Teacher Journals: Stephen

I'm a student in the Teaching and Curriculum (TAC) program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am studying to get a Masters in Education and a Massachusetts Teaching Certification to teach high school physics.

I am originally from a small town in upstate New York. I received my bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1994. After college, I became an officer in the Navy, where I specialized in cryptology, otherwise known as signals intelligence. During my five years in the Navy, I had the opportunity to travel all around the world, including the Arabian Gulf and Southeast Asia. I spent my final two years of service working for the Royal Australian Navy. When I wasn't on duty, I would travel to New Zealand or surf in the waters near my house.

About three years ago, I decided to pursue a career in teaching. I chose physics because it is such a fascinating subject. I know it will give me a great challenge in the classroom. On a more general level, I can't wait to become a teacher. It may be one of the most difficult professions, but I'm convinced it will also be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding. As part of the TAC program, I am student-teaching at a high school in the Boston area, where I already have learned a great deal. I look forward to sharing some of my experiences throughout the year.

Select from among Stephen's journal entries:

10.15.2001

This year, I've been assigned to student-teach in two vastly different physics classes with two different teachers who each have unique teaching styles. I've already been fascinated by different approaches to the same basic concepts, and hopefully I'll be able to grab bits of 'style' from both of them while I am beginning to create my own.

The first course is for ninth graders and when I first learned I would be in the class, I was skeptical about teaching physics to freshmen. I first took physics when I was a senior in high school, and I didn't understand how freshmen could know enough math to do even some of the basic high-school physics problems. I was certain most of the students hadn't yet studied trigonometry, and I didn't think I could teach much physics without trig.

When I first asked the teacher, S_____, about it, she laughed and said that most of the course doesn't involve much advanced math at all, and when we do need it, we'll teach the students what they need to know and let their math teachers fill in the rest in due time. Conceptual physics is just that--the course is based on teaching students to develop insight into the physical world, and it isn't about rigorous problem-solving methods. When we taught about objects in free fall due to gravity, for instance, we had the students observe what happens with real objects and then we talked about what they observed. Our goal is to teach them to understand the structure of the physical world, and not necessarily the details, which we save for 12th-grade physics.

S_____'s style for teaching the freshman is fantastic. We do a lot of demonstrations in the class, and we let the students get plenty of hands-on experimenting with the equipment. The school I work in is fortunate to have a tremendous amount of resources, and so far we've used sonic motion detectors for measuring velocity and distance, we've modeled projectile motion on computers in the classroom, and we've even shot air-powered rockets in the schoolyard. The kids love it, and I'm having a great time helping S_____ present it to them. I'm convinced that fun and learning are directly proportional in the physics classroom, and I haven't been disappointed so far. Once the students understand what they have seen in the demonstration or experiment, S_____ teaches them the physical reasons with notes or handouts.

The second class I'm participating in is an advanced physics class for seniors. Despite the 'advanced' label, the class is actually the least rigorous of the three senior-level physics classes taught at my school. The other two classes are structured such that the students will be prepared to take one of the two nationwide Advanced Placement (AP) physics exams given in May, and therefore the curriculum for those classes is determined by the testing goals for the AP exams. However, my class does not have a test we have to teach to, and this gives the teacher, V_____, and me the flexibility to vary from a strict curriculum when it makes sense to do that.

All of the seniors took freshman physics three years ago, and V_____'s first question to the students on the first day of class was, "Why are you in this class?" He was interested, specifically, to know why the students chose our class over the AP classes. The students' responses were varied, but the overriding theme was that they enjoyed physics as freshmen and wanted to learn more about it without the pressure of an AP exam. This, of course, thrilled V_____, and when we first discussed how we would plan the curriculum, he beamed when he speculated how far we could take these students, because they already had an interest in the subject.

A month and a half into the school year, the reality of V_____'s prediction has been slow in coming. The students are interested in physics, but I'm not convinced they are willing to do the work necessary to understand it as best they can. V_____'s approach to teaching the class puts most of the burden of learning the concepts onto the students, and this has been a struggle for some of them. When he teaches, instead of presenting material in a rote fashion, he slowly prompts the students into figuring things out on their own, and he gently guides them through the non-intuitive parts bit by bit.

For instance, when we were studying projectile motion, he used two tennis balls to demonstrate that when one is thrown straight up in the air to a certain height, it takes the same amount of time to go up and down as a ball thrown in a parabolic path to the same height. Then he stepped back and asked the students to describe why that might be the case, given what they know about gravity and the way things move through the air. I think V_____'s approach is excellent, but it does take commitment by the students to volunteer answers to some difficult questions. The good news is that as each day goes by, the students are slowly learning what V_____ is looking for, and I think they will start to be more willing to do the qualitative thinking he wants.

