OK, here's the video reflection, such as it is.......

OK one more
I think I've figured out the value of twitter.  If you need to get a message to a bunch of people you can reach a whole audience with a single hashtag and don't have to create an address list.  Much easier.  I still thinks it's annoying, though.

On a more serious topic - I'm grading a lab.  There's an old saying about labs:  "If it smells bad it's Cemistry, if it's green or fuzzy, it's biology, and if it doesn't work it's Physics."

The lab had the students varying the length of a tube with a tuning fork vibrating at it's mouth and locating the lengths at which the tube resonated.  Then they figure out the wavelength and calculate the speed of sound.  NOBODY, not even I, found the fundamental.  We could hear the variation on volume fine, but couldn't find the shortest resonant length.  I've been trying to grade this thing for 2 days.   I decided to kind of pretend that they did find the fundamental, but what really bothers me are two things.  First, only a couple of the students acknowledged that their measurements were WAY off of theory.  It seems the only thing they learned is the old adage quoted above.  They don't worry if it doesn't work - as long as they know what format to write their report in (kind of like what I'm doing now).  The other thing is, why did I not catch it while it was happening?  I didn't design the lab, but why not run it the night before to make sure it worked?  (In self-defense against self-attack, I've done that with most of the labs)  And why not check their results on the fly (again, as I usually do) to make sure things were working out?  I guess that had to do with their working outside, widely separated, with no tables to set their notes on and for me to look over their shoulders at.  But I could have done it better by controlling the situation to the point where I could get a verbal response that would tell me where they were at.

At the risk of being disingenuous, I'm going to crank out a post or two for my blog.  I know I'll be considered insincere for going past the last minute, but there it is.

As it happens, I've opened up tweetdeck, as much as I don't like to, and found a stream of edchats going by, so I guess that'll be my subject for now.  I went to two edchats, only commented on one.  If you read the first post you know that my comment had to do with spam and, again, I find I can't much focus on the topic of the conversation as on what's between the lines.  I keep thinking about the deceptive scale of the internet.  All the marketing principles about how many times you have to hear something before you believe it, or before you click on 'BUY NOW' hold sway here.  Once upon a time there was a fad of placing a classified ad in a newspaper saying, essentially  "Please send me $5"  Enough people would do it that you could at least cover the cost of the ad.  With the internet, you can write a message like that, set it up to post and repost automatically, even with variations,  and reach hundreds of millions of eyes for just a few hours work.  So I have a deep suspicion of anything flowing through that pipe.

Meanwhile, tweetdeck is popping away and I've become acclimated, and arranged my screen so that it doesn't cover up what I'm doing, so now it's just a minor annoyance - but it still doesn't bring me any value.

RC Time Constant

I had an idea.  Usually nobody does a lab with capacitors, even though students are supposed to know about them, because without automated equipment you can't measure current and voltage as a function of time.

So you could get a resistor and capacitor set with a time constant of about a second, have student set the voltmeter and ammeter next to each other and take a video while they close the switch.  Then using one of the video editing programmings you can step through the video frame by frame, that is every 0.02 seconds, and read current and voltage off the screen.  They could see the voltage across the cap increase as the current decreases and they would get too see an exponential function - which they don't get anywhere else.

DISCREPANT EVENT

When we do a DE in Science Methods, we generally end the demonstration by saying something like "What's going on here?" It's meant to make the students think deeply and  look for the thing we're not telling them.  So here goes.......

The other day I saw a classroom that contained 2 teachers, 40 laptops , 80 clickers and about 14 students.  A few years ago I volunteered in a classroom that had a smart board, 5 computers and 3 students.  What's going on here?

I stopped at 7-11 last night and the clerk was talking about this cool drinking game based on the TV show Big Bang Theory.  It seems that you watch the show and whenever a character does or says the trigger, you drink. Details can be found at http://weknowawesome.com/2012/03/17/the-big-bang-theory-drinking-game/ and other locations.   I said to him, “Well, you could do that with any show.”  He thought for a moment then replied, “Yeah, but Big Bang Theory is so cool!”

On the way out I realized that this fellow had been the recipient of a viral marketing campaign.   The main demographic of the show, men in their early twenties are in their prime binge-drinking years. If they can be convinced to take a shot every time a character says the word “sex” or some such thing well, you can sell an awful lot of booze that way.

The question that comes to my mind is:  “Does what we do every day as teachers help to inoculate the kids against that type of manipulation?  Or does it make them more susceptible?”  Alternatively:  “Does our educational system make students more observant, more aware, or not?”  At this point I’m concerned that the answer may be “not”.

Wow, finally a few minutes to be able to come back to this thing.

I've been feeling like I was fighting a losing battle here.  For the first few weeks, I noticed I was timid to try anything new - and last semester that was a workable approach because I had motivated and mostly well-behaved students with classroom routines that worked.  This semester it's not like that at all.  I can't keep their attention without being creative, so I have to be creative.  On one level it's good because I am learning how to make use of some different strategies, but planning, creating materials and props, teaching the actual classes and grading it all is....well, one thing I've learned is that a 5-hour energy drink provides an additional 12 hours of sleep deprivation.

