It's Your Turn to Change the World.

I didn't run all weekend, to give my knee a rest. It sucked. I did, however, get in a nice 12 miles on a bicycle, in Saturday's lovely almost-60-degree weather. It was beautiful. Otherwise, the weekend was uneventful, and incredibly relaxing.

It's Monday, and I have the Mondays. It's also the first workday after daylight savings, which means that I'll be tired all day up to the moment that it is time to go to sleep, at which point I'll be wide awake.

On Friday, I had a non-teach half day, so I could observe a science teacher an another North Star school. It was an awesome experience, and not only because I didn't have to do any work. It was incredible watching a talented teacher with an extremely different teaching/learning style. The teacher I watched was clearly a spatial learner. He learned by looking at the physical and spatial interactions between concepts. This was both interesting and unnerving to watch, because I am NOT a spatial learner. I do not understand the spatial relationship between anything. I was able to predict that this teacher had a very good sense of direction (which he confirmed after class).

I found the lesson very frustrating, because of the way it was taught. Students were given a blank white paper on which to take notes, which were done with drawings and arrows and non-linear note-taking. It was completely unlike anything I have ever done, which made me realize something: there is probably someone sitting in my class, equally frustrated, because I don't address their learning style. I need to, over the course of a unit, address more learning styles. This led to two action steps I created on Friday:

Instead of just taking notes on a concept (esp. physics), have students draw the forces to prove it (by teacher modeling), and then take notes on it

Address multiple learning types (How can I do this if each topic is only 1-3 days long? Multiple types in a lesson? Or make sure spiraling addresses all learning types?)

Oh good, I was just starting to feel like I had mastered teaching. Ha.

 

Today, I got a lot of housekeeping done. During my 3 hours of observation on Friday, I managed to get ahead by 2 lesson plans. So, today, I spent the day working on miscellaneous activities. I updated the signage in my room, including making a sign that says, "Isaac Newton was a critical thinker and developed the Universal Law of Gravitation. These students show evidence of critical thinking that would make him proud" and is posted above some exemplar student work. It also has this picture on it:


I also completed a decorative project that had been on my to-do list for a while: I printed out a series of colorful posters that say things like, "Thomas Alva Edison, Age 14. Built his first lab and later a lightbulb. It's your turn to change the world." I took the idea from the Google Science Fair website. I posted them around the hallway, including on the wall around the water fountain. I'm pretty excited about them.

I work hard so that they'll change the world. I like to think it'll happen. Some of them, I can't wait to see what they'll do.