Racism

I'm not really sure how helpful the movie we watched today was. In the first place, I don't think anyone seated in our classroom would ever exhibit the type of overt racism demonstrated by that teacher. We have grown up in a multi-cultural society and have had a great deal of training in not being racist. That's not to say that we are free of prejudice and free of any attitudes that may adversely affect our students, just that I don't see any of us berating our students and calling them 'stupid indians' or anything. Therefore, I'm not sure how helpful that particular video was as a learning tool for us. It may have been better to focus on the inadvertent ways in which we may disadvantage minority students in our science classes and discuss ways to avoid that. I didn't really appreciate the lack of time for discussion of the video either as many of us were bothered by her methods and by various aspects of the video and it would have been good to have a chance to talk about it. In the end, the group of us that have chemistry after our class ended up discussing the video for the first 10mins of that class as we needed a debrief time. Thankfully Sarah was willing to tolerate our discussion as we cut into her class time a little. Next year, if I were you I would either not show the video or cut the intro down to 20mins so there would be time afterwards for discussion. Its just not a video you can watch without talking about it as that's really the whole point.

Teaching of Inquiry at Althouse

I had an interesting discussion with several science student who were general science and a physics students. One of the students is in one of the other biology sections as well. During our discussion the idea of inquiry came up (from me) and I was shocked to discover that none of them had any idea what I was talking about. When I tried to describe it and indicate that the way we teach science at high school is about (and is) to go under a significant change to teaching via inquiry I was met with a great deal of resistance from these other students who couldn't imagine teaching science this way. I found this very surprising as inquiry has been such a strong emphasis in my chemistry and biology classes. I therefore assumed it was being universally taught to science students at Althouse.
I was definitely disappointed to find that it isn't as due to my science experience I am well aware that our current teaching methods do not reflect the way science is really done and I am very excited to use the inquiry method.
Perhaps all those that teach science at Althouse should meet and discuss how they are teaching us to teach! I think it is critical to teach using inquiry and for future science teachers to seriously reflect on how science is taught versus how science is done.
All of the students I was talking to were very disbelieving when I tried to convince them that the hallowed "scientific method" taught in schools bears little to no relation to how science is really done. This is very unfortunate as they will all just continue to perpetuate traditional science teaching.
I for one and very excited that I am expected to teach inquiry. It will be a challenge but one I certainly welcome and that I am hopeful will help students to enjoy science.

First weeks back

I really enjoyed our interview day. I think that was an excellent exercise for everyone. It was no doubt good for the few to practice being interviewed but also good to watch, listen and learn. It was both informative but also provided a lot of good starting material to help/encourage us all to start thinking about interview answers ourselves.
The lesson on technology in education just needs to be updated. It felt like we wasted an hour on a history lesson of outdated stuff rather than learning about tools, methods and programs we could use currently. The format would have been fine if the history was kept short (no more than 10mins) and the rest was on info we could put to use in our teaching. As in our online course, there is a lot of information about technology and how to use it that teachers should learn about and perhaps next year, you could cover some of that info in this biology lesson.
As for our 'science for all' lesson, some great points were brought up and I think, for those who haven't thought about it much, that it was a really good topic to start thinking about. I have certainly thought a great deal about what I think science education should be and feel that science should be taught to at least the grade 10 level but that perhaps the content should be modified to cover the aspects of science that will trully be important for this generation to know and leave the "less-important" topics for those that wish to specialize in an area. So perhaps a greater emphasis on genetics and chemistry of pharmaceuticals and bio-engineering rather than say optics. Just a thought. This coming generation, more than any previous one needs the ability to make informed decisions in the area of science.