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Growing up, children have a plethora of experiences that have to do with the concept of force. Even before they start talking and knowing the word “force” they have an intuitive understanding of the concept of push and pull. It doesn’t take long for a child to figure out that pushing their brother will result in him moving in the same direction. Babies realize from very early on that things fall down. (A common game among babies and parents is the “baby drops toy – parent picks up toy – repeat many times until parent loses patience”.) This environmental input of the force of gravity acting on an object, thus accelerating it towards the earth gets absorbed by the child’s awareness, and becomes second nature to the child. Most children will ask a parent about these phenomena. The parent then tries to explain these phenomena in terms of sophisticated words such as force, gravity, energy, power, and push / pull. The adult might go in depth or just quickly dismiss the inquiry, depending on the adult’s actual knowledge of the phenomenon, the parent’s interest in scientific principles, or even the time and place of the question. Based on these explanations, and the instances of hearing the words of force or gravity in context, children start to associate what force actually means in terms of their world around them.

I was impressed from the very moment I read about Knowledge Building in the Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006, pp. 97 - 115). As a science teacher, I see the enormous potential of this learning philosophy, and cannot wait to apply it to my existing teaching repertoire. In order to implement the principles of Knowledge Building, I must understand it fully and understand how to apply it. To this end, I am writing this thought paper with two articles on Knowledge Building as a backdrop. The first is “Learning to Work Creatively With Knowledge” by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (2003) and the second is “Student-Directed Assessment of Knowledge Building Using Electronic Portfolios” by Jan van Aalst and Carol K. K. Chan (2007). The first article serves as the theory portion of my understanding of Knowledge Building. The second article provides an example of Knowledge Building in practice and presents a possible way of implementing the innovative learning environment as well as assessing students in the collaborative Knowledge Building setting.

When teaching, the teacher always should have an objective in mind: what is the purpose of this lesson, this activity, this game? So when I am teaching how to factor polynomials, I could use many games (factoring bingo), activities (group work / collaboration), and manipulatives (algebra tiles), but I also have to have a purpose in mind. For instance I can't tell my students to play Monopoly, as that is irrelevant to factoring polynomials, even though the Monopoly game could be used in a different situation to teach how to count money, give out change, etc. Similarly in a science classroom, we shouldn't be showing explosions unless there is a relevance in what we want the students to learn.

I apply this logic most of the time. But recently I was teaching some math workshops and as a fun activity (yet educational - I thought) I decided to teach the students how to construct a Mobius Strip and discuss it.

I got this video three or more times by email. I guess my friends know that I love physics and cool things. Well - this really is COOL. Everytime I see it, I can't believe it, and it makes me smile. You have to see this:

When somebody asks me what I do, I reply that I am a math and science teacher. I have been a teacher for the last nine years, and a tutor even before then. I taught all sorts of subjects and levels, in many different schools and even in two separate provinces (Alberta and Quebec). I feel like I have a lot of experience, and being exposed to the different types of schools (public, charter, private) I can compare the teaching going on in many different environments and I have opinions of what seems to work better for me. I pick and choose what I like and what works best. I learn and apply from one environment to the next. The overall result is that I am becoming a great teacher. In fact, I might be called an expert teacher by my students, peers and superiors.

Even though this is not a related to education at all, I thought I would put it out there anyway - a ranking of the Canadian Provinces (for travelling, not for living. If I was to rank the provinces for living, the list would be very different).

This past summer I went to the last province on my list of provinces to visit (Nova Scotia). Now I have visited all the Canadian provinces from coast to coast. I have to admit, I haven't seen everything in every province, and I did short stays in some provinces and long stays in other provinces, all the same I feel I can rank them from best to worst (although I don't think any of them to be bad at all, since we live in the best country in the world). This is by no means accurate to any of the standards of science, journalism, statistics, or anything. I just feel like ranking the provinces according to what I thought is interesting to visit.

1. British Columbia
2. Newfoundland
3. Nova Scotia
4. Alberta
5. Prince Edward Island
6. Quebec
7. Ontario
8. New Brunswick
9. Manitoba
10. Saskatchewan

If you think your ranking is better, I challenge you to leave a comment with your list.

Students in the US get tested every couple of years to check the progress of american children and their ability to do math. They check grade 4 and grade 8 students. The report came out today. In short, the grade 8 students improved from 2007 while the grade 4 students remained the same in performance in math from 2007. Here's the report: The Nation's Report Card - Mathematics 2009

Recently I read an ariticle by Tabak & Baumgartner: "The teacher as a partner: Exploring participant structures, symmetry, and identity work on scaffolding." I was excited to read about it, and hear this new approach to teaching: teacher as a partner. It was published in a very reputable publication (Cognition and Instruction) so I knew the results of the study must have been significant and relevant. In the methods section, the authors describe the huge set-up for the experiment. There were three schools involved all around the United States. A computer software was developed for the students to learn first hand about natural selection in the wild, and more specifically the "structure-function reasoning" (i.e. how a structure on an animal/plant determines or constrains funtion). Students were placed in groups of three around a computer looking at the first hand data of finches on the galapagos islands. Researchers listened in, observed for 8 whole weeks of this activity. Very cool.

There is a steady increase in environmental issues in the curriculum every year. The environment is important and we must take care of it, thus teaching about it to students that will one day take care of the world is a necessity.

But whenever I learned about it or taught it, I found it to be more of a "social studies" subject and not a science. There's a lot of descriptions, definitions of concepts, discussions of alternatives, debates. It never felt like a real "science", with numbers, predictions, experiments, etc. I know that this is not the case. I know that environmental sciences are very much scientifically based and hard core, with lots of experiments and empirical data supporting phenomena, but the way the curriculum has the "environment" presented wasn't at all interesting to me thus far (since I'm one of those science geeks).

The other day my husband asked me: "If I burn a tonne of fuel, how much carbon dioxide is produced?" He wanted to know for his work. Someone was working on some calculations to do with the railroad and production of CO₂. Now that governments calculate the CO₂ (green house gases) production rates, this is an important question even for non chemists, non environmentalist scientists.