EDSS 531

Philosophy/Model Integration

Well, I have to say, it’s sort of obvious that I’ll choose Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry as the educational models that fit my education philosophy which, you may recall, was perennialist as to content and existentialist as to process.  The reason I think it is obvious is that the most important skills of a Physicist are Inductive Thinking and Scientific Inquiry.  Discerning correlations and generalizing those correlations into causative hypotheses is the first job of the practicing Physicist.  And the second job is testing those hypotheses against reality and modifying them as necessary.  So, state standards notwithstanding, it is really those two models themselves that students of Physics most need to learn.  These two models need not be student-centered, which is to say existentialist, and both have been practiced in very teacher-centered educational environments in the past.  But both can be applied in student-centered ways and be very successful that way.  

We use Scientific Inquiry in the classroom whenever we have a discrepant event.  We ask the students to make a prediction based on their current understanding of nature, then test their prediction against reality and modify it accordingly.  The process is student-centered in that it is about their prediction, their experience and their conclusion, not that of the book or teacher.  Discrepant events are often billed as being just a way of generating cognitive dissonance for the purpose of highlighting a principle and making it more memorable, and they can have that effect.  But they are also valuable in developing the habit of open-mindedness; the ability to accept that one’s preconception may not be accurate.  So I see the Scientific Inquiry model as having the dual role of enhancing the acquisition of information-centered, perennially important knowledge as well as engendering in students certain thinking skills that will serve them later in life.

When you teach to the standard, except for those few points in the Investigation and Experimentation section, it’s mostly about understanding physical principles and applying them (and their appropriate formulas) to various problems or situations.  That’s largely a perennial approach.  It’s necessary to develop that skill, but it is not the same skill as that of recognizing relationships between isolated pieces of information or, more importantly, isolated principles.  I always come back to a lab commonly done in Physics 1.  It’s a reaffirmation of Newton’s second, not an inductive lab, but there is an anomaly that always appears as a result of friction.  As it happens, a graph that should go through zero has a finite y-intercept that exactly corresponds to the friction in the system and is easy to account for, if one notices it.  Very few students, however, notice it until and unless I point it out to them.  That, of course, is what I want to change.  I want my students to engage their own curiosity; to notice patterns, and exceptions to those patterns, for themselves, and to look for the meaning within them. 

In short, what I hope to be able to accomplish, at least a little, is for students to learn Physics the way Physicists practice physics:  Standing on the shoulders of giants, and imagining.

WHAT?

Last night in methods Barry mentioned that his CT had done the Pendulum lab as a discrepant event.  I was pleasantly surprised.   You wouldn’t think it would be surprising at all, really.  The pendulum lab is perfect for teaching scientific inquiry.  It requires almost no equipment – some string, some fishing weights, a cell phone and something to hang the string from.  A pendulum’s  period is simple to measure, depends linearly on one obvious and easily controllable variable (length), and does not depend at all on another obvious and easily controllable variable (mass).  So, like I say, it’s perfect.  Everybody should use it.

There’s more.  Simple Harmonic Motion is also one of the most basic and universal phenomena in Physics.  Firmly ensconced in classical mechanics it is easily derivable from Newton’s laws, but in its own right it is the foundation of wave mechanics, which in its turn is the foundation for acoustics, physical optics, all of AC electronics including microwave and communications technology and finally the vast majority of modern Physics, including quantum mechanics, atomic and molecular Physics, the standard model and pretty much all of the dozens of unified field theories out there.  Obviously then, Simple Harmonic Motion is an essential part of any Physics curriculum.  So why would I be pleasantly surprised to hear that Barry was teaching it?  Because it is not taught in any of the Physics 1 classes I’ve seen (My CT last semester did teach  it in AP).  And why would it not be part of the curriculum in those classes.  Because it’s not in the standard.  Nowhere. 

Speaking now not as a Teacher Candidate, but as  practicing Physicist and Engineering Manager, I have this to say to the California Department of Education:  “What in God’s name can you be thinking?”

On the advent of the three-legged fly swatter.

We saw a video of a lecture by Daniel Pink, related to his book on right-brainedness. In it he displayed a fly swatter that has three little legs protruding from the handle for it to stand on when not in use, and pointed out that this device commanded a wild price tag (I think it was $8 or $14), just because it had a cool designer look and feel. At least that’s how I interpreted it. Me, I think he was just a wee bit off the mark. The designer toilet brush he also displayed sold for only 3 bucks. So what’s so special about a three-legged fly swatter?

Anyone who has ever lived in close proximity to livestock knows that you want your fly swatter handy. Particularly in the kitchen, you want to be able to grab and swat in a matter of seconds. But one thing you definitely DON’T want is to lay the business end of the thing down on the kitchen counter. Hence the legs. Really, it’s a great design. And if it’s patented, which I’m sure it is, it can easily sell for 14 bucks. This is not to detract from the beauty of the design, but to point to its utility. “Form follows function” is, in my opinion, more than a principle taught at design school, it’s a law of nature; could even be considered to be a corollary to the law of natural selection. Really build a better fly swatter and, in time, you’ll drive all the other contenders out of the market. If that fly swatter is better because it has legs, then the fact that the legs give it a unique appearance is secondary to the increased utility of the design. This is also not to detract from the value of right-brained thinking, but to point to the overarching value of integrated thinking. Recognizing the need to have your fly swatter handy is a left-brained kind of a thing. Pulling together a wide range of disparate elements and seeing within them a creative solution to the problem is right-brained.

