Seasons

Learning about why the Earth has seasons has definitely thrown up some of my favourite student misconceptions. Last year, I had the student who earnestly tried to argue that seasons are caused because the sun goes round the Earth and it's closer in summer. This year, it was the student who said it was because the plants needed summer to grow and so seasons started because of the plants.

Personally, I have a special love for the equinoxes and solstices, and celebrate them each year. As a teacher, I have a few odd seasons in my head too. For example, late September to November is Red Pen Season, when I eat, sleep and breathe revision and marking. It's not my favourite season.

I know that some of my students have this sort of headcanon for thinking about the world in a way that is not strictly scientific or 'true' for some values of true. It's real or sensible to them in their own perspective, though, and I think that's a valuable thing to have. I think it leads to the sort of quirky creativity that helps people get their head around things, and it's not something we should try to stamp out.

So I guess I am thinking about where to draw the line between completely, utterly, bizarrely wrong beliefs and eccentric and personal interpretations of the world around you. I think, for me, it's the recognition that my personal interpretation is just that, and not mistaking it for a universal perspective.

Today, a compliment

Well, I took it to be one, anyway. A student asked me if they have Daylight Savings Time in the Cook Islands. I kind of blinked and asked why I would be expected to know that, and he replied that I am a fount of knowledge and so it was worth a try. That was nice.

So then, I asked why he didn't just google it to find out. His answer? He's not very good at searching. He doesn't know what keywords to use, and, even if he takes a guess at the keywords, he doesn't know how to combine them or how to sift through the results he gets in order to find something that will be useful to him.

In this particular instance, he was trying to find the time in the Cook Islands based on a time in Aotearoa New Zealand, given one time when NZ is not in DST and one when it is. First of all, I explained how time zones worked and we figured out in our heads how the times related. Then, we confirmed it with a handy time zone converter.

I found one online.

This student had no idea how I found it.

So I tried to explain boolean searching. At this point, he started to have that hunted look that people get when they really, really wish I'd just shut up and let them continue on having no idea how to fix things. I am pretty much immune to that look now.

I started with some venn diagrams, as in this picture below:


He kind of got the point of this. It's using simple English conjunctions to connect search terms in a way that makes them form a combination. That's all good. But that doesn't really make much difference with the first problem - that of the lack of sensible keywords in the first place.

In the Daylight Savings question, I put in daylight savings Cook Islands as my keywords. I didn't even bother with boolean connectors, because I was pretty sure I would find a useful link on the first page. I asked the student what he would have put in, and he shrugged. He didn't even really know where to start with it.

I think I will, next week even, start working on this with my younger students. I am inspired, because, even though being the fount of knowledge is good, I'd rather be the facilitator of how to do it yourself.

I like to think I am a happy person

It is one of my more cherished delusions, for realz. But there are things that make me happy and I like to share with people. However, this week, I have been reminded that 'people' and 'students' can be a mutually exclusive group, for values of 'people' which mean 'people who will appreciate the happymaking of the things'.

Here are some examples.



My students said "why would anyone go to the trouble of making food look that good when all you're going to do is eat it?". My students are philistines.

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My students said "What? Why is this even funny? What is this song? Why are you laughing?" My students are young and do not recognise the juxtaposition.

Self-reflection and students

Well, I wanted to write a blog post, so I made the mistake of asking my students what it should be about. I don't think I've ever seen such faces - there was an underlying incomprehension about what the hell I was asking them for, true, but on top of that there were a myriad of shades of incomprehension about why I would want a blog in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder that too.

But today, I have some very specific things to reflect on. Like the report I have to write about how the Science Department is going in implementing the new NZ Curriculum into our schemes. Perhaps it would be more proper - and accurate, in our case - to say that we are re-writing our schemes in light of the directives of the new curriculum.

There are many parts I like about the curriculum. I like that it explicitly states that a positive sense of identity is a key learning outcome. I like that it expects students to learn how to be international citizens and informed decision makers. I love how it values diversity and social justice.

The challenge now is how to implement all of this into a comprehensive scheme of work that leads into the highly content-driven NCEA environment, where students must absorb and regurgitate knowledge. But it's a challenge I am excited by.

One thing that annoys me is to hear teachers say "but we already do this!".

Well, sorry, no. Mostly, you don't. You drive content. Sticking a new front end onto your existing schemes is not implementing the new curriculum. That's why we're thinking big and making big changes.

More ways to use flickr

I should have done this ages ago... too many things to do, and the sparkly image stuff kinda gets shoved to the bottom. Nevermind.

For parent-teacher conferences (or report day, as the principal likes to call it), I made name plates for the doors.
Last year we had budget sheets of A4 with our names written on them with a vivid, but I think these are much nicer, more personal, and look classy without taking much time to do.

I used flickr, again, to find the images. This time I got my Y13 physics class to help me (they were totally responsible for the one of Basil Brush doing an experiment while wearing 3D glasses, no matter what they may say to disclaim). I rather like the one we chose for me - apparently, I can be rather shark-like.

Then I used the 'motivator' tool over at Big Huge Lab's Flickr Toys site.

Easy. So, so easy, and the end result was something classy and a little bit nicer than a sheet of A4 with a name scrawled on it.

Another tool at Big Huge Labs makes a calendar for your desktop from a flickr image. Naturally, I made use of that, and I currently have Ian Crawford (from The Cab) gracing my desktop with a nifty little calendar in the bottom right corner. Of course, one of my colleagues saw it and asked if it was Chrissie Hynde.

Music in class - treats and rewards

I use music as a reward in some of my classes. If the class is working well, I'll hook iTunes into the stereo and off we go. We can mostly agree on reggae, but the kids get weirded out by the more avant garde end of my collection of dub and electronica, and their tolerance for emo music is low at the best of times.

So sometimes I let the kids hook their iPods into the stereo instead. Sometimes that can be really rewarding, but sometimes it makes my skin crawl. Who would have guessed that my Year 9s have a thing for Mama Mia? OMG, Belinda Carlisle just came on. I have to go vomit discreetly into a rubbish bin now.

*meeps* Generation Y, web 2.0 and EPIC FAIL

At my school, the principal is really invested in teachers working to understand and cater for generation Y students. One of the ways we do this is through watching/reading/listening to research into generational change and some of the points of misunderstanding. One of the best I've seen was this presentation to the Australian Secondary Principals Association conference in 2008.

I love thinking about generational change and the huge cultural shifts that we see taking place as young people grow up and make sense of a world that is completely different - socially, economically and politically, to the world that their parents and (most of) their teachers were shaped by.

As a young teacher myself, I sometimes find myself acting as a translator to other teachers. Oddly, I also find myself acting as a translator to my students. Many of my students are not as computer savvy as a casual read of the literature would imply. A closer look at the literature reveals a more complex picture. I'll get into posting on that another time, when I can really engage with it.

But what triggered this today? It turns out that none of the students in this particular class had ever used or heard of *meeps* - or, for that matter, *hugs you* or any of the other common actions, encased in asterixes, that indicate an action in the middle of exposition. I use them all the time in blog posts and IM conversations and it really had not occurred to me that my students might not know what it means.

I would facepalm, but I don't think they'd get that either.

Nevermind.

*facepalms anyway*