First Day Of Senior Year!!!

 I cannot believe I have entered my senior year of college today. It seems like these past three years have flown by. I am excited to be taking both Science and Math methods this semester and think I will learn a lot from both of these classes.

            There was nothing I was really proud of or satisfied with this week since we only had one class and we did a science experiment the whole class. Math and Science have never been my strong subjects, so today in class when we were talking about the water and foil experiment and different terms I was a little lost. I will need to look information up outside of class when I do not understand because this is a methods class so we learn how to teach and not so much about the content. I need to know the information before I learn how to teach it, so it is important to look up the concepts that I do not fully understand.

            I think it was really cool how we started right off with a hands-on science experiment. It definitely made the class more interesting and fun. It kept us all engaged and helped me to realize if I was having fun building boats and seeing how many pennies each could hold, I know my elementary kids would enjoy this and it would keep them engaged in the lesson.

            As I mentioned before, it was the first day of class so I didn’t really contribute anything to the class this week besides in my science experiment group I helped to come up with ideas of how to build our boats. I also did not complete any outside research this week because it was the first day of class today.

            A specific current event that related to science that I learned about this week was the solar eclipse. I had no idea what a solar eclipse was before everyone started talking about it. If I was teaching in a classroom currently I could tie this into the classroom by showing my students videos, creating visuals or doing experiments to help my students get a better understanding of how, why, and when a solar eclipse occurs.

            Today in class I made the connection of NCTCS standard 3, “Teachers know the content they teach” under “teachers make instruction relevant to students”. Teachers need to know their students and know when they need to do hands-on activities to keep their students engaged and interested. I think science is a subject students can definitely get lost with if the teacher is not making instructions that will help the students to learn. I believe students will better understand concepts if they can do them themselves.

This tweet from Dr. Justin Tarte says "You weren't hired to maintain the status quo. You were hired to make a difference." I think this is very powerful especially for teachers today. We cannot just get by and think we are there just  to make money. We are there to change kids lives and invest in their lives so they are better prepared for the world that they will be heading into.

This next tweet says "success seems to be connected to action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit." I think this tweet can be perfectly related to science because scientists make mistakes all the time but they don't give up. You learn lessons from trying and trying again. You will not have success if you give up after the first try, so we need to embed that in our students heads and show them that it is okay to make mistakes but not okay to give up when mistakes are made.

Lastly, this tweet goes along with the tweet from above. It says "It's okay to not know, but its not okay to not try." If a student doesn't know something thats okay, that is what teachers are there for. It becomes an issue if they are using that as an excuse for not trying. Instead of saying they don't know they could say "can you help me" "may I ask a friend for help" or "may I have more time to think" We need to encourage our students to look at other options when they "don't know" something.