PCK pre-post

So its been a few weeks into my first official graduate course. I have been a grad student sort of speak since I graduated from Monmouth, but this time the class I am taking can possibly lead into a Masters program, and I would already be half-way done with it. In the near future, I am going to post my weekly reports I sent in each week during this class, just to give out what I have (re or de)learned, questions and observations, etc.

It's OVER!!

The finals have been graded, the 2nd semester grades have been entered, my checklist of year-end procedures have been turned in.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I have finished my first semester as a gainfully employed science teacher, and I cannot wait for the next year to begin.  As I have mentioned, I do have a heavy summer load of classes that have crept up on me.  I am waiting on getting accepted to a chemistry inservice that wont cost me anything and will award me another 3 graduate classes.  (recap:  16 total already, 9 this summer for PCK, and 3 for the inservice = 25 grad credits.)  This is both good and bad.  At some schools, i do qualify for a 2nd pay lane of schools, without having this summer load.  If I spend another summer after this year taking up to 5 more grad credits, then I am a volcano of a pay raise ready to erupt once I get a master's degree.  I would jump to lane 1 to lane 4 at my school.  These classes I take right now usually accept me if I have permission from my principal to take it.  They must know what could happen if I get over a 15 or 30 grad credit mark, or even admission into a program that grants a master's degree, which is why I am afraid they will say no and I will not be able to get into one which would lead toward more pay.  Okay, I do get a lot out of these programs other than a chance of a raise, but I do appreciate the benefits of advancing my profession.

I have just gotten a catholic school self-appraisal evaluation.

THEY LIKE ME! THEY REALLY, REALLY LIKE ME!!!

I have decided to stay another year at Maria High School.  By the end of spring break I was convinced that I did not want to come back to the school.  There was one day that I was in my horrible, horrible mess of a lab and I realized, what are they going to do with this?  I must do something.  I must stay another year to get this all sorted out and taken care of.  I no longer need any of the lab equipment since everyone is taking finals next week and all they have to do is review.  My goal is to have a system of transforming the physics lab into a laboratory classroom.  Right now I teach in one room, move them in the lab to do the experiments.  Next year I want this to happen in the same room.  I wont be teaching chemistry, but whoever does can take the lecture room I am currently using as well as the chem lab, which I might borrow during the first half of the school year for my physical scientists.  This summer is filled with both a graduate course (which I am getting paid to take!) and an undergraduate course in mathematics. This class should complete the requirements needed to obtain my math endorsement even though I will already be teaching math here next year here instead of chemistry.  I hope to get the labs cleaned up for whoever is going to be working with me next year.

Spring Break week

My first spring break as a teacher...is now over.  It was well deserved, nice and long, but I do need to get back into it for my own sake.  I am reflecting on my experiences during my week and a half of vacation.  Yeah, the private school has perks like that.  It was a productive vacation toward my professional development, with plenty of time to enjoy myself.  My first experience during my break was a visit my best friend (teaches Math and Science at a community college) and an old friend of ours (we both dated her, true story) who's been teaching for a couple of years already.  She knows what she is doing, has an excellent head on her shoulders and was able to provide some inspiration to my cause, she made me feel better about what I am doing, or what I am trying to do.

I had to cut my portion of the meeting with them short because I was on my way to meet up with my highly esteemed colleague who aided me during my student-teaching, my mentor Steve.  It was the end of his spring break as mine was beginning.  I got to help him with another demo.  This demo is as equally as crazy as the bed of nails demo from December.  The topic was heat transfer, the idea is that you can come in contact with very hot surfaces without burning yourself.  What can be super hot to touch without burning yourself?  You can put your hand in (not on) an oven that is set to 450 degrees Farenheit (232 degrees Celsius), but that's nothing.  The air cools too quickly, if it didn't, you would feel cold in 72 degree weather, you would if you live in Arizona at least.  We needed to do something the average joe wouldn't dare agree to.  How about walking on burning hot charcoals?

