Blog @ ScienceGeek.netMy personal views on teaching, strategies, methods, resources and motivations. These are strictly my own opinions, and don’t represent the opinions of my school or district. It is my goal to keep this positive and solution oriented. Comments are always closed. This is not intended to be a forum for debate.
Well, it is the start of the school year. If I weren’t certain of that fact, today’s “Convocation” cleared up any doubt. Now that the recession is over, the district can once again afford to motivate us by bringing in someone to give us a kick start. Today’s speaker was very good. Set aside that […]
I recently stumbled across a Google+ feed from a law firm handling a lawsuit for a young man injured in an accident in a New York classroom. A teacher was demonstrating the visible colors produced when various metal cations are excited by heating. In the case cited, the teacher was using methanol ignited in Petri […]
Background For some fifteen years, California has had a science framework built around reasonably well-defined sets of standards. In the case of chemistry, these standards were quite well defined. For many science teachers, it has been a genuine pleasure to teach to these standards. During these past fifteen years I have adopted a number of […]
Twelve years ago, when I had been in this profession for sixteen years, I was asked to write a statement of my philosophy of teaching for a local teaching award program. I don’t think that I had looked at that document more than once in the time since then. Because this is the start of […]
I recently had the good fortune to discover for myself Public Laboratory (www.publiclaboratory.org) and one of their magnificent projects, Spectral Workbench (www.spectralworkbench.org). I was on a spin bike at the gym and read an article in the science column of Popular Mechanics in which the writer touted the resources and the do-it-yourself plans for building […]
When I was growing up, “Video in the Classroom” meant one of two things – a filmstrip or an educational film on the film projector. Anyone near my age remembers being put in charge of the filmstrip projector and advancing it on the “beep”. Every room in elementary school had students trained as “AV Monitors” […]
Every profession develops its own vocabulary, and new teachers quickly come to realize that education is no exception. I can remember even during my education classes at UCSB that there were several student teachers who delighted in this educational jargon. One student teacher in particular seemed incapable of completing a thought without trying to impress […]
The Reality In a perfect world, all teachers would have the budget that is necessary to purchase ALL of the supplies that are needed for the day-to-day function of the classroom. Most teachers quickly realize that budgets only stretch so far, and that some of those supplies come out of pocket. For the record, the […]
A very insightful friend of mine once said to me, “Andy, bad teachers never burn out.” The great paradox of teaching (and other service professions) is that the practitioners will often give so much of themselves that they reach a point where they have nothing left to give. On many occasions, I’ve felt like the […]
About four or five years ago, each department at my school was asked to set goals for the new school year. One of the commitments that we were asked to make was to come up with ways that we could make the campus safer and friendlier for students. The commitment that the science department members […]
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