Mutually assured construction

Quite a cool demonstration today.  Four of us sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by our classmates.  We sat two at a table with our backs to the other pair and were handed 8 pieces of a 16 piece puzzle.  We were allowed to talk, but not permitted to look at the other team's pieces.  As a group of four, we worked to assemble the puzzle, half on each table.

The obvious message was one of working together and communication.  In order to fully complete the task, we had to develop an easy way about talking through the process.  We worked for a minute without communicating, getting a general "idea" before starting to discuss strategies as a whole.

I thought of a few other variations on the rules/parameters.  As it was, we knew it was a 4 x 4 grid, we were told we had 8 of the 16 pieces and we were permitted to talk.  A few other ideas:

1. Suppose that we were only allowed to use 25 words.  We'd have to figure out how to communicate with a limited vocabulary and carefully think about exactly what we're describing.  Take this idea one step further - suppose we had a limit of 25 words, but were NOT given a list.  Every word we spoke would be recorded and permitted.  Once we passed 25 (or whatever magic number was decided), we would have to limit ourselves strictly to those.  This would force an even more careful attention to our choices and being succinct.
2. I also like the idea of printing the other team's pieces on the back of ours.  This would make it ridiculously tough as we'd first have to discover who was paying attention to which pieces.  I think this might be fun for a challenge for grad students, but would likely be far out of the reach of middle schoolers.
3. The picture we had used exactly 16, non-repeating pieces.  Each team had 8 of them.  Suppose that 2 or 3 were repeated and there were ones missing.  How would we resolve these issues?  I think this would work well as a parallel to the scientific process.  Frequently, you are forced to proceed with incomplete information and make inferences about what's missing.

Regardless of what you do, I thought this was an intriguing way to get us working together.
 

Corrupting America's Youth...with SCIENCE!

When we had a media specialist visit our class, she presented information about the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octobpus.  The website is pretty convincing.  If you were not skeptical enough, you run the risk of donating money to save this poor creature from certain extinction.  The lesson is obvious - pay attention. 

I was reminded of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World.  In it, he explores many topics, ranging widely from crop circles, alien abductions, faulty scientific conclusions and fairy tales.  One specific element resonated with me.  In it, he presents his famous Fine Art of Baloney Detection.  In it, he presents a set of tools students (and non-students) can use to assess the validity of claims.  If you suspect something isn't right, chances are...there's something odd going on.  I highly recommend the book to anyone.

It is my stated mission of teaching career to corrupt America's youth with science.  By this, I mean to equip students with the tools to think critically about things they're told and to come to informed decisions.

Also...I'm obsessed with Carl Sagan...

Technology!

Every time I write the word "technology", I imagine shouting it out with a strong emphasis on the even syllables...I'm sure there's a linguistic word for that, but I'm completely blanking on it.  Also, I do the same with "SCIENCE!"...image every time you say the word "science", you must make a face, raise your fist and should "SCIENCE!".  I think that might be a dangerous prescient to set in a classroom.

Regardless...about technology...specifically in the classroom.

There's a tendency for us to all rush towards that "new thing".  Teachers feel compelled to "stay ahead of the curve" with new and exciting devices and apps.  We have to understand the cutting edge and what's en vogue.  To connect with students, do we really have to know the difference between pinterest and twitter?  Are these things kids even use?

Considering the wealth of apps and devices available, I have been quite reticent to join the bandwagon.  I recognize that the future is coming, bringing with it all sorts of new advances.  I recognize that for students to excel in society, they will increasingly need to know how to incorporate technology into their lives.  I recognize this all...

A curious thought routinely finds its way into my head.  We are the last generation that can remember life without a cell phone or a computer.  We didn't have a computer in the household until the middle of high school. I didn't even get a cell phone until I moved out of the dorms junior year.  Yet now, I'm sitting here at home writing a message that will be available to whoever wants it and can get private messages on a small box in my pocket.. 

My question: what happens when we forget?  What happens when we become so enthralled with our "technology" that we fail to look out the window and appreciate the rain?  What happens when we no longer stop to investigate how swarms of ants will fight over a particular territory of sidewalk?  What happens when we no longer remember what it feels like to be barefoot in a field of grass?

With each new "device" and "advancement", we run the risk of alienating something sacred.  As I move into a classroom, I will reluctantly adopt the technology, but more importantly, I want to instill the belief that the natural world, sans computer, sans cell phone...is worth slowing down and simply marveling at.  Take a moment.  Turn off your phone, ignore your e-mail and feel the wet sand between your toes.

A brief, brief post on other blogs

I've officially looked at one other teacher's blog tonight...so I doubt I have a valid sample size.  I found this one and immediately found a student video that features machine guns and missiles as two theories for the extinction of dinosaurs:

10 Reasons the Dinosaurs are Extinct 

Needless today, I think I've found inspiration for having students do videos and for having a public forum to post creative student work.