I showed up to the demo site (school park property) and found Steve hanging out in his car with the charcoals warming up next to the pit area.  Being that it was his spring break, and nobody was at his school.  It was a perfect time to share libations while doing a run through of the demo.  It helped a lot to shake off the nerves to actually perform this crazy idea.  I was all for doing it after I went over the physics of it: generally, the rate at which heat is given off by the charcoal is too quick and the heat absorption rate on the bottom of my feet is just long enough that not a lot of energy is transferred if you can cut short the contact time with the charcoal.  The trick is to not run.  If you run, you apply more force into the ground, causing closer deeper contact with your feet.  Reduce that, walk.  You spread the force throughout the whole surface of the bottom of your foot, YOU DO FEEL A LOT OF HEAT, but you dont burn up and leave bad burn marks.  So it went well with the test run.  Tried it with both wet feet and dry feet.  With wet feet, the charcoals might stick, careful.  Dry feet, they just get dirty.

My next professional experience was a visit to Lake Forrest College for another monthly meeting with fellow Physics teachers of local high schools, colleges, and university of the Chicago Area: The Illinois State Physics Project.  It's a friendly gathering to share ideas and projects that work well to describe a concept or demonstration for classroom use.  I have done a previous blog about presenting in front of these guys, and dog-gone it, I presented something new to them this time around, and I knew about doing it long before I got there this time, so I was ready and confident.

Again, I did the introduction as "The young Jerry", I think this time it caught on.  Gerry Lietz realized at that moment that he is old.  To be nice we will say he is not old but seasoned, very well seasoned.  When it was my moment to take the floor, I went over to the storage room next to their lecture area.  I pulled out a bicycle and walked it over to the lab table that everyone in the room looked down on.  When I placed it on top of the table everyone could see what had happened to it, but that wasn't the point.  A tire tube was exposed outside of the rim and the cover of the tire was not fitted on right on the front tire.  The gist of what I told them is how it follows...

"I got this bike last summer at a garage sale in Elmhurst.  I had a job downtown over the summer and a place to crash a couple nights a week, and I didn't want to drive all the time, I just wanted a bike that would take me from point A to point B with some nice speed on it.  This bike however was brought to my attention for a different reason, so I bought it.  I was working on fixing the front wheel today when I remembered how this works and that this would be something neat to show everyone as long as you haven't seen this before.  It is constructed like a normal bicycle, it has a seat, pedals, handle bars, and it also has multiple rails for the chain to link to, now why do bicycles have such a thing?" 

I waited a moment for someone in the audience to respond with the answer "to change gears"  which is the correct response...

"To change the gears!  How do we normally do that?"

I let the audience take another guess, "just turn the gear shifters"

"Where are my gear shifters?"

just then, the audience of physicists took a closer look at the handle bars of my bike and realized THERE WERE NO SHIFTERS!

"Like I said before, I got this bike for a different reason, I asked the dealer where they were and he said there was no need for them.  This type of bike was made in the late nineties and is said to be an Autobike.  The gears shift automatically!"

"How does it do that?  The gears shift based upon the centripetal acceleration of the back tire that contains weights evenly distributed around the wheel, and they are each held together by a tight spring.  As the wheel spins faster, the weights get further from the center pulling away from the springs that are attached to the deraileur and cause the chain to switch to a different sprocket."

Everyone was intrigued, I was pumped.  I delivered my presentation the way I wanted to and was even able to demonstrate the changing of the gears by flipping it over and letting the audience see the spring-held weights move further away from the center as the wheel rotated faster.  It wasn't too long of a presentation but did get a lot of people coming to me with comments after the meeting was over.  I got a giveaway of a henry inductor with some powerful magnets and got to hang out with some big dogs of the physics teaching community.

If you think that's all I did you are dead-wrong!

