Reflections about teaching #6

#6 How do you incorporate diversity or moral education in a science/math classroom?

Eesh...the moral part is something that I firmly appreciate pretty much entirely avoiding.

Yes, there are areas where chemistry and morality can overlap, but those are areas that I tend to skirt. I tell the story of Fritz Haber developing chemical weapons for the German government during World War I and his wife eventually killing herself, not being able to live with her indirect involvement. I tell the story of Neils Bohr having to dissolve his Nobel Prize in aqua regia before the Nazi's took Copenhagen. I also relate very tangentially the decisions that had to be made by chemists/physicists in taking part in the Manhattan Project.

These are direct, dramatic examples where chemists have had to make choices of whether to continue with research or to turn away. (Well, the Bohr story isn't, but it's just freaking cool.) In each case, knowledge won out over possibly more moral choices. In the long run the philosophy of science says that the pursuit of knowledge is, of itself, the highest pursuit. Nothing else tops that, and how that knowledge is used is almost always of secondary concern.

I do discuss environmental concerns, and those are - to me - moral concerns. We discuss what should and shouldn't go down the drains and why. We discuss why we should or shouldn't pursue nuclear power. We discuss the greenhouse effect. Those seem natural connections to chemistry education for me.

Now, about diversity, I try to make connections to my students' backgrounds and interests. Sometimes that means mentioning how the topic connects to sports (what electrolytes are, for example), to beauty (soap making and hair straightening), to explosives (the reaction of nitroglycerine), to cars (why different fuels react differently), and to anything that I know interests them.

It also means pointing out that even though most of the scientists we study are white men there were many others involved in the discovery of some of our concepts - Nagaoka theorizing the existence of the atomic nucleus, Meitner and Curie helping discover elements and radioactivity, the research currently ongoing in India, Japan, China, and many other countries.

I don't do a lot of moral teaching, I don't think. Partially because I don't always feel comfortable doing it, and partially because it often feels forced to include it in chemistry.

Reflections about teaching #4

#4 How does teaching affect your view of the world?

Teaching seems to be one of the most inclusive views of the problems (and strengths) of our society that I can imagine.

Teachers see consistently that the things that lead to success in school - and that doesn't always mean success in life, I know - are outside the control of schools to a great and glorious degree. Success in schools come from a message at home that success in schools matter, and it's incredibly obvious which students have gotten that message for their lives.*

Teaching also allows for a view of some spectacular - and some pretty pathetic - parenting. We see parents who for all sorts of reasons are detriments to their children's education. We see parents who yell and scream at teachers, who demand that their children don't get the consequences that just might turn the student away from whatever misguided path they're on. We see parents who abuse and belittle their children. We see parents who ignore their children, abandoning their children to take care of younger brothers and sisters while the parent disappears for days on end. 

And, sadly, I don't have any idea how to fix those things.

People become the kinds of parents they saw far too often.

People have children when they're not in good situations to raise children - too young, too economically unstable, too little support in their system.

Far too many people have no idea how to parent, how to talk with their child instead of at their child, how to use the television in moderation and educationally instead of as a full-time babysitter, how to read to their child so that he or she comes to love reading.

Far too often there aren't easy ways out of the cycle of poor parenting because without education, without training, without assistance, the same mistakes are made - and all of that takes money, time, and desire to change...things that are often far too lacking.

Maybe what I have come to realize, how my view of the world has changed is that I understand that the problems are complicated and sadly not Gordian-ly so.

* I can't remember where I read this argument, but it's an interesting one. 

The upper class families aren't terribly worried about education because they have learned the lesson that they will succeed in life because their family and their friends have succeeded. They know that they'll get the education they need as a checkmark -  not as a route to success - no matter what they do.

The lowest socioeconomic class doesn't worry about education because it is simply another societal institution that is going to mistreat them, that is going to be used to deny them and their families a route to success. 

It's only the middle classes that see education as a route to future success, so it's only the middle class students who really value education.

I don't know that I believe in that theory fully, but it's something that has made me reconsider the effects of economic class on educational value. It may not be as linear as it is often made out to be.

Reflections about teaching: from Katie

Taking a break from the questions I had listed and answering something posed by Katie on my first post...

Is there a defining lesson that your students have taught you throughout your career that other careers may not get the opportunity to experience?