What, then does this have to do with education? Pinks thesis, as I read it, is that we as a society do not value right-brained-ness sufficiently and do not do enough to culture it in our educational system. Probably he’s right. And that, to me, is rather discouraging. My only real problem with his book and his seminars is that it seems to me yesterdays news. These ideas have been floating around the culture since at least the seventies. I point to that decade because that is when I first became aware of them, and did so only because that is when I first began to pay attention. Probably they have been extant throughout human history. Why then is the left-brained, linear, goal-oriented style of thinking so dominant. I haven’t an answer, but I think it may have something to do with fear. When we fear death or suffering, we rely on the most direct means of meeting our basic needs, be they real or imagined. That puts us in linear, short-term survival mode where the left-brain is most successful. Only when we have some time to relax can we open ourselves to the bigger, longer, holistic appreciation of life.


Anyway, there it is, and what I have to say is concluded, concerning the nature of the fly swatter.


Perhaps you’d enjoy an interlude of cross-brainedness.

On the integration of iPads at Oceanside High. 

First off, I was pretty amazed at the campus, the quality of students and the quality of the work they were doing.  I am new to this area, and the only impression I have of the area schools has come from my cohort, but I was under the impression that O-side had a not so great reputation.  But I would love to teach there. 

Anyway, on to the iPads.  Clearly they have not had time to really get full value from them, but for my money JUST being able to do assessment for learning is enough to warrant the expense.  I asked how that process could be achieved without those devices and the presenting teacher kind of danced around the question, but the true answer was ”It can’t”.  At least it can’t without some form of automated randomization of test questions and that requires at least computer access.  It’s also true that the type of testing they were doing is not a panacea.  Students could practice on a problem until they get it, yet not be able to apply the principle to a different set of circumstances. But it’s still a great tool and even that sort of second-tier rote learning is a better foundation for advanced study of Physics than most HS students get. 

The chem teacher is apparently also recording lectures or example for kids to work with individually.  He announced that he would be recording a vlog on some topic that evening.  So they are apparently doing at least some degree of flipped instruction.

I’m sure they’ll use the technology to greater and greater advantage  as time goes by – because they believe in it are committed getting the best out of it.  The main thing, though, is that they seem committed to student-centric education, and that’s where the action is.

EDSS 541

My thoughts and reactions to Disrupting Class, by Christensen, Horn & Johnson

It is not entirely clear to me why Christensen et. al. place so much initial importance on the terms ‘modular’ and ‘interdependent’, but there it is.   In an interdependent design, the interfaces between the different components of a system are unique to that system making it impossible to substitute components form a similar system from a different source.  In a modular system, interfaces are standardized such that components from different system may be interchanged without modification.  The authors point out that modularization generally happens only when a technology has become mature.  For example, the drive battery from a Honda hybrid vehicle cannot be replaced by one from a Toyota Prius whereas their 12-volt system batteries are pin compatible and could be swapped at will.  The electric drive system is a technology in its infancy while the system battery architecture has been unchanged for at least 50 years.

The authors argue that the American educational system has an interdependent architecture.  I’m not sure I agree.  As I sit in the RBV student library writing this, I see that it is indistinguishable from the VHS library nearby and from the Windsor High library 600 miles away.  Surely that is an example of modularization.  The standardized curriculum and assessments  mandated by the state of California, and soon to be mandated nationwide also strike me as sings of increasing modularization.  It is not so much that “you can’t study this in ninth grade if you didn’t cover that in seventh…” as “If you are in ninth grade, you did cover that in seventh”, so you could move from one school to another and never notice the difference.

What the book is primarily about is ‘disruptive innovation’.   Disruptive innovation occurs when a product or system, which has been designed to address an unmet need in a segment of the consuming population, unexpectedly overtakes and supplants existing products and systems.  An example is FedEx.  Designed to address the needs of those who just HAD to have their packages delivered overnight, whatever the cost, the more efficient delivery systems the company developed for that purpose are taking over the function of simply delivering packages and driving the USPS out of business.  A key component of disruptive innovation is the word “unexpected”.  Disruptive innovation is rarely if ever planned.  Those innovators see an underserved niche market in which their idea can flourish and the technology is found serendipitously to be applicable over a wide market.  MySpace, for example, was originally conceived as a means for musicians (only) to share their work.  By contrast, sustaining innovation has to do with improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of existing products and systems, and adapting them incrementally to meet the evolving needs of their consumers.

Considering the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovation, I would say that the American school system, in the face of the ever-changing demands made on it, is arguably the most successful sustaining innovator in history.  But there remain significant populations of children who are chronically underserved by it, populations which it was, perhaps, not originally intended to serve.  (The authors cite Thomas Jefferson as wanting education to be universal, “so that all citizens could participate in the democracy”.  Bear in mind, however, that to Jefferson, “citizens” meant white, male landowners.)   So this system of education is ripe for being taken down, so to speak, by a disruptive innovation in the generalized field of developing children into adults.

Christensen posits education as a value-added process.  Somewhat confusingly, he describes both the process of educating children and the business of providing instructional and curricular tools as value-added industries.  Certainly such commodities as textbooks are produced that way and the result is a one-size-fits-all kind of approach to learning.  But it is interesting to consider schools themselves as value-added enterprises.   Like a factory that takes in pieces of sheet metal and turns out auto bodies, the schools take in partially socialized children and turn out competent adults by way of implanting knowledge, habits and attitudes.  Many would argue that value is actually subtracted in that process, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that efficiency in a value added chain dictates uniformity of both process and product and makes individualized instruction difficult if not impossible.  Like chickens bred for uniformity of size so as to be easily processed by automatic machines, students are expected to fit a mold and if some part doesn’t fit, well that part gets squished, and the machine moves on.  This is the trap of monolithic education, for which he prescribes student-centric education as the cure. 