A couple days later was the real show in front of the students for the fire-walking demo took place.  I was a surprise visitor coming back to meet all my former students, and to help Steve guard the location of the fire pit so no ignorant beings thought about touching the hot charcoal.  We had a few students from one of the classes guard everything when we both weren't around.  Finally we had it setup.  It was nice to evenly distribute the charcoals throughout the pit and to continually prove to the students that the charcoals were indeed hot.  When they were in doubt, we ripped a sheet out of a phone book and laid it on everything to see it engulfed in flames in a  split second.  "Yeah, it's still hot!"  Steve let the crowd notice what heat transfers were taking place and wanted to show them the effects of heat transfer on different objects.  How long would such objects stay hot?  How long would our feet stay hot?  Would they stay hot long enough to burn us alive if we walked across?  The crowd couldn't wait.  A few of them got the chance to walk across in their shoes, but I thought that was nothing, I talked down their game as a way for them to bet me that I couldn't do it.  Finally Steve went first, with wet feet.  The water itself acts as a insulator so he would be safe for a couple of seconds.  The crowd was pleased but not too pleased since he did that.  There was a bucket to dunk the feet in afterward, but that made sense, we walked on fire, we didn't want to have continual heat sensations acting on our feet, that's crazy!  I knew I had to do it, dry.  I walked across like it was no sweat.  They couldn't believe I came back for this reason, I thought it was the best reason!  After it was time for the students to head back in, Steve and I took care of the fire pit but extinguishing and burying everything over.  It was funny to see smoke coming out of the ground after a while.  We did everything we could with everything we had.  It was time to celebrate by showing the other teachers the bottom of our feet and look at them with disbelief.  Our pride did get the best of us.  During one of the free periods that morning, he asked how I felt.  "Seriously, this feels different from last time, I think i sense a couple blisters on the sides of my feet, sorta irritating!"  Steve felt the same, "Yeah I know, this is unbearable, I think I am going to call it a half-day today!"  I was blown away by that, until he asked, "Do you think you can teach a couple of my classes?"  I am back to student teaching again!  I told him I wouldn't mind, but I had to go to the university for a luncheon, and number two, I was still on spring break!  "You don't have to teach all of them" he said "just maybe the next two and we will leave the last period to so-and-so."  I told him I would take just one because there were an easier group and would have appreciated my return more.  The other part to all of this is that at the time, it was illegal for me to teach at that school because I was not registered all the way through with the City.  I did it anyways, had a nice lesson on waves.  Anyone else would have let them do whatever they wanted, but I had a plan and engaged it.  All went well, the students noticed I am a lot more confident in front of them, only because I knew what I was talking about, and I got use to teaching over the last couple of months.  The period ended and I only had some time to say hello to a few people coming in the next period, I was done with the school until next time, whenever that may be.

I went to a luncheon with former colleagues I worked by when I was getting certified to teach.  There was a Society of Physics Students meeting, and after I introduced myself, the older students were able to point to all the new members that I was a former President of the society.  I wasn't much of a president but I did come up with many new projects to do before I took the position.  The same year I took it I student taught, so I was hardly ever there.  I had a nice talks with professors and soon to be teachers about how everything is going.  I gave them as much advice as any new teacher can.  Which of course is not much.

The next day, I finally got the bike fixed up.  I took it with me to get to another luncheon at Northwestern University and used it to ride a few blocks from where I parked.  Some of the people attending the luncheon were able to recognize me from earlier that week, "You are the guy who brought the bike!"

"I brought it to campus."  I told them.

