to collect evidence (and thus likely the only way his or her word will be believed over that of the teacher, an adult) – is an utterly improper response.

During college, my plan was always to be a scientist: to get my doctorate and work full time in a research lab. I loved studying biology, with all its diversity, beauty, and balance. There were so many exciting lessons to be learned, and I wanted to be a part of helping to create and discover new knowledge. After a year of graduate school, however, I realized that research wasn’t what I had expected it to be – and I realized that what I had enjoyed the most all along was the time I had spent acting as the teaching assistant for a freshman chemistry laboratory course during my last two years of college. Because of the nature of the course, I didn’t get to spend much time teaching lessons directly, but I did get to have a lot of one-on-one time with students when they came to me with concerns or problems during the experiments. Of course, some students only ever wondered things like “will this be on the exam?” or “do I have to memorize this equation?” But I was always happy when they came up with questions beyond the immediate scope of the laboratory – things they weren’t required to know for the class, that they would never be tested on, but that they generally wanted to understand more about. I also enjoyed helping them discuss and plan their academic careers; since I was two or three years down the path they were currently taking, I could tell them what classes they would learn the most from and what professors would help them succeed the best.

I loved science, and I had begun to recognize the profound pleasure I found in helping students understand, appreciate, and apply science on their own. I realized that what I really wanted to do was teach.

Besides simply enjoying helping students to understand the facts of science, I also feel it is very important that students have an appreciation for what science and technology can do, and for the usefulness of the scientific method itself. I think that these things are an important factor in being able to function in our increasingly science and technology-dependent society. Being able to use reason and process information scientifically using empirical evidence is a critical part of being able to participate in modern democracy – a part that is too often lacking in young adults today. In addition, it is becoming more and more important for people to have a solid scientific background in order to evaluate the information they receive from media and government outlets, if they are to be able to form a valid and informed opinion on it. I would like to do what I can to ensure that students are appropriately equipped to deal with such problems as may arise in their daily lives, at their jobs, or in future academic work, with the best possible critical thinking skills, data collection, and factual knowledge.

Even though I didn’t feel scientific research was the job for me, I still feel it is a very valuable field, and I would like to encourage in young students the drive and the curiosity necessary for such a career. Laying the foundation for the years of work, both experimental- and class-wise, needs to begin in secondary school in order for students to be prepared for a rigorous undergraduate schedule and a lifetime of laboratory work. Despite leaving my graduate program without a degree, I am glad to have the experience – not only to better understand the process of science and the details of factual knowledge, but also to be able to advise my students on exactly what a scientist does and how he or she goes about doing it. Even if I don’t get to teach the next Einstein or Curie or Crick, it would be nice to know that I have helped children find a career they are excited by.