Student-centric education is not a new concept.  In past centuries, institutions of higher learning were for the elite (remember Jefferson’s white, male landowners) group instruction was in comparatively small groups and every student had a mentor.  In the trades, apprentices were individually instructed in the intricacies of their trade by journeymen, and journeymen by masters.  Today, the wealthy still have access to schools where individual mentoring is the norm and class sizes are in the single digits.  But, to be blunt, our desire to provide high level education to every member of our society has not been matched by our willingness to pay for it, so we have followed a path of increasing standardization of both product and process.  That path, as we’ve heard, makes educational institutions ripe for disruption.

Our authors seem to believe they have identified the disruptor in the form of computers, but I think it is more likely that the real disruptor is student-centric education, which may or may not turn out to be accomplished by way of the cloud.  In any case, they are correct to state that attempts to exploit disruptive innovation through existing monolithic systems geared toward sustaining innovation are likely to fail.  They call that cramming, and point out that simply equipping classrooms with computers has not, and will not, automatically lead to student-centered education.

I think it comes down to this.  If information technology is able to lower the cost of student centered education to the point that it is available to (almost) everyone, then (almost) everyone will take advantage of it and we will see a real transformation of our school systems.  If market or political or other forces prevent the necessary level of cost reduction and individual adoption oon the part of students, then internet-based education will turn out to be just another technology that was never able to climb the S-curve.

reflection on a twitter chat

My first real experience of twitter was an #edchat (is # a vowel or a consonant?) a week or two ago.  Topic:  How do we know when our students are engaged.  What was it like?  It was like a cocktail party.  Every comment short and maybe sweet.  It takes a little work to condense a thought into 140 characters.  With #edchat the action is fast and furious. If it takes a few minutes to compose a retweet, decide what of the original to include, etc.  during that time you’ll have missed a lot.  I was totally lost – I couldn’t figure out whether to retweet, or reply, what hash tag(s) to put on it.  So I basically lurked after the first 15 minutes.  But I guess that’s the idea.  I guess it’s meant to be like a cocktail party.  Maybe participate in a few conversations, maybe learn a few things.

There’s one thing that really annoyed me – I started paying attention about a half hour before the session began, when there were not so many tweets coming through and I was able to follow a lot more.  The percentage of tweets that had a link to a blog site that required registration to read the entire post was high – and I know that on the internet e-mail addresses are like currency.  I also found at least one person who seemed to have an automated tweet with #edchat going on that led to a site hawking his products.  That kind of thing turns me off in a big way. 

Today I learned how to block and report spam, but am I willing to use that function?  Let’s see.  I looked in a little while ago and saw a very interesting tweet in #edcaht.  Followed the link to the ASCD website to read a blog post about “7 myths about rigor”.  At the end of the post I was directed to learn how to conquer those myths ------- by purchasing a book from their bookstore.  Blatant spam.  But no report from me.  Because, hey, they’ve got a .org domain.  That means it’s a non-profit, right?  They’re only trying to help, right?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  Does the end justify the means?  

EDSS 531

Journal #5

Human beings are expert at the art of self-delusion, and I am no exception.  So when I walk into a room and I think I ‘know’ the 40 or so kids staring back at me, I could be completely mistaken.  Still, it was surprising, the more I became familiar with my students last semester, how much I recognized in them the personality traits of people I know and have known.  That’s great, because it gives me a ground on which to relate to them, but it is also in a way pointless, in that my relationship to my students is different than my relationship to anyone else I’ve ever known.  I have a purpose with these kids that I don’t have with anyone else. Actually, two purposes.  One is to somehow implant in them the Science Content Standards for Public Schools.  The other is to somehow support and nourish their growth into adulthood and their expression of themselves.  They seem anxious to do both, and it seems that the most important thing they want from me is to let them.  It’s important to remember that I teach an elective and all my students have made a conscious decision to be in my class, but with that in mind, far as I can tell, the best thing I can give them is to encourage and appreciate their efforts to succeed.  Since they do want to succeed, I find that if I can keep myself open, they’ll let me know what they need from me, or at least they’ll try to.

That said, there has been one group of students that I’ve been unable to relate to.  There are two or three in each class.   These are the silent ones.  They are always Hispanic.  They never speak except when spoken to.  When I try to engage them they answer in single syllables and show little or no emotion (at least not that I can read).  And they don’t get good grades.  I think, if they were succeeding academically, I wouldn’t care so much that I can’t communicate with them, but they aren’t so I find myself feeling frustrated and helpless.  To me, these kids stick out.  I notice them because they are so un-noticeable.  At first, I thought poorly of them and figured they didn’t care and were just marking time.  But I don’t think that’s it.  As I say, I am at a loss as to how to approach these kids.

Which leads me to get on my soapbox for a while, and I’m grateful to Brianna for tweeting this website yesterday and reminding me of it.  I believe that THE most underserved population in America is the deaf community.  Have you ever had the alarm go off while you were leaving a store because the checker hadn’t properly deactivated the security tag on your new dress?  If you were deaf, you wouldn’t hear that alarm. You wouldn’t hear the checker calling to you.  You wouldn’t know anything at all was amiss until the loss prevention man tackled you in the parking lot.  Security systems, disaster systems and schools are all geared to the hearing.  Deaf students have a dropout rate approaching 45%.  It is estimated that up to 50% of parents of deaf children never learn to sign, leaving their children without access to language itself until they reach school age.  The developmental deficit those children begin with is almost incomprehensible.  So that’s the most negative reaction I’ve had so far.