The point of the luncheon was more of a get-together with fellow physics teachers in the Chicago area.  The man who wanted us to me was a nobel physicist Leon Lederman.  He had spent a lot of time in Illinois with both science and science education.  My theory is that if you can get anything to work here, you can get it to work anywhere, just like the town of Peoria might be used.  His plan is to reverse the order the way the sciences are taught, Physics First is the name of this program, followed by chemistry, and then biology.  During the luncheon, he told us he realized that this might sound scary:  A froshman taking physics!  That sounds scary to not only the student, but sometimes also the teacher!  "They should call it Biology on Top!"  that sounds a little more reassuring.  He has been long since retired and is now trying to transform the entire science curriculum.  I dont know yet where I stand on this but I do see a lot of signs dealing with the way physics ought to be taught.  I did tell him that I am doing Physics first, but I feel like I am going to have to do Chemistry first.  My physical science class is a froshman science introduction course that has the first year more chemistry based, and the second half of the year physics based.  I know I am going to teach the same thing twice to the students with a couple of years in between.  This needs to get straightened out.  The science department is already setting up a new curriculum that will mainstream health science as a way to catch people's attention to come to this school.  Luckily as a physics teacher, I may not have to deal too much with this change, but I will have to let certain board members take my students on mini-field trips to the hospital to learn about different health careers, whatever.

So that is my spring break in a nut-shell.  I did have a lot of fun, and it was definitely worth it.

More to come as the year is ending. 

It's been a while

It has been too long since my last post.  I have been busy as normal and face merely the same challenges since I eased into the place.  It might not be a good idea to have so much time pass in between post, or else what pretty much will happen is an explosion of information that would be meaningless or nonsense to read because everything would have been bottled up and my innocent readers (whoever you are and thank you for being a reader by the way) wouldn't know what hit them.

It is a couple weeks into the fourth quarter and I have the chance to relax a little more, but I still must keep myself from easing on my students.  I swear they will get the best of me if I let my guard down.  The last couple days I have been running out of stuff to go over for the lesson, but I have been keeping them engaged.  I am planning a big day for wednesday with having the students show their creativity.  It's like a magic show and I need to plan little side tricks before the big event.

I used excel to grade everything last quarter which wasn't too awful for me, I have experience trying to figure out functions to perform on a spreadsheet, there were a few creative moments too!  This time around I found an online gradebook the students (as well as parents, which is important) can have access to.  This is nice because they can contest a certain grade, hopefully a participation grade, and I will point out to them why their behavior reflects that grade.  They shape up, things get easier, and life goes on.  Their parents may do the same as well.  They find out about their daughter's behavior, they punish them, the student shapes up, things get easier, and life goes on.  A key idea that I have been told before and I will tell anyone, "Make things easier for you."

I have reached an interesting point with the "teach-as-you-go" curriculum:  some of the topics I want to teach with some classes have already been taught to them in a different science subject.  I was going to teach wave mechanics to my seniors, and they told me they learned that in chemistry!  They did nail most the common parts of a wave, so I was thrown off.  I did find some new territory for them to go into by the end of the period, so they are back on track for some despair!  I will show my froshman and seniors the same thing that I have going on for wednesday just because I am in awe of what they can do at the end.

Overall, I think I am slightly losing my touch, I have no clue what I can do to do better.  The only new thing I have going is the make-shift new-teacher induction meetings that happen almost regularly after school with the other new teacher who started a little after I did.   I read in a classroom management book that it is a really good idea to look into being part of a new teacher induction program with whatever district you work in.  You share and build off one another to keep the spirits alive and prevents you from being burned out. As for us, this sounds like bad news: we have the same students who give us the same issues!  As long as the veteran teacher still has the same issues with them, we know we are doing alright.  The only rubbish they throw back at us is that they are not cool with their teachers being changed up.  They have no choice, and we cant help that.  You get a job, and get a new boss, you better sing to their tune.  I hate ending talking about that, so let's figure out something positive...I have my chemists in the lab for most the week, they just figured out how to make Molarity solutions so now I can trust them with making stuff on their own.  Only how they do it is the next challenge.