I think the lesson that I've learned that I don't know every other career gets to learn is that I had a wonderful childhood, and I owe my parents a phenomenal round of thanks for what they did for me.

I deal with a whole lot of wonderful young people day in and day out. I also work with a fair number of students for whom school isn't the first priority, and I understand that many of them aren't too worried about the chemistry that I'm teaching because they're worrying about what they're going to eat that night, about how they're going to write the lab report while working six hours after a full school day, how they're going to help out with the bills at home, which side of the family they're going to hang with this week, and a hundred other challenges that I didn't have to deal with when I was growing up.

I can't imagine that my friends in the labs at P&G or painting houses get to learn that nearly as well.

Reflections about teaching #3

#3 How do you make chemistry exciting to people that may not find it exciting?

Chemistry can be very boring, a series of disconnected facts stacked up, listed down and ready to be memorized to then be immediately forgotten. I'm certainly not in favor of turning chemistry into that kind of a class, though I'm thinking some of my less successful students might say chemistry is still far too much like that.

The chemistry that matters to most students - to most people, really - is the chemistry that explains their world, that connects to something they already knew or had seen. The student interested in fireworks might have an easier time understanding that the colors are produced by electrons gaining energy to move to higher energy levels then losing that energy as they return to ground state because they've seen the results of those transitions. The student who bakes might understand decomposition reactions better if he or she knows it's a decomposition reaction that powers some baking powders.

The secret to making chemistry exciting - or even understandable - is making the chemistry relateable. An atom, an energy level, an orbital, yttrium, double replacement reactions - none of them exist unless they connect to something in the student's life. Or, if they do exist, they'll exist as abstract ideas that will stick about as well as water to a superhydrophobic surface.

So, don't say 'catalysts speed up chemical reactions'...show a catalyst speeding up a reaction. Explain - or show - a catalytic convertor.

Connect to students...show applications...and blow something the heck up.

That's what makes chemistry exciting.

Reflections about teaching #2

#2 What is the hardest/easiest part of teaching?

The hardest part for me - and for a lot of teachers, I think - is the paperwork: grading papers, tracking data, filling out referrals, calling home, writing SLOs, sending feedback for IEPs, and every other form that's given to us by our central office or mandated by the state.

Keeping up with the paperwork is endless, daunting, worse with every passing year, and it makes for lots of long, long evenings and weeks when I spend the entire time trying to catch up. Every quiz, every lab report, every test has to be graded and returned quickly because there is invariably another assignment coming just a couple of days later that has to be graded, as well. It's daunting and never-ending.

The easiest is the joy of interacting with my students. The things that happen within the classroom, that I can't possibly predict - those are the easiest and most enjoyable parts of teaching for me. When I say 'get into groups and draw these reactions' or 'explain these reaction types to each other' and give my students a chance to talk to each other, to show me what they know, and to give a little of their personality - that's easy and enjoyable and fun.

Summer break isn't bad, either.

Reflections about teaching: #7 (adjusted)

From Smamy's comment on my original post...

7) What attribute is most important for teachers to have? (knowledge, patience, style of teaching, desire to be with kids, etc). I think I know what your answer might be, but that is based on a conversation from college....that took place from about 10pm to 3am one evening/morning. Good times.

Man, that is not a conversation that I remember. Admittedly, college was a great time for deep conversations, for trying to solve the world's problems (usually sober for me, not always that way for everybody) by talking through them, for thinking forward to how different the world would be if only we had better control of it, for bucking the system verbally in hopes of bucking the systems for real at a later date.

Back to the question at hand...

What's the most important attribute for a teacher to have?

I would like to say that it's a deep thematic knowledge of the teacher's subject because that might be my best attribute as a teacher, but subject knowledge isn't remotely the most important attribute.

There are so many attributes that are necessary to be a great teacher...

• empathy - the ability to understand and relate and put yourself into the shoes of your students' situations, struggles, and needs
• flexibility - willingness to let the best laid plans go when teachable moments appear and also to be able to take the entirely, thoroughly unexpected changes in stride and still manage to deliver quality instruction
• consistency - When students know what to expect, that there is no doubt - which doesn't always mean strictness, by the way - in what is expected of them, they can more easily succeed.
• clarity - This one's close to consistency in that the goals of giving instruction - both teaching instruction and simple in-class, do-what-I-say instruction - is to make sure you are understood. Students can be at their best when they aren't struggling to understand what's being said to them.
• vision - Some people are part-to-whole folks. They can plan individual days and somehow put them together into a unit, a plan, a cohesive whole. I'm not like that. I need to see the big picture - where are we going - so that I can plan down day by day and hopefully get us there.