EDSS 541

RR 14 & 15

We went with a team approach and a complementary approach.  

EDSS 541

RR13: IDENTIFY what co-teaching approaches were modeled this week.

Working from the assumption that the main point of this response has to do with the co-teaching seminar on Feb. 15, I would say two of the approaches were modeled.  During the first half of the evening, we saw the Supportive approach, in which Dr. Thousand led the presentation while other faculty members were in attendance to help as needed.  During the second half of the evening we saw a parallel approach in which our two professors moved around checking in with the different groups as we did our independent group work.

On a more general level:  a summary of the four co-teaching approaches we’ve been introduced to follows

·         Supportive – one teacher leads the classes while one or more others are there provide support.  The support teacher may help with classroom management,  housekeeping, providing individual attention to students who need it, etc.

·         Complementary – one teacher still seems to be leading the class, but the other will take a more cognitively active role, paraphrasing, clarifying or amplifying points or modeling student participation.

·         Team – two or more teachers share all of the teaching duties, from planning to execution and assessment.  They plan closely together, each expressing their strongest skills.

·         Parallel – the class is split into two or more groups and the teachers work independently with those groups.  Each teacher may work with one or more groups exclusively, or all teachers may rotate amongst all the groups.

EDSS 531

We've been assigned the task to pose some questions for discussion based on our reading this week.  Might as well put them on the blog.  Both questions come from a single reading:

From Understanding Unconscious Bias…….

 “…in ,many situations we are able to direct our behavior using our conscious attitudes – what we choose to believe or our stated values – rather than our ‘racial attitude on and unconscious level – the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think”.

Here’s the question:

The great objection I have to digital communication – twitter et. al. – is that it completely erases those  “automatic associations” that communicate what we unconsciously think and feel as opposed to what we school ourselves to think and feel.  My question then becomes, does that erasure make it better or worse?  Our we more or less able to internalize and make automatic the attitudes we want to cultivate in ourselves in a situation where those we are interacting are able to see and respond to only our “best face”?

Also from Undestanding Unconscious Bias:

Table 1 shows the time it takes a team composed of a white and black member to complete a task.  The teams were sorted by the existence of overt bias, no bias and covert bias on the part of the white member.   What accounts for the increased time to complete the task when the white team member exhibited covert bias?

EDSS 531

 Journal Writing 4:  What are your biases and how do you mitigate your behavior when working with students?

Warning!  The next few sentences may be pretty ugly.  Blacks are dirty, lazy, noisy and stupid.  Hispanics are hard-working but so dumb they can’t even speak English.  Indians are drunken bullies. Asians are treacherous, just pretending they don’t speak English.  Germans are pushy and rude.  Poles are stupid.  Those are the stereotypes I was brought up with.  Lurking like a virus in my lungs ready to emerge in a moment of stress.  And as much as I to ignore them, they do affect my first impression of everyone I meet.  The trick is to keep them from affecting my ongoing interactions, particularly with my students.  The first thing is to ignore that first impression, which with practice is not too hard to do.  The second is to cultivate curiosity about my students.  Try to understand their thoughts and feelings.  The third is to care about them and let them know it, which, once you’ve got to know them a bit, is really almost unavoidable. 

That’s my approach.  I don’t know how successful I am.  There’s a big difference between modulating your behavior so as not to show bias and really not having any bias.  The first is relatively easy.  The second – well prejudice in some form at some level may be an inescapable part of the human condition.

Before I conclude though, I’ve noticed a new prejudice in my teaching, which surprises and troubles me.  When grading papers I’ve noticed that if I know the student whose paper I’m grading; that is, if I know their name and picture their face as I read their work, I am inclined to be more lenient in assigning grades.  As a practical consideration, that means that the more outgoing students, who I get to know sooner, will get better grades from me than the retiring ones.  

EDSS 531  Journal #3

To what degree do you think you really understand the needs of your students and what they need for the 21st century?  How wide is the “gap” between them and you? In what areas are the gaps? What can you do to make connections?

OK, I may be full of it, but I really don’t think the gap between me and my students is all that great.  Which is not to say that I think I know what they need for the 21st century.  Indeed, I think that very lack of knowledge is what we have most in common.   For all that we all try to pretend otherwise, none of us, I say none of us, has any idea at all what knowledge and skills these students will need to succeed in the world ahead of them.   The professional prognosticators of the world have been proven wrong pretty much every time anyone has bothered to go back and check their predictions against reality.  So for me to imagine that the communication tools and the social interaction paradigms that I don’t share with my students will somehow cripple my ability to relate to them is, I think, wide of the mark.  Those paradigms will most likely be unrecognizable by the time these kids finish college.   More importantly, I don’t believe that the things I have to offer my students depend strongly on those paradigms. 

My subject is Physics and, to be brutally honest, if one of my students were to learn absolutely nothing of Physics in my classroom, they would be at almost no disadvantage in a college level Physics program.  The concepts that we spend weeks covering can be mastered in hours by a student who is intelligent, internally motivated and curious and will never be mastered by one who lacks those characteristics.  Formulas are easy to memorize, facts are easy to memorize.  The heart of the Physicist is skill and persistence in asking questions and finding answers.  So if I want to give my students the best professional gift I possibly can, I will strive to inspire in them a spirit of curiosity, a desire to see beyond the surface values of the world around them and a vision of the beauty they will find when they do see beyond those surface values.  And if I want to give the best human gift I can, I will strive to inspire in them that same spirit, as expressed in the form of charity, compassion and empathy toward their fellows, which really amount to the same thing . 