Still swinging

Yesterday, all of my classes had lab. I think it was wonderful to get them engaged and see science concepts in action.  My froshmen have labs to work on for the rest of the week, next week I will hit them with a test.  My physics class will be wrapping up a magnetism lab, and I will hit them up with a test, and my chem class started electrolysis, and I will hit them with a test.  Despair, I know.  I feel evil but it must be done.  It looks like im getting some of my students to come around to how they should be working in the class, I wish I could say all of my students know how they are suppose to be working when in the classroom.  Today is the last day of the 3rd quarter, I started here at the second week of this marking period.  I am having a good ride so far.

There should be two ways to reflect on how I am doing,  one mode of reflection is for daily, the other is for overall.  This might be like summa and cumulative grading.  I need to start doing better so that I have a good record overall.  I'm told the first few years of teaching might be rough.  So if I think I am having a hard time with something, I just think, "I'm still a rookie teacher then this is suppose to be difficult!" and then I feel better, no really I do.  Some bad news, I have not officially planned out what the next couple of weeks look like for my students, but I do a mental map of what will happen.  So when crunch time happens, i just pull out resources that will guide their learning when the moment occurs.

Still hanging out here late as ever only almost every night, not every single night like the last few weeks.  I leave, and it's nice, only the disastrous area remains.  Tomorrow night I'll spend time in there, I feel like leaving early today.

PD day

I've had a few 4-day weeks lately, there is one next week as well. Too bad it's not on Monday, but 4 day weeks are relaxing. I have been wanting to get through this week more than my students wanted to only because of an exciting weekend lies ahead of me. The teaching itself is finally getting better. I think one of my classes (that I count as a class) has no one failing, a couple borderliners, but they know how to get their act in gear. A few in the other classes that have issues with their grades really dont care they are failing. As long as I've done some outside notification personally then I have done everything that I can. It is now up to them. Monday I better make some phone calls, I would do them today, but the students were not in school today, and the vision of answering the phone when it is your teacher on the other line is very shocking. So I wont risk that. It happened to me once, I almost dropped the phone. There are a couple weeks left before they can get their grade up at the end of the quarter. They can try. I had a professional development seminar today. A free tool for grading, composing lessons, contacts, etc all in one, online, and did I mention Free was what the workshop was about. It's not too bad when describing how user-friendly it is. HotChalk is the name. I might transfer my scheme of things on it starting the 4th quarter so that everything is fresh and new, nothing old. Anyways, I finally locked in on my chem students with what to teach. All along for the first few weeks I was here, I was trying to teach them some general chem that they didn't know. I would ask them at the end of class if they knew about a certain topic, if no was the answer, that was going to be what I was going to teach them for the next time I saw them. Finally I put it all together. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail." - Anonymous. I am a Science teacher with a Physics background. I started teaching my chem students and have been able to stick with the same content with the last few weeks because I was teaching Nuclear Reactions with them. The lessons were easier for me and I was finding something to engage them with. It all makes sense. Next I want to teach electrochemistry, and then go over some organic chem since it touches close with the hot topics of saving the enviornment and what not. I am off to enjoy the weekend.

Relaxing Limbo

So I have it in the back of my mind to make things as easy as possible for me.  Well, I think I have that on auto-pilot.  I am planning on making this an easy week for me.  Started the week on a tuesday with a test, perhaps tomorrow will go over corrections, so that only leaves two days of new content.  Awesome!  more later.

JC

At ease

There has got to be something going wrong, because I do not feel that stressed out about anything.  I need to be observed and critiqued on how I am doing in the classroom.  The last couple weeks have been just slightly over-bearing for the students which should be where I want them.  I want to get closer to that point where it is just barely beyond their capabilities until I step in to assist them.  Overall I have great and talented students that can make it in the class if they just learned how to focus.  I am afraid they get easily lost in day-dream world or feel that they dont have to use their talents in the classroom.

