The New Science Teacher

Weather can be pretty boring in California, but atmosphere, climate, and weather are what my 6th grade students are studying right now.   I do feel the pressure to get them to DOK 3 and 4  but it seems most of my students never even noticed that the hills to the west are covered in thick redwood forests while the hills to the east are are covered with brown grass.  Nevertheless, I have to get them thinking about what climate patterns are responsible for this di-chromatic arrangement of plant life, and beyond that, have them predict what plant species live in other parts of the world based on the climates of those places. . So much of my time is spent on just getting my students to DOK1. Yes, on my classroom walls are giant posters my students made that say things such as: "A=B, B=C, therefore A=C" "What is the physical evidence?" "What is the energy doing?" "If two claims negate each other it is possible that both are false, but one ...

I began this blog for another course (MAT670, I think) but am now updating it for MAT671. I am about to be fifty years old and I am embarking on a new career.  in the past I have been a soldier, a bookkeeper, an advertising executive, a paralegal, and a real estate investor.  For the last two years I have been working as a substitute teacher. My education has kind of been all over the place.  I was homeschooled until I joined the U.S. Army at age 17.  They trained me to be a chaplain assistant, a personnel clerk, and a combat lifesaver (kind like a low level medic.  All it really meant was that I could start IVs, treat for shock, and give morphine).  The army also sent me to The Air Assault School . About a year before I got out of the Army I took a class in sociology at Austin Peay State University and discovered that I enjoyed academics, so when I was discharged from the army and moved to California I started taking classes at De Anza College....

I just finished all the reading and course work for National University's course MAT670 Theory Best Practice Teaching.  Like all the courses at National University there is so much information given that it is hard to digest in the amount of time (four weeks) allocated.  But this course offered me something I was able to use the very same week in my science classroom, and if that is all I got out of the course I would count it as money well spent.  I'm talking about this video by Doug Fisher .  It was so useful to me that I consider it the most useful thing I read or heard or saw during the whole course. About 17 minutes into the video Doug Fisher, a professor at San Diego State University started talking about helping students read texts that contain unfamiliar vocabulary.  Well, that's all I do in my science class.  The vocabulary I make my students read is full of scientific jargon most of them do not hear outside my class.  His advice that teacher...

An over-arching theme in the science curriculum my school is developing is the question: "What is the energy doing?"  So, when I was thinking about the water-cycle unit I thought, "Hmm... the sun is driving this but I don't want to waste all the time involved in marching my students outside and setting up a lab in the outdoors to use the sun's radiation.  What can I do?"  I was talking to a colleague about this and he suggested using hot plates.  So, I went online to see if anyone else had ever done this and found this video that shows how to desalinate water with stuff you have in your own kitchen.  After watching the video decided to adapt this guys system to simulate the water cycle.  The bonus is that each student will be able to drink the water he will distill. Instead of using metal pans, like in the video, I am going to have my students use 1L cans (the cafeteria is setting them aside for me.).  The students will build their own desalination pl...

My 6th and 7th grade science classes are intensely hands-on, with new labs every week (the tomato & ethylene experiment is the favorite so far.  Deducing mass from volume was the least favorite.)  Nevertheless, I do have two scientific literacy projects planned for the semester.  I decided to include a literacy component after reading Feng and Wei (2010) who showed that even a little bit of reading in the sciences can improve outcomes. The first project is a word wall.  As I envision it, each student will be assigned one word, such as prokaryote or kinetic, and make a small poster with the correct spelling, definition, and etymology (I have been stressing the Greek and Latin roots of scientific vocabulary all semester) of the word.  The students will be given colored markers,  and a dictionary.  The words will be affixed to the walls in alphabetic order.  Each student will present his word to the class; explaining how it is used, the definitio...

Having read the descriptions of the four educational philosophies (Cohen, L. 1999)  I was, at first, equally attracted to Perennialism (Munoz, K. 2013) and Essentialism (Borst, T. 2014), but after reading more in depth about each of them I think I have decided that Perennialism is better than Essentialism, in so far as each was presented by Munoz and Borst. I have been a fan of Mortimer J. Adler for decades, having first read his book Six Great Ideas in 1991.  Later, I found out about his great books program at the University of Chicago when I became interested in the economics program there.  I read a lot of the books on that list though I never bought the whole set edited by Adler and his friend Robert Hutchins. A few years after that, with my own children I used many of the childrens books recommended by Adler; The Blue Fairy Book (Lang, 1965), Treasure Island (Stevenson, R. 1993), and The Three Musketeers (Dumas, 1993) became favorites of all my sons. ...