Tomorrow is the first day of school of my 8th year of teaching. I love teaching. I want to get better at teaching every year, and I wish other teachers felt that same way... many of them don't. Just like any teacher, I get frustrated with all of the foolishness - evaluation systems with maybe a million or two components (I still haven't figured it out), paperwork, students who get a little too feisty, malfunctioning fire alarms, uncooperative technology, more paperwork, professional development sessions that do all but develop me, and all the other things that get thrown at us everyday... but I do love it. It's tiring. It's overwhelming. It's the best job in the world.
At the end of last year, I gave students in my astronomy class surveys just to see how they felt about my class after 180 days of it. I had given an informal survey the year before, but this one had scales and more specific questions. (I didn't give a survey to my other class... because, well, I already knew I did a pretty awful job when it came to that. Not "awful" by normal standards... but awful by my way too high standards for myself. The kids learned (so it really was a success), but I did not love it, and that means they could have learned more. To me, that's awful.)
As far as my surveys, they were good, as usual. Many of the kids give comments along the lines of "I can tell you love what you do!" and "this was my favorite class!" but then when I look at the numbers, they tell a bit of a different story.
The first thing I noticed was there was a HUGE difference from class to class. Apparently my 4th period thought I was way to stressed and high strung. I'm always stress and high strung, but I guess during 4th period I didn't hide it so well... not sure why. Also, I asked about the favorite activity of the year and the least favorite activity of the year, and there were some that appeared in both places! Most noticeably, the solar system planet walk around campus - I think it was just a personality thing, because the kids that listed it as their least favorite said so because it was "too hot". :) One thing that was interesting to me was answers to the question "If you could give me advice on how to change the class for next year, what would it be?" I got a lot of "don't change anything!" (which I love, of course) but I also got a lot of "more hands on!" On it's own, this isn't too surprising, because they're kids and they like playing with things. I do a BUNCH of hands on things though... but really, I could always add more. But taken into consideration with another question - "Which unit was your favorite?" the data became a bit confusing. I did WAY more hands on things in the first 4 units - Sky, Sun-Earth-Moon, Solar System, and Light but only 28 students listed one of those as their favorite (49 listed one of them as their least favorite). On the other hand, 50 students listed units 5 and 6 - stars and the universe as their favorites, but those have way less hands on activities. I hate to admit this, but I lecture quite a bit when it comes to the universe. Maybe it's just they don't know what else to say for the question, so more hands on is a generic answer for them at this point? Or maybe they would just like the last two units anyway because the topics are just so different? Either way, I'm going to keep a close on the students this year when they're doing hands on things to see what exactly it is that they feel is the most beneficial part of them... other than to them it means they're not reading or taking notes.
Here's what really matters, some data:
(The thing that made me smile) out of the approximately 70 students surveyed, 100% of them agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I learned a lot in this class."
36 students agreed or strongly agreed "we had more thinking to do in this class than in my other classes" 31 were neutral, only 11 disagreed.
22 students agreed or strongly agreed "we had more work to do in this class than in my other classes" 20 were neutral, and 30 disagreed.
And the 4 places I'm really going to try to improve this year:
"I felt challenged by this class"
Strongly Disagree, Disagree answers: 11 (adding neutral answers: 33)
"We had more thinking to do in this class than in my other classes"
Strongly Disagree, Disagree answers: 11 (adding neutral answers: 42)
"I enjoyed using Moodle"
Strongly Disagree, Disagree answers: 23 (adding neutral answers: 41)
"This class connected to my life"
Strongly Disagree, Disagree answers: 6 (adding neutral answers: 50)
As far as the data goes, I'm not really sure how to take "neutral" answers, because I'm not sure the students understand neutral. I think next year, that won't be an option and I'll broaden the scale a little.
So what does it all mean? Hopefully I can take this advice, the advice that matters most and do better this year. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Off to try to get some sleep tonight... the past 7 years I haven't slept at all the night before the first day of school, this year doesn't seem to be shaping up too different. :)
Tomorrow, the learning continues.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
NITARP- summer 2013
team "they might be giants" with curiosity :)
Our week started with our trip from Orlando to Phoenix to Burbank then to Pasadena. The girls and I had smooth travels, which I was very thankful for. Our first day took us around the building we'd be working in with the other NITARP team that was there, then to our room to start working on the 200 stars we "looked at" as a team. (When I say that, what I mean is that we went to the Kepler Exoplanet Archive website, typed in a star ID number, normalized a light curve, looked a periodogram, looked at another periodogram, made a phase curve, then phase binned that light curve.) Each of the 4 small teams of our one bigger team had 50 stars to look at, then we combined all of our work. The result? Graphs, graphs, everywhere!
That afternoon, our team headed to Mt. Wilson, which I knew about, but for some reason I didn't realize how much history was there. It was very very cool. Let's be honest, who doesn't love Hubble? (the man... and the telescope too).
outside the 100 inch telescope
inside the dome :)
sea level Florida girls at 5700 feet!
The next morning was our tour of JPL which, of course, was awesome. We got to see where spacecraft are assembled (one was in there too- http://smap.jpl.nasa.gov/) an indoor Mars yard, a cool museum with lots of my favorite solar system exploring robots (Cassini & Juno were there!!), and, typical for me, I spent what was probably too much money in the gift shop. Our tour guide also shared some really cool JPL history with us, most of which I didn't know and hope to learn more about soon!
I want one of these outfits :)
can you spot the martian?
We headed back to our graph wallpaper work room and got back to it. We had a bit of re-looking to do, but got a good bit of work done. The third day was our only full day to work which was a bit difficult after only working half the day the first two and the jet lag catching up to me, but we powered through. We realized that day we probably should have packed graphing calculators, as we became VERY familiar with the Stefan-Boltzmann law. By the end of the day, a new excel spread sheet, a few histograms and scatter plots latter... I think we found something. Maybe not exactly what we thought we would find in the first place, but definitely something. Science is so cool. I can't wait to share the feeling of working hard to solve problems to find (or maybe not find) an answer with my students this year. One of my favorite things about the week - other than the cool people and the nerd fun - was probably that 8 of our team of 13 were girls! Before heading back to Florida the next day, we had dinner with some friends and found a pretty cool antique shop where I scored some old Life magazines with Gemini 2 and Apollo 10 on the cover and one of my students found some cool old disneyland swag. Looking back, the trip was definitely better than I expected in every way - more fun, less stress (from a teacher point of view: it was my first time traveling (WAY) out of state with students and staying overnight somewhere with students), more learning... just awesome all around. If you want to see NITARP from a student point of view, check out http://sinesinthestars.tumblr.com/, the blog from one of my students :)
One of our fearless leaders summed up the experience in a pretty great way - "We know things about the Universe that no one else does..." - and even though it's cool, I can't wait for our next step... making our science poster and presenting it at the AAS in January. Until then...
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