Biology, the game of Life

Recently, we've been discussing the use of game and gaming in a classroom setting.  I've never been a huge fan of video games, but I remember fondly the days of Number and Word Munchers.  We'd spend our "free time" in class learning sight words and multiplication tables.  For history, we'd routinely play Oregon Trail and "learn" all about the westward migration.  Many tragic days, we found that our ox had died, Timmy had lost a leg or somebody got some random disease.  We rolled the dice to see if we'd successfully ford a river.  In math, we even went so far as programing simple games along the lines of Snake and Rodent's Revenge.  Each game taught us simple problem solving skills, mathematical formulas, historical "lessons", homework avoidance techniques and many other important life skills.  On the other hand, all utility aside, what lessons have been dumbed down to scientifically inaccurate and when does that matter?

Today, I seem to have forgotten this element of childhood.  What games now would work?  What would entice students now?  I recently attempted to play a game called Caduceus.  The premise, I'll admit, was pretty cool.  You essentially start out as a student at an academy and are asked to go to some high council to help solve a pressing problem...never mind why.  You are tasked with analyzing phlegm slides for a dangerous contagion.   While slugging your way through endless samples, you cut your finger and you have a Eureka! moment and decide that the problem must be in the blood.  This is where the game actually begins...as do the problems with it.  You are asked to locate the "unique" cells in a slide in order to determine which one(s) is/are responsible.  While teaching kids to analyze evidence for minute details is useful, no diseases are going to be "unique".  I felt this task not only boring, but horrible inaccurate for processes.  Why not have students find the most common?  After about 10 minutes of clicking matches, I "won" and was then taken to a page where I'd have to start an account.

Now, I propose another game that might be fun in the classroom.  Laws of physics seem to hold (save for a few...which are described as "advances in technology") and your only task is to solve the puzzle.  Portal has become one of my favorite games.  You must go through a series of strategic challenges to come to an answer.  There are no other characters and only a few minor gaps in scientific accuracy (save for the whole...in the future thing).

I think there is a future for gaming in school because of the simple fact that kids love games.  If you can find ones that are 1) fun, 2) challenging and 3) accurate, then you're set.  The problems begin when you're lacking in any of these categories.

Pinterest

In our technology class, each of us were given a website devoted to organizing an aspect of our "online life".  The categories, broadly speaking, were bookmarking tools, note taking tools and curation tools.  We are presenting a 20-minute synopsis of the tool to small groups soon in class.  As an outside project, we were asked to reflect here about the process.  My website: Pinterest.  Pinterest is a website generally devoted sharing ideas and thoughts with other people.  Essentially, it allows you to "pin" photos and websites to a virtual corkboard and share these thoughts with other people.

In general, I like the idea.  Sharing recipes or directions for science activities would be a fantastic use of this website.  Additionally, if you really want to find photos of classic "mad scientists", you're likely to find legions.  Unfortunately, like many other social networking sites, I will have a hard time diving in.  The process of simplifying the website for my colleagues has been frustrating, to say the least...but it has also been instructive.  This blog posts is likely to come across as a bit complaining...fair warning.

My first issues with the site came when signing up.  It allows you to immediately link your account to Facebook (convenient, I will agree) or you can create it with an e-mail.  A personal pet peeve is when it requires information like gender.  While signing up, you must specify "male" or "female".  Though you can change this later to "unspecified", the program still has this information.  The cynic in me says they will target market based on this.

Once you sign up, it takes you through the navigation tour.  Albeit possibly useful, I don't generally like these tours and would much rather figure it out on my own later.  Nowhere could I find a way to skip the tour.  There is no option to just click out of it.  Additionally, at the end of the "tour", it invites you to "follow" some "recommended pages".  Specifically, it invites you to follow five.  More specifically, you CANNOT advance through the tour without following five.  About 20 minutes later, I did finally figure out how to "unfollow" these boards...but again, Pinterest now has those initial selections.

Your profile is automatically set to be searchable by web engines, though you can change this through settings.  Also, you automatically are set to receive e-mail updates from every possible update...but again, you can opt out.  I think my biggest worry here applies to almost every other website...as a consumer, I would rather "Opt In" (default is opted out) than have to "Opt Out" of things I don't even know about.

Although I am unlikely to use Pinterest and all of my frustrations aside, I do potentially see the utility of it.  As I mentioned above, it's a great resource for curating information and ideas to one place.  It allows for large amounts of related information to be gathered together in one place and it gives people a space to create content and share it with the world.

Failure - a rant

What does it mean to succeed?  A brief, although none-too-comprehensive search for definitions gives us a succinct, "to attain a desired object or end", as if success is entirely based on an expected outcome.  Everything is standardized and ranked as your "level of success" or "percentile".  This fetish with ranking creates an even narrower sense of success as being better than x percentage of the population.  Anything less is unacceptable.  Anything less is a failure.

In our classes, we have been reading a lot about success, smartness, praise and character.  In the first chapter of Nurture Shock, the authors discuss smartness, praise and motivation.  Constant validation of one's smartness results in a decreased readiness to take risks.  The "cost of failure" is too much, so it's better to simply not try.  This book has been resonating with me.

