you don't want to miss this one

Classic Gosling vehicle, truck model, about to collide with a vulture, which came from Smart Notebook. 

Yesterday I was visiting a school and the teacher invited me to give an example problem. I started off as I always do, with a story, which, like many good stories, was accompanied by a drawing. Now, as those of you who have been my students can attest, my art skills plateaued at roughly a 6th grade level. As such, my drawings are frequently a source of humor for my students. One went so far as to take photos of my terrible drawings as they happened and put together an end-of-the-year slideshow. I'm going to pepper this post with images from earlier this year so you can see for yourselves. Don't be fooled- though the images are chuckle-inducing, there is a deeper theme to come. On a side note, I like to think that my drawings help my students feel better about their own artistic abilities. If nothing else, maybe the artwork helps keep them from falling asleep!

Armadillo, close cousin of the turtle. The dotted line denotes the system we chose in class.

Now my example problem involved cars. I can draw a car or a truck very quickly, but they're not great. In fact, sometimes it's difficult to tell which way the car is supposed to be moving unless I add wind to the back and headlights to the front. But it's what I've got, and I drew it in all its glory in front of a class here, doing my best to explain that I am a horrible artist. Then the funniest thing happened- the students didn't think it was that bad! In fact, they thought it was better than the cars that their own teacher occasionally draws! What are the chances that I would visit the one class in the world with a teacher whose artistic talent is a match for my own? I am sure that he's better than me at animals, which are my biggest downfall. 3-D boxes are my bread and butter, but for some reason I draw more cars, people, and animals than anything else.

Poor fellow stumbling over an extraordinarily massive spiky rock

Anyway, I drew my car and the problem went pretty well. As I was showing the solution the teacher stopped me and explained that he always makes his students solve for the variable in question before substituting, as most good scientists tend to do. I don;t know why I didn't in this case- I'm used to doing so, but I spaced out. Not a good example to set! Anyway, we motored through the example and then the students got to work on a problem of their own.

Duck

I walked around the room and looked over the students' work. I talked with one group about how to convert units when moving from hour*hour to s*s, and then I ended up at the back of the room, where a student was looking lost. I asked her how she was doing, and then we talked about how she might start the problem. I knelt down next to her desk to point something out and she quietly confided to me that she wasn't really any good at physics. I reassured her and said that my own students have difficulty with these sorts of problems, and then we had a discussion about what she needed to find and how she might be able to go about it. We quickly touched on the idea of converting the given numbers to different units, but the bell rang before she was able to really start the problem. I've seen this happen before, and when it does I'm always worried that the next time she goes to start the problem, she'll have lost the train of thought and feel lost all over again.

Dog. I can never get the front legs right, though this poor fellow has other  issues. My rabbits and horses suffer from similar maladies.

In hindsight, I wish I had responded more strongly to her statement about her aptitude for physics. Maybe I was worried about my ability to express myself adequately in Spanish. Maybe I didn't want to draw attention to her and cause her more discomfort. Mainly, I wish I had said more. I should have explained that physics ability isn't something that comes naturally, and that most everyone has to work at it. It just takes some of us longer than others.

Turtle with balloons to reduce the normal force. The R was for his name- Rodney perhaps? He had a twin brother, who didn't have balloons. I make good use of the clone feature of the Smart software.

I remember going to my first national physics teachers conference during my first year teaching at Saranac Lake. It was a big deal for me- I had successfully applied for a grant from the local Teacher's Center to help cover the cost of attending, and I was presenting on the use of a Reflective Writing exercise to help students learn physics. My talk went better than I had expected, despite the scheduling conflict with another talk that seemed to draw most of the potential audience. It actually worked out since what I did during my talk worked out better with fewer people. Anyway, on the way home from Seattle I was stuck in the airport for a couple of hours because of nasty weather. I struck up a conversation with a guy from North Carolina who asked what I'd been in town for. We got to talking and he explained that when he had tried to ask someone else who attended the same conference (you can usually spot the attendees of a physics conference by their nifty bags or clothing), the person he'd asked had blown him off and left to sit with other conference-goers. We ended up having a really good chat, and at the end of the conversation he complimented me on my ability to explain things in a way that made sense, and also thanked me for spending the time to chat with him.  After I returned I told my advisor about the experience, and he was really excited for me. At the time I was just happy that he was proud of me, but lately I've realized that when I look back on that particular conference, that conversation was what stuck with me the most.

Squirrel in a tree (think National Lampoon's X-mas Vacation)

What I'm trying to explain, in a very long-winded and roundabout fashion (how else did you think I was going to generate enough text to justify including all of my pictures???), is that while I am obviously not the physicist out there pushing the boundaries of experimental knowledge, maybe I'm not meant to be. Maybe I'm the teacher who is around to listen to people and answer their questions when nobody else notices. I don't know if I was able to help that student at all, but at least she was able to tell me how she was feeling. I can only hope that the next time I'm put in that situation I'll react more strongly. I think that this experience belies the reason I'm pursuing the line of research I'm working on here- I think that anything that can be done to bolster a student's belief that they have the possibility to succeed is well worth my time and effort. Hopefully my findings will help prepare other teachers to follow my lead.

Ask and ye shall receive

Earlier this week I went to visit another school, Colegio San Luis Gonzaga. Like some of the other schools I have visited, it is a private Catholic school for girls. I learned that Gonzaga is the oldest school in the province of San Luis, and it has an excellent reputation. Though I had a great visit this morning, that isn't the topic of this post. Rather, I wanted to comment on the way that my visits have evolved here.

About a week ago I wrote to a friend that I was a little bit frustrated because I hadn't been as successful as I had initially hoped in visiting schools. Soon after I received responses from not one, but two teachers that I had been hoping to work with. I now have a standing invitation to come help out at the university school, and I've been invited to give a physics lesson at Gonzaga next week. There is also talk of having me come visit the English classes to give a presentation as a native speaker, which would be neat too. I spent Monday afternoon at Aleluya helping a teacher with a lesson involving video analysis, which is something I have a lot of experience with. It's a really powerful tool for teaching physics, because the students can capture their own videos and analyze the physics behind them. Talk about a solid connection to physics in the real world!

The Ah-ha moment of the day came when I was meeting with some of the administrators at Gonzaga. We were discussing my project, and they asked what other schools I had visited. I rattled off the short list, and said that I'd been hoping to visit others but it hadn't panned out. The preceptora (I am almost positive that that was her title, but if you happen to be reading this please accept my apologies if I got it wrong) offered to contact her husband, who works at another school here in town. By the time the Director of Gonzaga's secondary school had finished showing me around, she had set up an appointment for the following morning for me to meet her husband and the physics teacher at his school. She also offered to contact any other school that I might be interested in visiting.

My mentor at the university has been great helping me meet local physics teachers, but the ones that he knows seem to be teachers who also work at the university or teachers who have gone through his master's program. There are a load of other schools out there, and I am thrilled to have an "in" so I can get a broader perspective on how physics is taught in the public sector. I am really impressed by the way this worked out. Now all I need to do is kick this sinus infection and I'll be back in business!