These, I believe, are qualities that do not depend on the means of communication.  They are, however, also qualities that don’t appear anywhere in the California State Science Content Standards.  I hope that won’t turn out to be a problem.

EDSS 541

RR10:   Revise your team's Task 2: ITU Cover Sheet

EDSS 541

RR9: Begin your ethnographic research on your school site to complete your ethnography for EDSS 530 and to complete Task 3 for the ITU.

RBV School Data
Demographics of School:
Total school enrollment and listed percentages of the total population by race
Total Enrollment	3061
Black/African American:	4.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native:	1.4%
Filipino:	1.4%
Asian:	3.2%
Pacific Islander:	0.9%
Hispanic/Latino:	45%
White:	43%
Two Races or More:	0.8%

The API growth report for 2011can be found at RBV API GROWTH 2011  and it's nice to know that the school met its growth targets in all categories.

Some other websites related to the school:

The School's Website

The Parent/Teacher/Student Association

The Longhorn Foundation

EDSS 541

RR8: LIST ideas and resources you can use for your Service Learning and ITU (Task 11).

Our ITU is on the topic of Hydraulic Fracturing, which is a rather large-scale topic and, by itself, not easily addressed in the form of a direct service project.  So I think we would do best to incorporate an advocacy experience.

1.      The environmental impact of fracking in areas where it occurs is controversial, and it would be a good component of the unit for the students to do research and reach a consensus as to their opinion on the subject.  They could then follow up on that with a letter-writing or editorial campaign in support of their side.  The project would not really be very locally oriented, as there is no hydraulic fracturing going on in California, so they would have to use mostly remote resources like internet research and communication with advocates on both sides of the issue in the various areas where it is occurring.

2.      The subject is related to topics of energy use, energy conservation and carbon footprint.  So another  project that comes to mind is carbon footprint auditing.  Students would research various strategies that could be used to reduce energy usage with a particular focus on their school.  They would be able to connect with local businesses in the industry for help.  The project could include a financial analysis of each strategy.  The project might culminate with a “footprint reduction day” at the school or at any local institution or even just around the neighborhoods.  On that day they might enlist parents or other teachers or students or even professionals to participate and go through and implement the changes that they had previously identified

EDSS 541

RR7: Identify the key elements and process for Service Learning

In the first major section of this book Ms. Kaye approaches the subject of service learning from multiple perspectives.  Each of those perspectives contains key elements of the subject and in many ways each could become a blueprint for a service learning experience, she also presents a formal blueprint which she appears to have developed from the key elements she has presented previously. (I’m looking for a better word than ‘experience’.  While Kaye rightly rejects the term ‘project’ as implying that the service has a defined end-point and may be forgotten once it is over, the term ‘experience’ these days connotes a certain theme park touchy-feeliness and lack of rigor.  Maybe ‘program’ would work.)

Those key elements boil down to:

Four categories of Service Learning: These are Direct Service, Indirect Service, Advocacy and Research.  She points out that Direct Service and Advocacy are more impactful to High School students than the others, which makes sense in light of the moral passion which is so much a part of adolescence.

Service Learning standards for quality practice:  I can only describe these as essential points to consider in the planning and execution of Service Learning programs.  They are very much process-oriented and tend to skew toward a student-centered philosophy.

A five-step process which lays out the essential stages of planning and executing a Service Learning program.  These are Investigation, Preparation and Planning, Action, Reflection and Demonstration.  It is worth noting that here also she shows a very student-centric philosophy, often recommending that the students, rather than the teacher, take the lead in defining the process.  It is also worth noting that she takes the time to explicitly discourage us from using competition as a motivator.

Finally, the Blueprint for Service Learning seems to be a more expanded and detailed exposition of her five-step process in which, along with the various forms summary documents on the CD, she provides the reader with almost a cookbook for an effective Service Learning experience.  The blueprint is a very comprehensive guide which includes strategies for finding connection to different disciplines, engaging parents and community and providing the students with opportunities for reflection and authentic assessment.

