Ready to Teach?

It's finals week! I have observed Physics classes for a whole semester and learned much about students, schools, curricula, and assessment. Student teaching in an urban environment has made me aware of another sector of society that I had heard about, but never experienced. I will do my best to teach these children more than just Physics next semester. I hope to help them learn new habits like self mastery and self control and self direction. For those that make it to college, they will have to accomplish most of their learning. Just listening part time in class won't cut it anymore.

In the process of planning units for second semester, I will be working to address and overcome what I see as the greatest deficiency observed in first semester, namely lack of student involvement and interest. I feel that good instruction has been made available by my mentor teacher, but for various reasons, a majority of students have elected not to participate meaningfully. After a semester of viewing this, the results are to be expected: these students have failed to learn the material and are failing the class.

To overcome what appears to be a very natural lack of motivation, I plan to use three strategies simultaneously. First of all, as stated above, each lesson will contain multiple activities to build a sense of energy and progress each day. Secondly, I will directly relate the content of each of these activities to relevant concepts from students’ lives. For example, many of the students are involved in sports. All athletic sports can be understood scientifically and individual games improved through correct understanding and application of physics. Friction, forces, velocity, angular momentum, and inertia are just a few examples that relate directly to sports applications. As we discuss these examples, I will apply the third strategy: increased student involvement. Current lessons consist mainly of teacher lecture and demonstration of problem solutions. I plan to engage students by having them bring their own questions to the classroom and then working together to apply the science and mathematics to their own lives. For example, on New Year’s Eve, a stunt man in California set a new record jumping a Subaru 290 feet off a ramp, across the water and onto a ramp on a barge. The ramp angles and velocity can tie directly to our first chapter on projectile motion.

I hope some of this approach works with at least some of the students. Please comment if you have any other ideas to share. Thank you.