Month: December 2008

Sometimes I’m just grumpy

grumpy-pup1

There are a lot of excellent educational blogs out there, and most are well worth reading if one only had the time.

But one thing bugs me; we  tend to focus on what worked for us in class (and sometimes even what didn’t work), and so an outsider reading all these blogs would come away with the impression that teaching is wonderful.
All the time.

And that’s not true. And I know it’s not just me. And I know when things go very wrong we as teachers often don’t have anywhere to go.

Let me give an example. This week has been hectic; I have four teams entering Young Scientist (a science-fair competition) and they are at various stages of readiness. Some are constantly bugging me about it, while others I have to chase down to make sure they are doing anything at all.
It’s the last week of term and students are in festive mode in class, while I, while not wishing to dampen their spirits, am adamant that there is still work to be done.
As a houseperson with responsibility for 60 students I have to deal with each and every disciplinary issue as they arise, and boy have they been arising this week.
I have been socialising  at night-time, consuming more alcohol than I otherwise might during the rest of term.

Bottom line:
I’m frazzled (read ‘grumpy’). So you can guess what happens next. I’m teaching my normal class. Mary is chatting at the back while I am talking at the front. I snap at Mary. Mary snaps back. I give Mary detention. Mary feels (quite rightly) that she has been treated harshly and the whole class atmosphere changes.

I am human. I experience the full gamut of human emotions. I make mistakes. As a teacher I have to make 100 calls a day on discipline. Most involve ignoring somebody talking or simply asking them to be quite. Most of the time I get these calls right. Occasionally I get them wrong. As I become more experienced I get better at making these calls. But sometimes I have a day where I get more wrong than right. And that’s life.
The trick is to recognise this and acknowledge it. And if that means apologising to a student, whether it be straight away, or at the end of class, or even the following day, then so be it.
Why should an apology be such a big deal for me as a teacher?

And why, if class discipline is such a big issue in schools, are so few of us writing about it?

Junior Cert Revision

 

 

revision

To access the Junior Cert Revision document, simply right-lick on the link below and then choose ‘Save Target As’ to save it to your computer

Junior Cert Revision Schedule

Revision is one of those areas where I suspect some of us fall down.
Particulary at Christmas time, I tend to forget that while the top students seem to have no problem knowing what to learn and how to plan their revision, us lesser mortals could do with a bit of guidance.

While there are plenty of students who won’t open a book over Christmas (and good luck to you), for those who are trying hard, you could probably do with a little guidance. Hopefully this will help.

Don’t forget to ask your teachers NICELY to help you put together a list of tasks which will help with your revision.
And say THANK YOU to Ms Marion Mcginn for coming up with the template.
Remember that you can always edit this to suit your own needs.

Good luck!

Our first podcast
I know I should be using podcasting more in my teaching, and part of the reason I stayed away from it is because I figure my voice is just not that interesting (not much of an excuse I know).
Anyway I figure students are much more interesting than I am, so I gave Maeve (Second Year) the dictaphone, and this is what she came up with. Not bad for a first attempt (I need to keep surnames out from now on).
See what you think. All constructive feedback welcome.
This particular clip may not be all that valuable from an educational point of view – it was just to give us all a feel of what could be done.
The nice thing about it is that now that we know we can do this, there is no end to what we can do with it.
I’d like to embed the player on this page, but havn’t been able to figure out that part yet.
Apparently you can subscribe to this in itunes (whatever that means).

Was the human species pre-ordained?

inourtime_fossils

I think this is one of the most significant questions that mankind has ever addressed, and yet I very rarely come across any reference to it.
Stephen Jay Gould is probably the scientist best associated with this. His well known metaphor runs as follows:

If you re-ran the tape of evolutionary history, an entirely different set of creatures would emerge. Man would not exist because the multitude of random changes that resulted in us would never be repeated exactly the same way.

Gould is by a long way my favourite science-writer (or was, until Bill Bryson dipped his big toe in the genre), and therefore I was always likely to agree with this view. The concept also appeals to be in that it reinforces our insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I came across a program dealing with exactly this topic while browsing through the archives of In Our Time; a wonderful series where Melvyn Bragg discusses the big questions of civilisation (subscribe to his newsletter – it’s wonderful reading).

Who were the original proponents of the idea of a grand design? Were they deliberately setting out to find a scientific theory that could sit alongside religious faith? On the other hand, can the concept of contingency – or the randomness of evolution – be compatible with a belief in God?

Visit In Our Time to listen to the program (all quotes and image taken from that page). The discussion takes twenty minutes to get around to this topic, and the jury seems to go against Gould, but it’s good stuff nonetheless.
Take a few minutes to browse through the other programs (it’s not just Science; there’s also History, Culture, Religion and Philosophy) then save this page to your favourites and listen to other programs as you browse next time.

Of course this is much too interesting a question to appear on any Science syllabus.

“History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
Aldous Huxley

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
G. W. F. Hegel

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana

“History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.”
Anonymous

Taken from ageofthesage.org

The history of Easter Island is fascinating because it shows a civilisation slowly destroying its future in order to glorify the present. The people cut down their trees (which we now know were essential for their very survival) in order to carry stone for their famour statues, and must have continued to do this down to the last tree.
It would have make a nice moral story if the people had died off completely because they destroyed their key resource, but History is rarely this simple.
Nevertheless the moral still holds.

Watch The Mystery of Easter Island on youtube

The disappearance of the island’s trees seems to coincide with a decline of its civilization around the 17th and 18th century. Midden contents show a sudden drop in quantities of fish and bird bones as the islanders lost the means to construct fishing vessels and the birds lost their nesting sites. Soil erosion due to lack of trees is apparent in some places. Sediment samples document that up to half of the native plants had become extinct and that the vegetation of the island was drastically altered. Chickens and rats became leading items of diet and there are contested hints that cannibalism occurred, based on human remains associated with cooking sites, especially in caves.
From wikipedia

 

 

Fractals and Dinosaurs

Continuing with the space and dinosaurs theme:
I get my transition years to do a project on absolutely any topic on Science which interests them, preferably something off the beaten track (i.e. not in the textbooks). fortunately this doesn’t seem to be a drawback in the slightest. Almost no aspect of science which interests them is on any science syllabus.
Because I am as likely to be interested in their topic as they are, I suggested I would look for resources also and post them here.

In relation to fractals, the classic video is called The Colours of Infinity. The original DVD and accompanying book is available in the school library.
The problem for anyone doing a project on dinosaurs is sifting through the vast information that is out there. This clip is pitched at about the right level.

The Colours of Infinity:

When Dinosaurs ruled America