The question is, how will I develop my own teaching style? Will I be straightforward like S_____, presenting most of the material to the students while also allowing them to get hands-on experience with the concepts, or will I be more like V_____, encouraging the students to do most of the figuring out on their own? I hope I can find a strategy that uses both methods, because both have merit. I cannot discount the fact that S_____'s class is a freshman class and V_____'s is made up of seniors; student-level certainly plays a part in planning how to teach various concepts. I am excited that I have been able to see both S_____'s and V_____'s style, and I'm convinced that they have already helped me to become a better teacher myself.

11.20.2001

I came to the realization last week that in a couple of months, I'm going to have to find a job. I'm excited about it, of course, but I'm already thinking about all the different factors I'll have to consider in my decision about where I want to work. I've already been told that due to the serious shortage of high-school physics teachers, I will have many options, so I should be in the enviable position of being able to pick and choose from the many different types of schools available--public, private, charter, small, large, urban, suburban, rural, etc.--and the permutations of these factors are numerous.

So, while I won't be able to fully make a decision until I actually start interviewing, I've already started mulling over the issues I'm going to have to consider, and the biggest one is going to be whether or not to teach in a school that works 'well' or one that doesn't. Let me explain what I mean by a school that works well by describing the school I am interning in right now, and then I'll say a few words about why it might not be the perfect place for me to work next year.

When I first arrived at school, I attended a science department meeting, and I had two impressions afterwards: first, the teaching staff is young and energetic (i.e., it sounded to me like they all wanted to be there), and second, the problems that came up in the meeting were the kinds of issues that I imagine many high school science departments would love to have--the computers (at least three or four in each room) didn't have enough memory to run the newest version of astronomy modeling software; the lab and demonstration material storage room is running out of space and is disorganized; in order to have PowerPoint presentations in class, the department would have to purchase some video projectors which were going to be expensive.

I thought to myself, this school is talking about real technology and the problem of having 'too much,' whereas some schools have a hard enough time getting chalk for the blackboards. While money was an issue during the meeting, instead of being pessimistic, the department head said that he had a big enough budget to solve many of the problems. In fact, the principal stopped by the meeting and echoed the department head's position exactly--justify the reason you need to spend money, and you'll probably get it. I was amazed.

So the school has a fair amount of money and a good attitude about spending it on equipment and materials, but what about the students? You can have all the technology in the world, but if the students aren't working, all that technology doesn't matter. Let me put it this way: after being in the school for two and a half months now, the worst problem I've seen in a classroom are students who talk too much. I've seen one student fail out of a class for non-attendance, but I also talked to his dean at the school and he assured me that the administration was working very closely with the student and they have a plan for his improvement. In the classes I've observed and also taught in, I've been astounded at the general level of expectation to work hard, especially from the students. Almost every student does his or her homework. Coming late to class means three or four minutes (and usually with a note), and skipping a class is almost unheard of. Grades are due next week, and when one of my students found this out, she exclaimed, "Yes! I love report cards!"

Certainly I can find counter-examples to the ones I've given at my high school, but the overwhelming atmosphere is one of students who understand that doing well in school is important, and they clearly understand their responsibility to do the work involved. In that respect the school where I'm teaching works well.

Why, then, wouldn't I want to take a job at this school? The teachers like it, the students work hard, and the administration is competent and supportive. It would be the perfect place to spend a career teaching, and the rewards would be frequent and immense. If I worked at this school, I could concentrate on teaching my subject matter above everything else, because the framework for learning is firmly in place. It seems like the perfect choice.

However, there is another point of view. My HGSE classmates are probably getting sick of me saying this to them, but this school will always have good teachers waiting in line for employment at their school. There are many schools that don't have that luxury. The schools I am talking about are the ones in urban and rural lower class neighborhoods; they are the schools that can't get students to attend first-period classes, they are the schools that always show up at the bottom of the list for standardized tests, they are the schools with metal detectors and full-time police officers. There are many reasons for why these schools have the problems they do; in fact, I think the level of the teaching staff is not even one of the major factors. However, the students in the schools I'm talking about need the best teachers they can get, and it is for this reason that I must consider working at a school that does not seem like a good place to work.