I come from a family of perfectionists.  When you ask my mother if she ever got B's in school, her response is something along the lines of "no, why would I?".  The truth behind the statement is that she worked tremendously hard at getting A's because she valued it, but the implicit understanding is that only the best is good enough.  From our father, my siblings and I adopted a deeply emotional response to the world.  Anything that was not "perfect" was the worst possible failure.  As a result, we've all struggled with motivation and ambition.  If you're not going to be successful, why bother?  I have mellowed out on this over the years, but it is still a struggle.

After undergrad, I started working with children informally at a science museum in town.  One of the biggest frustrations I experienced on a daily life came not from the kids, but from the parents.  We set up 10 or 20 stations of fun, exciting, interactive activities designed to enthrall students and give them a sense that science is for them.  Nothing was graded or turned in (save for the few exceptions where the school handed out worksheets).  These programs were meant to encourage parental involvement in their students' learning and create that "spark" in a low-pressure environment.  While working a particular station, I frequently asked if a kid knew something.  Often, I would see their mother or father lean over and whisper something in their ear.  Dutifully, the answer would be quoted and the parents beamed.  They were so obsessed with their kids being right.

Technology furthers this obsession.  In our technology class today, one of the conversations was essentially about potential dangers of computers in the classroom.  A fellow student pointed out that in the middle of a discussion or debate in a bar, you can simply pull out your smartphone and suddenly you have the answer.  The conversation continued along these lines for a while.  In the classroom, it is now possible to simply "google" the answer.  We are so obsessed with having the right answer that, according to another intern, we are ashamed to admit that we might not know the capital of St. Lucia (Castries, I checked) or which power is currently controlling which island.

Why are we so obsessed with teaching our children that failure is the ultimate sin?  We need to change this narrative.  Shouldn't our children be learning how to deal with failure rather than simply avoid it?  This obsession with being right and having "the" answer leads us down dangerous paths.  When we never learn how to accept that we can't answer a question, we eventually stop asking and when we stop asking, we take one further step from humanity.

Advice for the Future

"With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions.  To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities..." - John Dewey (http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm)

Gendered language set aside, this quote would almost be a radical position by today's standards.  John Dewey wrote the above quote in 1897...for those not quick with math, that would be 116 years ago.  For perspective, the oldest living person currently alive is a Japanese woman at 115 years, 122 days.  In 1897, classrooms were not designed to focus on the individual.  Chairs were bolted to the floor and the teacher stood in the front and "gave" the class, not the individuals, information.  In many classrooms, the only thing that has changed today is the bolts.

Dewey understood that the world was changing rapidly.  In the ultra modern society of the early 1900s, Dewey noted, "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now."  To adequately prepare students for the future, we have to assume that the future is not a static thing and we need to know the perspective each individual brings with them.

Reading about Dewey, I'm struck with how many of his ideas of teaching methods resonate with me.  In the science classroom, real knowledge is less about learning what has been done and more about what remains to be discovered.  While the background knowledge is important (one doesn't want to start from nothing), we should be training future-looking citizens aiming to anticipate the world to come.

A New Adventure Begins

A new adventure has begun.  Having spent seven years free from school and nine months free from work, I have returned to pursue a graduate program in secondary education at the University of Michigan.  This blog will be about all things SCIENCE and all things EDUCATION.

As a first entry, two and half weeks into the program, fellow teaching interns and I were asked to reflect on our technology-in-the-classroom course.  We were tasked with imagining our "ideal classroom" and drawing a simple picture.  Initially, I wanted to do away with all walls and focus strictly on an outdoor setting.  Next, I got an image of those three sided cabins I'd visited when I was a kid.  I struck me that this would be a fascinating idea for a classroom (considering that having an indoor place for storage and escape from bad weather might be desirable).  My design:

For those who can't quite appreciate the beauty of this representation, I sympathize.  Drawing hasn't always been my strongest trait and pen marks bleeding through from the other side don't do much for photo composition...but still...the idea's there.  Essentially, it's a three-walled room, open to forest/prairie/swamp...etc...  There are some desks, some scopes, some storage...but the important part is the outside.  Students should feel that the outside classroom is equally, if not more, important than inside.

The next day, I asked myself WHY these image came into my head as the classroom.  I thought back on all the positive outdoor experiences that have led me to where I am.  When I was young, my family took me hiking. Later, I joined the boy scouts and camped almost every month.  In high school, I took part in several independent study classes which had a heavy field-focus.  In undergrad, I spent two summers at the BioStation.  I have spent countless nights camping outside, and I still don't know even the surface of what there is to even experience.  My senior year, I took a poetry course where we work-shopped with 5th graders from two local schools.  Each week, we spent one day outside, searching for inspiration in nature and jotting down notes and another working together on poetry.

This struck me as a great model for a school.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a school where all the classrooms are open to getting us back in touch with that ethereal thing known as nature?

To ponder the value of connection with the natural world, I end this post with a photo from Lake Superior...mostly because I had it and really like the big lake...