Newton's first law!!

I guess I never thought that things like a car accident could be related to science. This onetime, back in 8th grade, my sister was driving me to wrestling practice and we hit a tree. The airbags went off and everything turned out alright, but we both had some serious whiplash! That demonstrates inertia! Our head was still going about 45 MPH and all of sudden the car stopped, but my head wanted to keep going forward! This is a web page about whiplash. I also found this site that had games on it that you flew a space ship around. I guess it is inertia!

Web 2.0 Educator

I read blogs from the man who moves at the speed of creation, Wes Fryer. I didn't realize that you could put so much non-text in a blog. He seems to be into blogging in general, and emphasizes its importance in the classroom. I especially liked how he found a loophole in Oklahoma's antiblogging school systems. Wes takes it upon himself to outfit his readers with information and technology that will benefit both students AND teachers.

Type I and Type II Technology

The difference between type I and type II technology is that type II is creative, innovative, ahead of its time, and refreshing. Type I is the old guard, stale, busy work, and dry type of technology.
Some examples of my experiences with type I technology are:

1. In the Navy, My job was to track ships. We did this so we didn't crash into them , and so that if they shot at us, we could immediately respond with a little bit of our own love. Since we very rarely got the chance to practice with controling a torpedo and changing its settings, they made a torpedo simulator. There was only one scenario on the simulator, and it was not even something that we thought could happen. Instead of actually pretending to not know what was about to happen, we would pre-steer our weapons and change all the settings to try and have the torpedo with the most fuel remaining when it finally hit the target. My division ended up making a scoreboard similar to what you would see at an arcade game, and we never got anything out of it.
2. The next example of type I tech was when I was in High School, and my french class had to go to the computer lab to basically fill in the blanks on a French I computer program that would spit out mind numbing sentences and give us four choices on which word was the correct one. We would just memorize the pattern and never actually read the sentences.
3. The final example of type I technology is when I was in the Navy learning how to manually make a geographical plot, which offers a variety of tactical information about a target's location. Every 30 or so seconds, a computer voice would come up and tell us that the ship was "turning right to course 030" or whatever the next course was. There was no realtime thinking, or unexpected maneuvers. I was in pure hell. It would have been much more effective with no technology, and a live person shooting from the hip, but there was some apparent need for incorporating this useless computer into our lesson.

Some examples of Type II technology I have had are:

1. When I was qualifying a watch station that involved controlling the ship's ballast, complete hydraulic control, ventilation manipulation, and many other duties, I got to practice on a completely interactive trainer. During a flooding drill, I would follow procedures and pump water from the flooded compartment. While I was doing this, the while room I was sitting in was moving around like a Disney World ride. When I eventually conducted an emergency blow of the main ballast tanks, the air noise was piercing, the "ship" had a 30 degree angle and when we came to the surface, it actually flopped down to level again almost exactly like a real sub would do.
2. The next type II tech example I have was when I would give divisional training to the other guys I worked with. It was a rule that you had to use PowerPoint during your training, which could really take away from some of your thunder if you didn't know how to use the program well enough. I had a junior officer who spent a few hours with me showing me how to turn PowerPoint into something completely different. We made Jeopardy, including the sounds, daily doubles, and final jeopardy. When we presented the training, our department head used us as an example of how he wanted training to be done from then on out. We killed the boring trainings using the same program that made them boring, just with a different approach.
3. The third example of type II tech I have was in High School when the teacher would use the overhead and her laptop to incorporate videos off the internet into her lessons. Even if they were short, it was nice to stop looking at the chalkboard and stop taking notes. We would have discussions afterward, and it would open up the whole class period.

Maddox, C.D. 2005 Type II Applications of Technology in Education: New and Better Ways of Teaching and Learning. Computers in Schools 1-5

Chapter 2: Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness

1. I have a friend who is going to be a teacher, and she tries extremely hard to be "popular" with the students. This frustrates me and makes me concerned that she is too young to be a teacher. She doesn't have the separation that comes with self-confidence.
2. All of the students in this chapter talked about how they could grow on a teacher if the teacher did their job well. They said that liking a teacher was important to them wanting to learn. I think that my favorite teachers and leaders in the Navy were not always the nicest, but steady in their knowledge and their demeanor. I think that the first step of proving yourself to the students as a teacher and not as a peer is huge for establishing credibility and boundaries.