EDSS 531

Journal #2

Quote from the Text/Video	What it Means	Deeper Thinking
The reality is that diagnoses aren’t especially useful for understanding kids with behavioral challenges or for helping adults know what to do next. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	A diagnosis is basically a label.  The author here is saying that labeling the behavior does not by itself solve the problem.	I remember hearing about a psych study on the attitude of therapists towards their patients pre- and post-diagnosis.  The gist of it was that after a patient had been diagnosed, the therapist became less curious, less interested and treated the patient as a disease more than as a person.  The upshot seemed to be that therapy was more effective without a diagnosis.  My own thinking is that we have a left-brained tendency to want to be able to look up in a book the solution to our problems and apply it, secure in the knowledge that if we just get the diagnosis right, all will be well.  That approach works well for washing machines and cars, but not so well for people.  I think experience has shown, often tragically, that we frequently make the wrong diagnosis, and that once diagnosis is made, we carry on blithely with the prescribed treatment oblivious to its effects.
…kids who haven’t responded to natural consequences don’t need more consequences, they need adults who are knowledgeable about how challenging kids come to be challenging….. -From “Kids do Well if They Can	Teachers and parents need training in those skills.	Perhaps those people who we consider to be natural born teachers are the ones who are able to empathize with the adolescent experience and support their students’ maturation.  Take black-and-white thinking for example.  As long as a kids brain has not yet developed the ability to see shades of grey, they are stuck in that black and white world.  We can’t shake them out of it.  Perhaps teachers should be recruited from the ranks of psychotherapists.
“This is precisely what happened to the routine mass production jobs, which moved across the oceans in the second half of the twentieth century.  And just as those factory workers had to master a new set of skills….many of todays  knowledge workers will likewise have to command a new set of aptitudes.” -From A Whole New Mind	Adapability and lifelong learning are the essential skills for the current generation.	There has been an incredible increase in the standard of living in Asia over the past twenty years or so.  While the economies of America and Europe are undergoing recession, those of Asia are booming.  As a by-product there has been a small but significant increase in manufacturing in the United States.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s Japan became an economic powerhouse, flooding the developed industrial world with products cheaper than we could make at home.  The result was an increase in the standard of living of Japan and a continuing migration of low-level labor to China, India, Southeast Asia and South America.  Now mid-level labor is also migrating.  Prognostication is always dangerous, but I think the defining economic trend of the 21st century will be the leveling of the global playing field and a more even distribution of valued skill sets.  Throughout history those “right-brained” qualities have found expression in societies characterized by abundance.  But that abundance has usually been at the expense of the poverty of some unseen class, often in another country.
“The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of University entrance and the consequence is many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not.” -From Do Schools Kill Creativity?	The whole thrust of the current educational system is misdirected.	He goes on to say much more about this topic and elaborate about the industrial revolution, etc., and makes a lovely joke about school being designed to create university professors, but here’s a scarier scenario.  If schools were initially designed to train children to be factory workers, once the factory work became automated goes away, the next most appropriate application for that type of unquestioning, regimented training is the military.  And now that warfare is becoming automated the next most appropriate application is the prison system.

EDSS 530

Reflection on the Visitors and Residents Video

Cyberspace:  It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  The simple fact that I call it cyberspace is a giveaway; puts me in a generation that considers that realm foreign and somehow disconnected from the world of human interaction and experience.  Neuroscientists have determined that the music we listen to in our adolescence will remain our favorite throughout our lives.  Personally, I believe that the principle applies to the majority of our experience.  The psycho-emotional biases we are exposed to during the period when we are developing our higher-order thinking become the fundamental principles that govern our behavior and our preferences through adulthood.  So let’s look at some of those biases. 

We baby boomers all read Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac in school.  We’re deeply distrustful of Big Brother.  And while we envisioned him as an all-powerful, vindictive, reactionary government and he’s turned out to be more like the marketing department at Sirius Cybernetics, still we don’t want anybody (I say anybody) following us around and snooping into our business.  Still, we hear that  people will follow us around on the web if we’re not careful; that we need secure passwords and must be careful about the cookies left on our computers.  But we don’t really know what any of that means.  The password must be between 8 and 20 characters with at least one numeral and one capital letter and with no actual dictionary word embedded anywhere within it.  And cookies.  Shades of Hansel and Gretel!  Not truly understanding the mechanisms by which we may be tracked, we don’t know how to protect ourselves and generally elect to avoid the woods altogether. 

And we like words.  Orwell, Kesey and Kerouac.  I mean, #csusmedu just doesn’t trip lightly off the tongue.  We put a lot of energy into mastering our version of English and we don’t want to give it up.  We can become functionally literate in this other language if we have to, but we won’t bother to become fluent if we don’t see any joy in it. 

So I’ll visit from time to time, maybe even work there.  But at the end of the day I’ll go home to my books.  But really, what’s the problem?  “Old people just don’t understand this stuff.”  The young may build their homes on the foundation left them by their parents, but do they really want grandpa hanging around all day  yapping about his prostate and how he had to walk 12 miles through the snow to school uphill both ways?  I don’t think so.  Visits are good.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #6  CREATE a Personal Learning Network

So far my PLN consists of .......me & Carl.

No, not really.  I just get a little punchy after a few hours at the laptop.

My primary communications with my ITU team, my OSL, CT and US, still happen by way of e-mail, as does much of my communication with the professors in the program.

I can communicate with everybody in the program via our various blogs, and there are a few still who use the evening cohort Facebook page.  I've got diigo and twitter accounts happening, tweetdeck installed, and am slowly but surely learning how to use them.

It would be great to expand my digital network out beyond the world of CSUSM.  I've a lot of friends & acquaintances who are teachers and have been valuable sources of advice and support in the flesh & blood world, but I don't communicate with many of those folks digitally very often.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #5  IDENTIFY  a theme for your ITU and share ideas and a draft for a Cover Sheet with your ITU team

Here's a draft cover sheet.  The quality may be poor - 'cuz it's a screen shot of a word document, but you'll get the idea.

I'd say at the very least it needs a more reedable font.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #4:  IDENTIFY what tasks you would be well skilled at leading and contributing to for the ITU assignment.

These are all things that we are developing the skills to do as teachers, but there are some that I am more inclined to do well, by interest and inclination, than others:

Task 4 – develop a statement of enduring understanding

Task 5 – develop a schedule of activities

Task 6 – define objectives & assessments with rubrics

Task 8 – assemble, test & assign  technological tools for the unit

Task 12 – Student Descriptions, particularly the revisions thereof based on additional information and nteraction.