This decision is so hard because I want to go into teaching because I love the subject I teach, and I can't imagine how difficult it will be to have so many barriers to overcome before I can educate my students in physics. I don't want to be as much disciplinarian as educator; I don't want to watch students fail out of school because they can't pass a basic literacy or math test. I don't want to feel physically unsafe in my place of employment. But instead of thinking about what I don't want to do, I can instead think about what I want to do, and I want to teach where I can help the students who need me the most, and these students are the ones at the schools that don't have the facilities and don't have all the motivated students. But if they have one more teacher who can overcome the difficulties inherent in working in that environment, they will have that much more opportunity to succeed. Maybe I should be that teacher.

12.20.2001

Last week I spent the morning at an urban school of the type I disparaged in my last journal entry. It was, I would say, a school that does not function well. The school is predominantly minority students (91%), and there are roughly 1300 students crammed into a building designed for 750. Many of the classrooms have been divided with false walls into two long, skinny rooms. The tables are too close together and the students do not have room to move around. I do not know how they concentrate. In one classroom, I saw about ten to twelve computers along the back wall. "Great!" I thought, "At least they have computers." When I looked more carefully, however, I started to notice missing keyboard and mouse pieces, disconnected monitors, missing disk drives--every one of the computers was broken.

I sat in on a three classes that morning. I was hoping to see three physics classes, but I had to settle for two biology classes and one physics class because there is only one physics class at this high school. Let me emphasize this point. This high school has a student body of 1300 students, and there is a single physics class composed of 25 students. If 25 students from each year get take physics that means that over 90% of the students that pass through this school do not take physics at all.

Although I may sound parochial, this infuriates me. If a student graduating from high school wants to attend college and study science, engineering, pre-medicine, nursing or any other science-related field, physics is not only a pre-requisite but any student who does not have physics before arriving at college (assuming he or she is accepted to study that major without physics to begin with) is at a severe disadvantage compared to other students. The school where I am an intern has slightly more students (about 1800) and seven physics teachers. Every freshman takes physics, and there are three options for physics at the senior level (two levels of Advanced Placement or "AP" and another second-year course). One hundred percent of the students take at least one year of physics and twenty percent take a second year, most at the AP level.

The first class I observed was a biology class, which took place during the first period of the day. Class starts at 7:40am, and at 7:45am I picked my jaw up off the ground after sitting for five minutes observing the three students out of twenty-five that showed up for class. The teacher had not bothered to start the class with three students, and when I approached him to ask if this seemed odd, he shook his head and said that no one comes to class for the first period. A few students sauntered into class at about 7:50 and they laughed at the teacher when he asked them if they had notes for being late. After about twenty minutes, about fifteen students had trickled into class, and the teacher must have decided he had a quorum because he asked the students to start the "do now" problems on the board. The late students had unwittingly sabotaged his lesson plan, so the class only made it through about a third of the material the teacher wanted to cover. After class, I asked him again about the tardy students and he shrugged his shoulders and said that it wasn't too bad because the school has a rotating schedule so he has a different first-period class every morning. Translation: because no one comes to class for the first period on time, every class has one day of the week with zero productivity.

I sat in on another biology class, and most of the students were present as far as I could tell. Most were not on time, most likely because they did not have enough time to make it from their last class, and some because they had no accountability for being late. The students are allowed only three minutes to change classes, and this includes changing between floors. The school only allows students to travel on one stairway between classes (because it is too hard to patrol two different stairways), so the one stairway is an absolute traffic jam. Even if the students had the time, they would not be able to use the bathrooms between classes either, because the bathrooms are closed from the last ten minutes of class through the first ten minutes of the next class. This policy was instituted to cut down on the number of fires set in the lavatories, but it means that if a student wants to go to the bathroom, she must do it during class.

I finally got to observe the lone physics class. For the most part, the students seemed more motivated than those in the biology classes, and I attribute that to the fact that they probably selected the class for a reason--either because they want to attend college or because they like science in general (my guesses). However, the teacher (the same teacher who taught the biology classes) does not have much physics background, and I am not certain the students are truly learning much physics in that class. The duration of the class was spent doing three very simplistic "do now" problems that were on the board. I asked the teacher if he minded if I walked around and helped out the students, and he obliged. I had a terrific time helping out the students, although it was depressing seeing how little they knew about the "do now" problems. It does not surprise me; the teacher has no support in the form of other physics teachers and he has little background in the subject himself.

In my last journal entry, I discussed why it is important to attract good teachers to poor schools. After visiting this school, I am even more convinced of that importance. Compared to students at other schools, the students here are simply being treated unfairly. It does not surprise me that they do not come to school on time; I'm not sure I would bother to show up on time either. The problem is that I have also been convinced that I could not work at that school with my current experience, and that makes me even more furious. I hope that some day I will have the tools necessary to make a difference at a school like this, but I cannot say that I have those tools yet; I still need to learn too much.

