Adam Rodrigues - EDUC 450B Blog

This short article stuck out to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, taking a class with Marina this term has helped me to see just how passionate she is about getting everyone to find interest in physics, and how that requires us to specifically encourage girls and other currently underrepresented populations in the field. She has told us in class before about how it was not uncommon for their to be many women working as physicists in eastern Europe and Russia when she was growing up. I found this particularly interesting because I never had even one female physics teacher or professor in high school or undergrad, and at least 75% of my classmates were men in undergrad. I wonder what caused the variance between cultures and also why "the percentage of [Canadian] women getting degrees in physics dropped from 30 per cent to about 12 per cent between 2000 and 2009". I think if we were able to uncover some of the reasons why there was such a decrease in female enrolment, pe...

For this week's response please, choose three quotes from the article (one each from the beginning, middle and end of the piece) and discuss them in terms of 'the tact of teaching' and teachers' practical wisdom (phroenesis) in classroom situations. How might one develop such tact and practical wisdom? How does this affect students, teachers and parents?  1. "Good teachers are intuitively aware that the daily activities of teaching and learning are conditioned by such subtle factors as the atmosphere of the school and classroom, by the relational qualities that pertain amongst students and teachers, and by the corporeal skills or embodied knowledge that teachers enact." (p. 5) 2. "What makes true reflection in action difficult is that life in classrooms is contingent, dynamic, everchanging: every moment, every second is situation-specific." (p. 12) 3. "If teaching is so embodied and so tied into the phenomenology of one's world, then it is n...

 Commenting on Henderson and Tamina article ... I was fascinated with the construction of physical representations of the hyperbolic plane, as well as the investigation of the inherent geometry of machinery. I have always held that tangible experience is necessary to develop a strong scientific understanding, and studying physics, physical phenomena gave me a way to visualize some geometry and vectors. That being said, I am continually fascinated by the way physical experiences can enrich mathematical understanding. I have always been interested in "picture proofs", but I will need to look more into tangible "proofs" as well. One important point to make though is that embodied experience alone is not sufficient to bring about understanding. For example, without any of the commentary in the article, I would not be able to recognize a crocheted hyperbolic plane from just seeing or feeling it. There is an intersection of the mind and body that needs to take place for a...

1) What are your "student bird" and "teacher bird" thoughts about assigning percentages or letter grades in the assessment of student work? What do the grades indicate? How are they arrived at? Whose purposes do they serve? What are positive and negative aspects to giving grades? to be assigned grades by an instructor? My "student bird" thinks that grades are essential and doesn't question the rationale behind them. My "teacher bird" considers the question of their necessity a bit more and examines the underlying, taken-for-granted principles behind our common grading practices. In that sense, I think that the grades are meant to indicate understanding/learning and serve the purpose of informing teachers, students, parents, and post-secondary institutions (basically anyone who would be concerned with the academic progress of the student). In reality, there are many conflating factors that influence grades beyond student learning and there are...

What kind of people do we hope our students will become because of their schooling? I can't speak for all teachers, but I certainly hope that my students will become happy, thriving, and ethical citizens, concerned for the well being of their communities and people around them. I think that there is a lot of formation that goes into developing the whole person, some of which can occur in the high school classroom. Teachers can help build their students' confidence and self-esteem by giving constructive feedback and appropriate praise. Additionally, collaboration and study/work opportunities focused on current local, national, or global issues can help foster a sense of citizenship. These are some ways that we can work toward the previously stated goals. What kind of society do we want our schools to contribute to? How might marks, grading, assessment and evaluation, testing, etc. have an effect on the overall society? Again, in my personal view, I would hope that our society is...

 As I perused the insights of other groups' discussions, I noticed that there was pretty much a consensus that including embodied learning activities in math and science classrooms is an effective and engaging way to teach. Because the objective of natural science is to describe the natural world, there are endless opportunities available for teaching science in a physical, tangible sense. Although this becomes more difficult for highly abstract concepts (particularly phenomena on astronomical or microscopic scales), some metaphor and extension from everyday experience is usually possible. As for mathematics teaching, there are plenty of ways that patterns exist intrinsically within nature, and math is almost always necessary to create accurate scientific descriptions and models, so opportunities to connect mathematics with the natural world exist there as well. In my group, we talked about how the difficulty of creating effective embodied learning activities in math and science cl...

 I really enjoyed conversing with the other TC's in my group today and I thought that we generated some rich discussion. One thing that really resonated with me was what Jacob mentioned about allowing room for uncertainty in mathematics and science. Too often, we think that science is rigid and absolute, whereas, in reality, it is constantly evolving and improving. Similarly, mathematics is a an ever-developing field, and pedagogical approaches are constantly being improved upon. Embracing uncertainty, and also attempting to quantify or explain it, might be good ways to help ourselves and students become increasingly adaptable and resilient amidst the immense uncertainty of our collective future in light of global, multi-generational problems such as climate change and mass extinction. Fluidity in understanding also invites interpretation and subjectivity to our experience of math and science, which we agreed is important and need not be destructive to the objective developments of...