Chapter 1:Knowing Students Well

1. "Teachers should realize they are working with kids who feel that they are somewhat adults and don't like to be treated as little kids" (p.7 Alexis). This jumped out at me as a perfect definition of a teenager. There is a constant struggle in adolescence between independence and dependence. Alexis herself couldn't describe it, so she used the word "somewhat".
2. The tadpole adults: almost there, but not the full frog. The tough part is that they don't have a sign on them to tell you if at that moment they are feeling like a kid or an adult, and they expect you to know! If you treat them like an adult when they are in kid mode, you could damage your relationship. Teachers have the second hardest job involving this age group. Their parents have it the worst. I think a teacher can actually influence what side of that fence the teen is on by managing the relationship, and being the even keel who is not their parent.

My MEL experiences!

• Helping Students succeed: The best example of a teacher I had that held me to high standards and had a lot of confidence in my ability was not actually in High School, but in the Navy. When you first report to your ship, you are what they call a "NUB" or non-usable-body, among other derogatory nicknames. Your first year or more on board, you are required to qualify in submarine warfare and watch stations you will be standing when the ship is underway and in port. You work your regular hours and do whatever people tell you to, and then when everyone goes home, you stay and study the ship to learn about hydraulics, high pressure air, the nuclear propulsion systems, and about 75 other systems vital for keeping the ship's watertight integrity. To say the least, it can be a little overwhelming. The entire time I was working on my qualifications, my chief was setting goals with me and talking me up to other divisions in our department, and basically making me feel like Sea Biscuit. I never worked so hard in my life, because I loved being good at what I was doing, and I was afraid he would eventually see that I was extremely overachieving for my norm. He redefined my work ethic by giving me confidence and making me compete against what were essentially made up landmarks.
• Hands on/ doing things: Dave Heroux, a professor at UMF is a great example of someone who uses multiple approaches to reach an entire audience. We would have lecture, do in class problems, out of class problems, and labs that all had real world meaning. He would create an explosion and explain to us why we saw different colors or where the different materials were going during the reaction. Volunteers were used to help get points across to the class, and there was always more to class than note-taking.
• Student/Teacher relationship: George Miller, another professor at UMF is a perfect example of someone who has a class that is completely reliant on people opening up and sharing ideas in a safe environment. In the Fall06, I took Contemporary Moral Problems with George. We took on extremely controversial issues such as abortion and capital punishment, hearing from both sides and eventually learning enough to back up whatever side we were on respectfully and very convincingly. To get 25 adults to take sides and have respectful and engaging debates, while still having a sense of complete safety, was extraordinary, and George set the standard for me in this category.
• High expectations: Lori Koban is the most motivational math teacher on the planet! Last semester, I took calculus II with her, which requires a gateway exam to pass the course. You are allowed to take the gateway once a week until you achieve an 8 out of 10, with no partial credit awarded. I am not exagerating when I say that I got 1 out of 10 or zero correct the first five weeks! I was sort of hoping that maybe she would lower the bar or offer us some way out of the gateway, but it never came, she just kept encouraging us and going over each exam with the class individually to see where your problems were coming from. In the end, I had so much confidence in myself. Even when I was getting 7 out of 10 and not passing, I knew I could do it. I ended up achieving the minimum of 8 out of 10, and got a C- in the course, but I never worked so hard for a single class. I walked away from that class with a huge increase in knowledge base and a lot more confidence in my math skills.
• Connections: Connections with real life situations or previous knowledge is something that I think a lot of my teachers in the past struggled with. I'm sure that they have tried to relate, but nothing really sticks in my mind, except for the teachers I have already mentioned. Even for myself, I think this will be the most challenging part of teaching, because everyone's experiences are so different. There is generally no universal experience that is going to keep the attention of the students unless something epic such as 9/11, or an assassination happens.