02.19.2002

I've been "on my own" in my classes now for three weeks, and now that it is winter break, I have a few minutes to reflect on how my first solo teaching experience has been. Granted, both of my mentor teachers have still been in the room, but as far as the planning and delivering of lessons and the general logistics of keeping the classes progressing forward goes, the entire load has rested on my shoulders.

Interestingly, I have only been nervous and flustered once during these past few weeks, but I brought it upon myself: I had failed to adequately plan a lesson. As the last few students trickled into my senior class, I realized that even though I had a bunch of demonstrations lined up in the front of the room (we were learning about static electricity), I had spent too much time gathering all of the materials for the demos and I had run out of time before I had a chance to sit down and think through the actual material I wanted to discuss with the students. I had failed to create lesson goals, and if I've learned anything so far in my education classes, that is the number one mistake a teacher can make.

Unsurprisingly, the lesson bordered on dreadful. As I floundered around trying to explain the theoretical basis for "charge by induction," my demonstration didn't work, the students fidgeted and my mentor teacher gave me a quizzical look, obviously wondering what I thought I was talking about. He took pity on the desperate look I shot back at him, and he thankfully stepped in and gave the students a different (and meaningful) perspective on the material, a perspective I should have been prepared to give. He was apologetic afterwards about interrupting my lesson plan, especially because he felt that he had undermined my authority. It was actually exactly what I needed, because while he was talking to the students, I was calming down and gathering my thoughts again for the next demonstration, which went much, much better. I am envious of teachers that can "wing it" in the classroom, but sometimes I forget that those who have that ability have been teaching for years or even decades. I hope to get to the point some day where I will have enough experience to have intuitive goals that I can deliver extemporaneously, but I realize that will come with time, during which I will make it a point to carefully plan out my lessons.

On a better note, my freshman class is going splendidly. I have been much more prepared for this class in general, and the students have been willing to forgive my new-teacher mistakes along the way. In fact, I had a conversation with them on the day I took over regarding the fact that although I have been in the class with them all year, I am still new at this whole teaching business. I encouraged them to give me feedback on whether I am doing a good job or not, and I stressed that their feedback meant as much as feedback from anyone else. I told them, "Believe it or not, you are the experts in good teaching; you have had teachers for the last ten years of your lives, and by this point, you know good or bad teaching when you see it."

I haven't been disappointed, either--they have gladly pointed out when I've made mistakes (e.g., when I assigned a homework worksheet that had questions on material we had never covered), but they have also told me when they've enjoyed lessons. They all did very well on the first test I gave them, and considering it was on brand-new material, I felt pretty good about the outcome.

After teaching for three weeks, I am still amazed at how teachers prepare for four or five classes per day. Just planning for two classes is a lot of work; in some sense it is like getting ready to go onstage for two performances every day. However, I know it will slowly get easier, and I know I will get better at the planning. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm enjoying almost every minute of it.

04.19.2002

Senioritis is the bane of my existence. Here it is, mid-April, and my seniors have fully embraced the fact that they have just over a month until they are free from the reigns of public high school. More and more of them sneak into class later and later with nary a reason other than "I slept late," "I missed the train," or the most honest (and infuriating) "I'm a senior--what do you expect?" It doesn't help, of course, that I am also in a mini-senioritis of my own; I will collect my own degree from the podium just a few days after my students collect theirs, so I certainly sympathize with them. However, as much as I would like to close up shop and have a nice month-long vacation with my students, I am obligated to press on and attempt to keep running a productive classroom.

In order to combat the dread disease of senioritis, I have tried to analyze my own symptoms and have shifted my strategy toward what I believe the students will best learn in the last few weeks of school. The last thing I need right now in my classes is a professor who tries to cram a bunch of material into my head, and I certainly do not want to torture my students with a similar approach, especially because I don't believe they will remember it much past June.

So, I have decided to shift the focus from hard-core physics to topics that the students will (hopefully) find interesting but that still involve physics. We have been covering nuclear physics over the past week, and although the students still don't like it when I give them homework, they have been attentive to the topic because I've tried to relate it to the "bigger picture." For example, we have read about nuclear reactors and the longstanding controversy around their existence; we have discussed the atomic bomb and the phenomenal amount of tense and high-pressure work on the part of the Manhattan Project scientists to build it; and we have also talked about the moral consequences of having atomic weapons in the first place. We have also talked about radiocarbon dating and some of the problems inherent in the technology of figuring out how old fossils are. Is this still a traditional physics class? No. I hope, however, that the students are learning something about physics as well as learning something about how to relate physics to the world in which they live.