Last week was mostly on Lab experiments about Newton's Laws.  Too much time was spent on Newton's 2nd Law with motion sensors, calculators, and borrowed lab equipment (almost 4 days!).  What I re-learned from this experience is to answer all questions at the end of giving instructions.  That way, I know I covered how to perform the lab in one sweep, not in multiple stages.  It could have been worse, I did spend a lot of time getting the lab room (which is still a disaster area) prepared for this, so now everyone has a spot in the physics lab, but for a tech-savvy generation, I thought they would be able to navigate through a calculator even with the directions on the board.  I still scratch my head on that one.  Newton's 3rd was a success.  There was not a lot of technology to use, and they were outside the class for the period getting physics in action.

A lil bumpy

My teaching intuition is as sharp as its going to be for the time being. I like to do a few demos in front of the class, but they seem to fall short of something exciting. I get the ones who are starting to annoy me involved. That just ends up keeping them hyper when they are back in their seat. I need something to get them to pipe down when they are supposed to. As soon as I know how a simple detention is followed through, I'll be fine. Surprisingly for a mixed culture, I am getting the same problem from various groups. I get complaints that they are thinking too much. That makes me happy whether that is good or bad for me in the end. If it is the ones who really want to give me trouble during their class, then my job is going along smoothly.
My planning is etchy, I know the major concepts I want to get across for the week, and then it breaks down when its showtime. Hopefully as the weeks progress, my planning goes exactly how it should. The good news is that my bag of tricks is still full, and the planning vs showtime difference works in my favor since I am breaking stuff down more for my students rather than jumping from one major concept to the next.

First couple of days

Alright, I taught 2 full days, then had 2 snow days to end the week, then had monday off for MLK. This job is awesome! Everyone returned tuesday a little out of control. One because of the extended weekend, and also a pep rally for the girls basketball team. I was surprised in some of the students behavior, but had a better day today. It was a regular teaching day that I do not have any complaints about. I hope its like this for the rest of the days to follow. I plan only a little bit into the future for the class, and it might haunt me if I do not plan at least a week or two into the future, but thats what I hope to accomplish on the weekends. When I am not teaching, I am trying to spend as much time as possible getting the lecture room and labs organized. This will be a while, but the students are telling me it looks so much nicer than before. My systems have been improving, and now I need to grade. More later.

I HAVE A JOB!!!

I just completed my first full day as a science instructor.
It is the middle of the school year, the second week of the new semester, and I interview at a school for an immediate science position.  At the end of the interview, the job was straight up offered to me.  How lucky can this get?
The school is close to home, really close to where I student taught. No worries, its a private school. The catch is that it is all girls, so let's re-state those worries. The teenage thinking, adolescent changing, long-term grudging type of school, and I am their science teacher. I have 3 Physical Science Courses, 1 Chemistry, and 1 Physics class. I am more concerned about the chemistry course because my background is not that strong, it barely exists.
I am fortunate to have nice classroom size for my classes, I average about 18 students per class.

My workspace is pretty amazing, and pretty messy. "Show me a clean lab station, and I will show you where no work is being done." They need to stop working for a couple days so I can organize. I have a lecture room that connects to a chem lab, and in the other direction a physics lab.  It will take forever to get everything situated the way I want it, a few of the ways I picked up in student teaching.

I tried to make it a point of how I wanted the class to be managed.  The day of the interview I met some of the students in a couple of my classes, and they were just a little out of control, today being the introductory first day, I made sure that is not to happen.  Tomorrow will be their first of many normal days in the classroom.  My goal is to achieve a balanced diet of routine between lecture, activity, book work, and something else im missing?  Someone help me out.  So far so good, I just need time for organizing, including the content so I know what I am talking about.  Nothing should be complicated after this semester.

Now What?

Ok, that chapter of my life is over, the unpaid chapter we could call it. Consider this the preface to a new chapter, if that is possible in a literature sense. Its the last friday of winter break for the school systems and I wont be going into a new school to teach on monday. What are my options? I can substitute wherever for the next couple of months. Why not? I am not tied down anywhere, and I can get a peek into different schools. I can join some tutoring group for a little while to make some small change, or go into the private sector and work in some industry not knowing what I would be doing.  Who knows?