As to which of those I would chose, I think I'll go with empathy. Everything else can come from that. If a teacher can understand what his or her students need, what their challenges are and what needs to be done to overcome them - not to be soft, not to be sympathetic because students (read: people) don't need things given to them, don't need to simply be pointed at the easiest path and set upon it - then that teacher can lead toward success.

I'm curious, Smamy, what answer did I give back from 515 Jennison a couple of decades ago?

Reflections about teaching: #1

(note for Smamy - I already had question #1 typed up and haven't had a chance to answer your questions yet. They'll start coming next week. I promise.)

#1 - What do you think your greatest asset is as a teacher?

This one's a little tough because I wasn't raised to toot my own horn but rather to even downplay any compliments given to me. I do think I'm a pretty good teacher - not perfect, certainly, not all the way down the long tail of the bell curve but at least a bit to the high side of average.

When I was first assigned to student teach with Pru Phillips at Crawfordsville High School (Go Athenians!), Pru sat me down and gave me an assignment. I was to list all of the important topics in chemistry - the big topics, chapter-level topics - and put them in an order that made sense to me.I took a few days to come up with a good list of topics and another day to figure out what order made sense to me. Pru looked at my list, asked a few questions about why this topic came before that one, how those topics were connected to each other. She then pulled out the order of chapters in her curriculum. With only a couple of minor reversals, my list and her list were identical. I think that helped convince Pru that I at least knew my material, something I would like to think her husband and one of my chemistry professors, Dr David Phillips, had also told her.

I am a chemistry major, having taken ten courses in chemistry at Wabash after two years of chemistry in high school, and I think I understand the subject very well. There are certainly details that I don't know quite as well as I might, but I understand how the topics fit together, why certain ones must be taught before certain other ones, how specific ideas must be learned so that others can be understood better later. I know which examples problems to pick so that they show the current topic but so that they also lead into the next topic.

There are probably things more important to a teacher, but in a subject like chemistry - where the knowledge can exist as a whole bunch of entirely disparate facts, I think it's important that the leader in the classroom is able to see where the ship is heading. 

Reflections about teaching

Last week one of my former students interviewed me for a college project. The assignment required her to interview someone in the her chosen profession. The former student is heading to be a secondary science teacher, so she contacted me. I'm honored, by the way, and I'm always happy to offer some advice or perspective or something to someone thinking of heading into the teaching profession.

Over the course of the next while, I'm going to answer each of these questions her on my blog. Many of the answers, I would imagine, will have a kernel of the same answer that I gave my former student, but - especially in case she's tuning in around here - I want to warn that they'll not all be exactly the answer I gave her. If' I'm intentionally changing my answer, I'll say why.

Are there any questions from this list that seem particularly of interest to any of you? If so, I'll start with those. Or, are there any different questions about teaching you'd like me to answer? If not, I'll probably work through as I feel.

1. What do you think your greatest asset is as a teacher?
2. What is the hardest/easiest part of teaching?
3. How do you make chemistry exciting to people that may not find it exciting?
4. How does teaching affect your view of the world?
5. What do you wish someone would have told you before you started teaching?
6. How do you incorporate diversity or moral education in a science/math classroom?
7. What attribute is most important for teachers to have? (knowledge, patience, style of teaching, desire to be with kids, etc)
8. How do you feel about state testing?
9. If you would do it all over, would you still be a teacher?
10. Most rewarding part of your job?
11. How do you deal with administration?
12. How do you deal with teaching at a school like Princeton where kids come from completely different backgrounds and will learn in different ways?
13. Are you a part of the union? does it help you?
14. How does teaching affect your political views/values?
15. Any classes you wish you would have taken?
16. Do you have your masters? would you recommend that I get it? Right away?
17. How do you feel education has changed over the years you've been teaching?
18. How does teaching affect home life?
19. ...social life?
20. Do you feel appropriately paid for the job you do?

Oh, and the image up top is from an Ann Taylor post on what to wear to a teaching interview. I searched for 'teaching interview', and that's the best thing I got.