The more I think about it, the more I would like to teach my physics classes in this manner for the whole year. Unfortunately, the standard curriculum is set up so that it is virtually impossible to take as much time as I would like on each topic and to cover not only the physics but the bigger picture as well. I am lucky with this current class in that I am not bound by a standardized test (such as an AP test) and I can relax a bit during these last few weeks to broaden the scope of the topics. A few weeks ago, I asked one of my students why he looked depressed as he walked into class. He confided to me that the reason he had signed up to take physics was because he wanted to learn about engines (as in, automobile engines), and we had not talked about engines all year. I thought about it, and while he was misguided in thinking that physics class was going to be all about engines, there are plenty of physics topics that we can discuss (and have already discussed) that can be related specifically to automobile engines. If I had known about it earlier in the year, I would have incorporated something about engines into our lessons on torque, for instance.

However all is not lost, and one large topic we did not cover during the year is thermodynamics, which relates directly to how a car engine gets energy from gasoline in order to make it go. So I plan on taking a couple of days to teach about the rudiments of thermodynamics and heat engines, and I will, of course, relate it directly to automobile engines. Hopefully my strategy will keep more than just that one student interested, and if that happens I will consider it a success, especially during this ruthless season of senioritis.

05.31.2002

Considering the fact that I have accepted a job for next year at my intern school site, I would say that this year has been a success. I still have a great deal to learn about teaching, but I am confident that I will at least have a running start when I welcome the first "real" set of students into my class. I will be teaching a remarkably similar group of students to the ones I had this year--both freshmen and seniors--although instead of two classes I will have four. That's probably the thing that scares me the most; I have yet to figure out how teachers deal with as many classes and as many students each day as they do. I worked extremely hard this year, but everyone I talk to warns me that next year will be even more difficult.

Out of my four classes, only two will have identical curriculums, and the other two will be similar but distinct. Technically, that means I will have to prepare three different lessons each day (three "preps"), and I already know that I must raise my organizational skills and stay on top of my work by planning ahead. I learned very quickly that I need to carefully plan my lessons, and if I don't organize my time efficiently, I fear that my lesson planning time will be the first to suffer: I cannot let that occur. I already know I will have to rely on the support within my department at school (as I did this year), and I am grateful that it is full of fantastic teachers with whom I am already comfortable working and collaborating.

The great part about teaching both freshmen and seniors is that I get to see students at both ends of their high school experience. The freshmen are terrific because they have so much energy, and I will have a good chance of molding the way they think about physics and science in general because they are just beginning to learn what real academics entails. If I can get them to truly think about science (i.e., asking deep questions and trying to understand concepts rather than rote memorization or relying on formulaic methods), I feel they will have better success not only in the rest of high school but throughout their non-academic lives as well.

It is certainly possible for me to have this type of influence on freshmen, but seniors, on the other hand, have been through three years of high school academics before they step into my class, and it is more difficult to change the way they think. Many, hopefully, will already have learned how important it is to ask probing questions and that "the answer" is not always what is important. However, to those seniors who do not think that way, it is undeniably more difficult to convince them, at the end of their high-school careers, that deep understanding is important. That said, the conversations I had with my seniors this year were generally more thought-provoking and mature than the ones I had with my freshmen, and I look forward to that. I also enjoyed discussing post-high school plans with them, and I will continue to do that with my seniors next year.

If you read my earlier journal entries, you'll know that I struggled with my choice of the type of school where I wanted to begin my teaching career. After much thought and deliberation, I decided to take the job at my intern school for a variety of reasons. As I have already mentioned, the department is extremely strong and knowledgeable as a whole, and I am excited to work with so many fantastic teachers. If I am going to become an outstanding physics teacher myself, my school is the place to learn how to do it. Although I now have a master's degree and a certificate that says I am qualified to be a physics teacher, I have a long way to go before I will feel confident that I can strike out on my own without a lot of support. Because of this, it will be a few years before I can move on to a school that needs me more than my school, and it just doesn't make sense for me to rush into a situation I am not prepared to handle. That said, I do not plan on staying at my current school for the rest of my career. Friends of mine have already agreed to call me up in three years to ask why I haven't moved on, and hopefully by that time I will have learned enough about teaching and specifically about teaching physics to bring those tools to another school that desperately needs good physics teachers.

I have learned a great deal this year, and I hope and trust that my students did as well. I'm both excited and a bit anxious about what next year will bring, but I'm ready to give it my best. I can't wait to see what happens.