Like most eternal students/teachers, I don't consider January 1st as the beginning of a new year. Instead, this is it for me. Fall is here, and there is motivation and energy, adrenaline rushing creativity, and a desire to improve my teaching and do some learning.
Since I graduated in May, learning is now less structured (and more meaningful), but I had to pick something to focus on.
Without a classroom of my own, and limited funding at the museum for my programs, my opportunities and needs for creating new lessons and improving old ones was limited.
But I still have my GECOS. My Girls Engineering classes, two groups (upper elementary and middle school), 3 sessions (fall, winter, spring), and grant funding for new curriculum. This is my focus!
I'm writing this a month after I meant to, so we've missed the chance to follow me through those weeks of confusion and uncertainty. Having a hundred resources for lesson ideas and trying to group them into themes, narrow them down into interesting projects with real-life applications, mentally testing them for feasibility. But, that was all there (and amplified by personal-life struggles and stresses that kept me unfocused).
I've come out on the other side, ready to tackle this year with my girls. And truly, WITH my girls. Not only in creating this new curriculum for them and needing to prototype and test and all that. But also in learning some physics. I took a year of physics in high school (I vaguely remember building rockets and wondering why my physics teacher - who was also my chem and bio teacher - was such an idiot). I took a year of physics in college (my memories here are even fuzzier - I remember the prof made a big deal about how he and his wife hyphenated their last names oppositely in order to keep their own first, and the lab notebooks were a pain). I NEVER understood physics when I took it as a class.
I started to get really excited about it and learned it when I started teaching it to kids. The simple things - Newton's Laws, friction, force, etc - suddenly made a LOT of sense when I was teaching it. But I still haven't been comfortable with it. I understand physics on an elementary school level, maybe even a middle school level, from a textbook perspective. I still don't know that I truly get it from a higher level. And I would like to. I would like to be able to add a Physics endorsement to my teaching license. I would like to feel more confident about teaching it and knowing I'm not teaching any wrong ideas, and that I can challenge gifted students as well as average students.
So, I pulled my college physics textbook off the shelf, and two middle-school lab book texts (An Introduction to Mechanics published by National Science Teachers Association) from the museum shelves. And I'm going to go through them, page by page, theory by theory, example problem by example problem. I'm going to do the hands on experiments. I am going to understand the vocabulary. I am going to remember the formulas.
And here's where I explain this is NEVER how I would teach physics. This is why I don't understand it. Because in high school and college, some teachers had me go through these books at their speeds. Skipping some chapters, rushing through some examples, taking too long on things I did get while not explaining the things I didn't get. I would NEVER teach it this way. But this is the way that I learn. It always has been the way I learn. I taught myself biology in high school by reading every page of the text, copying every definition, taking notes on every interesting example they shared. In college, when a topic was especially difficult or interesting, I would do the same thing (in bio at least, not always in physics).
When I teach, it's hands-on. Always. Things for students to hold, short stories of real-life application, experiments, testing hypotheses, watching demos and asking questions. Conversations. Never text book boredom. They won't stay engaged that way. In deference to those who learn the way I do, I share with them resources they can read, vocabulary lists and textbooks if they choose to find other definitions then those they get in notes or through labs. But I keep class interesting. I make it fun.
And I'm going to make this hands-on for myself, as well. I'll spend time at the museum setting up experiments and collecting data to get through these lab manuals and the "Stop Faking It!" books I have upstairs (also from NSTA press) on force and energy. But I'm going to use the textbooks as my guide. Page by page, theory by theory, until I understand it. Until I can teach the subject matter confidently, not just a few hands-on lessons that I've researched and practiced and watched done by others.
That's how I've taught physics up to now - a few things I'm confident about, internet research to fill in the blanks, and a lot of Mythbusters for inspiration. But I want to share the theories with my girls, I want to give them the confidence I never had that the formulas and the theories related to the experiments in clearly defined ways. That the math is worth understanding, and the hands-on experiment makes it interesting. I want them to not give up on their high school physics teachers, or go into their college physics class saying, "Why can't they dumb it down for us biology majors? This is too hard!" I want to bring physics to them in a way that gives them confidence and prepares them for their future math and physics classes. To do that - I have to understand it better.
So, I set myself the task: 5 physics texts and one Physics endorsement on my teaching license by June.
I hope I don't have to pull out the calculus book too often. I refuse to start over with that one!
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