Task 20 – poster presentation, building a poster and doing the actual dog & pony show

Tasks 13-17 – I would assume that each member of the team will want to take the lead on one or two of the target students  as regards strategies for differentiation and assessment. 

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #3 Make a list or highlight models & resources (from Roberts & Kellough) to share with our ITU team.

I'll be keeping my highlighted copy of Roberts & Kellough in my binder indefinitely in case I need it.  Meanwhile, when next I meat with my team (i.e. Carl) we'll be spending some time on what models & resources we wan to use.  I'd love it if we could do a lab toghether - the block system makes that a possibility.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #2:  COMPLETE Activities 7.1 and 7.2 from Baldwin & Keating:

7.1  Since we’re limited in the amount of time we have to work with our local districts or our cooperating teachers and students before we start planning our ITU, it seems we have to focus on the standards and the textbooks for our direct ion.  I think it would also be good to find something really relevant to the students’ lives, so they can see how our disciplines affect them and how they could participate in them as adults.

Our team is composed of 2 members; one teaching Physics and one teaching Earth Science, which doesn’t allow for a very broad range of interdisciplinary themes.  We’ve settled on hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, as a theme.  It has plenty of Physics, plenty of earth science, is topical and its relationship to other disciplines is elementary enough that we might be able to design some lessons around history or economics to supplement our science backgrounds.

7.2  Some Essential Questions for our theme:

How is it possible to apply enough force to fracture a rock formation miles underground?  Which speaks to how fracking works and leads into the subjects of hydraulics, i.e. pressure, Pascal’s principal, how Pascal’s principle reflects the definition of work and how hydraulic systems relate to simple machines.

How does the greenhouse effect work?  Which speaks to the ecological implications of finding abundant new sources of cheap fossil fuels and leads into a whole range of Physics, possibly more than we can really cover.  Quantum theory, optics, the nature of light, the Bohr model of the atom are all needed to understand scattering and the greenhouse effect.  Or, we could leave it at “The Greenhouse Effect”.  But I’d rather cover the details.

Where does electricity come from?  Which addresses both ecological and political/economic implications of  fracking by way of the fact that natural gas is the currently preferred fuel fior electrical generating plants.  A complete coverage of the question brings in thermodynamics and E&M as well as nuclear physics and solid state physics, if one goes so far as to cover nuclear and solar energy.

EDSS 541

Reading Reflection #1: IDENTIFY research-based instructional strategies you can use in you ITU. 

This series of articles seeks to identify specific cultural affects of specific American minority groups, and provide some insight into strategies that might be appropriate for those different groups.  As we learned in the multicultural environment of EDSS 555, differentiation based on culture or language is often just good teaching, and can easily apply to all the students in our classes.

In this response, I tried to use the reading as a basis to come up with a few specific ideas for activities that align to the general strategies discussed:

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for African Americans:

In general, and applicable to all students, we should always practice unconditional neutrality, and we should practice “high help, high perfectionism” whenever we possibly can. 

This particular article bemoans the gap in reading skill, and mentions the value of having students read aloud.  What carrot, however, could be there to motivate students to follow such an instruction?  I think we could recommend a children’s book, preferably relevant to the topic at hand, and assign them to read aloud to their little brother or sister (assuming they have one) every night.  Explain to them the importance of reading to children for the child’s development and motivate them through their feelings of love and responsibility to their sibling.

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for Asian/Pacific Islanders:

I hope I may be forgiven for excess judgementalism, but this article as a whole seems to me to represent racism at its most pernicious – it lumps students from southeast Asia, Pacific Islanders, students from the Pacific rim & students from other Asian countries together based on superficial similarity, with only passing reference to the vast cultural differences between the different groups.  Thus for these students, really for ALL students, active inquiry and curiosity regarding the application of their cultural affect to their current learning is important.  I would like to propose a classroom activity:  Have each student write a brief description of their family engaging in a discussion about some aspect of the ITU topic.  Who, if anyone, would lead the discussion?  Do individuals interrupt each other or not?  Does everyone have an opinion?  Things like that.  Then arrange them in groups to compare their descriptions.  After some time, have them, also in the groups, consider how their families’ style of discussion would be perceived if it took place within their classroom, i.e. “How would that go over in Mr. Wrench’s class?”  If time allows, they could also think about how those discussions would be perceived in the classrooms of some of their other teachers.  Such an exercise, I think, would tend to level the playing field; let the students realize that their way of interacting is not the only one, and let them realize that their teachers (i.e. me)  have some prejudices of their own which effect the way they (I) interact with their (my) students

From Focus on Closing the Achievement Gap for Latino/as:

Once again, these strategies are valuable for all students, but particularly very collaboration-oriented and very practical students.  First, real-world application; something we always strive to highlight.  And second, group problem-solving and peer tutoring are always valuable, but it is always very important to make sure none of the group members drift into a habitually passive role.   

EDSS531
What is it like for students to move through classes in a day at our school?

It’s gotta be a surreal experience.  7:30 ‘til 2:28 (2:28, exactly) every minute is scheduled, every move is programmed.  Step into the English class, put on your English class persona, follow the English class rules and protocols.  Step into Math class, put on your Math class persona, follow the Math class rules and protocols.  And on through the day.  Six periods, six little universes with a sort of a no-man’s land in between. 

There are a lot of great teachers there.  A lot of those little universes are really wonderful places, but many are pretty horrible, too, and none of them bear any real resemblance to the world of work, family, community and life that these people will be returning to come June.  It does make one wonder.