teaching and science in teaching (or why I love my job really)

image from flickr by bullish under a creative commons license

When I decided to apply to be a teacher It was late in the year and I applied, for the second time, to university through clearing. The interview was awful and when I came out I was convinced teaching wasn’t for me. Thankfully the lecturer thought otherwise and offered me a place.

She asked me some questions and at the time they floored me, and now I see how brilliant they are, and I use them all the time to floor students.

If a one year old tree has a mass of 1kg and a one hundred year old tree has a mass of 1,000kg – where has the mass come from?

My housemate and co-technology enthusiast was telling me last night that he had subscribed to Ben Goldacre’s de.licio.us tags through RSS. Never liking to be out of the loop, I checked it out. I’m not a Guardian reader I have to confess (I like to tell my other journo housemate that the worst thing about the Guardian is Guardian readers) but John Rubinstein wafted into the lab once and told me to check out the Bad Science blog. So I did and I liked it. Bad science + Science Geek = Big smiles all round really.

I was flicking through snickering at some of the funny stuff and frowning at some of the downright bad stuff when I came accross this talk on TED.

… and was taken right back to that awful interview. I’d worn tweed kitten heels especially – a horrible mistake because I’m useless in anything above a flat shoe. I couldn’t answer the questions and I don’t think it’s because I didn’t know the answer, more that I was terrified of giving the wrong one and this is something I see with students all the time. I remember observing lessons where there were always the five or six with their hands up and the rest with their eyes down. If they got an answer completely ridiculously wrong how does a teacher deal with that? It’s difficult.

Misconceptions – hard to break. If you have a toilet cistern and the water is frozen, if you wrap a blanket around it will it melt faster or slower? Students associations are there before you get to them. Can you tell them they are wrong without making them feel stupid? I’m not sure, what you can do is show them how to test their ideas and let them make the leap themselves. Naked snowmen was my idea for that one I remember. Blocks of ice in the shape of snowmen (or people if you will), some naked and some with coats. I still like it.

Students are horrible little canny creatures. You tell them a million brilliant things and they’ll forget it, tell them one slightly iffy insecure factoid and they’ll set it in stone and beat you around the head with it. I’ve never pretended to know the answer to everything and am never afraid of telling them that I don’t know. I find it a lot easier however, to answer questions with more questions and seeing how far they get with what they already know, and it’s usually always miles.

They are brilliant things students, and for me teaching is the best thing I can be doing. I get paid to be excited about science all the time around people who want to be excited about science too. Sometimes it is literally that great. I won’t pretend they are all enthralled by everything but I will say we had a massive turn out for Einsteins Birthday Party and if we get our act together Schrodingers belated bash will be some (confusing) fun too (the idea is to have a series of thought experiments wrapped up in gift boxes eventually leading to the cat).

Anyway. I carried on flicking round this TED website and then saw this video.

I was reading through the TES forum the other day and found it so miserable. It seems like there is a great deal of apathy about and like a lot of people have given up. I can see why, I’m finding it hard right now. This week off, doing virtual teaching has been amusing. I got to freak out some students by monitoring their updates on a wiki and changing my twitter updates so it would show in site I was checking their work from miles away. Scary huh? but it’s no substitute. I miss it, even if I find my job frustrating.

Creativity in the sciences is a beautiful thing and not something that’s associated enough, especially from the students themselves. They see it as logical and progressive and sometimes don’t see that creativity and imagination can play as big a part. They need their minds to be wide open to the world around them, away from overly wordy textbooks and lectures. They need to have a go, to figure it out, to use their imagination sometimes. It’s really hard work – for them and for me, but I’ll persist, because I love my job really.

I’ve forgotten whatever point it was I wanted to make writing this tonight.

But I’m still glad I did. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I’m a science teacher, truth is I don’t ever want to be anything else.

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