A small victory.

Today, I got a call from Mount Saint Vincent University. Now I have a interview to enter the education program at MSVU tomorrow at 1 pm. One step closer to the goal post.

I'm going to go over my application and think about things I would like to mention.

Cheers.

Teaching Experience

I may have given the impression that I've never taught before. This is false. As a response to this worry, this post will cover my experience.

In high school, I did a bit of tutoring mostly to a girl I thought was very cute. Tutoring someone how you think is cute is hard. She only wanted me to be there for immediate feed back on her work. A good student too, I felt useless most of the time. The only other experience relevant during this time would be a public speaking course I took. I'm still nervous in front of crowds but every time I get up there it's a bit easier.

For my undergraduate degree, I went to a small liberal arts university Mount Allison. The school didn't have any graduate students, so you could become a TA after your first year. During my career there I was a TA for first year physics, oscillations and waves, electromagnetism, modern physics and a marker for linear algebra. My philosophy was to try to motivate students to see physics as an option for a major and show up prepared but act like I didn't remember how to do anything. Most students (in the first year lab) just wanted the answer. I had to try very hard not to succumb to their pleas. Sometimes hearing a "are you stupid?" (I hate that word and concept). So I started with a routine so that every student knew what was going to happen if they asked me over for help.

1. Listen to their question.
2. Go back to the lab manual and find the relevant passage. Usually, this is all the student needed.
   
3. Go over the relevant passage and ask question to help the student.

This helped reduce the "are you stupid" comments, but didn't get rid of them completely. This nice thing about being an upper level physics lab TA was getting used to the laboratory equipment.

The best lesson from my earlier TA-ing; Tricking yourself into thinking that you understand something is easy. Tricking someone else into thinking they understand the material is much harder. You have to approach the material from multiple angles and this is where you really start learning the material. If you really want to learn something the best thing to do is try to teach it to someone else.

My graduate work at Dalhousie also gave me the opportunity to TA. Being cheap labour this often involved marking for a class. One assignment was to man the help centre which is similar to my experience at Mt.A. For a few classes (Computational methods for physicists, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and classical mechanics) I was offered the opportunity to run tutorials. This experience is a bit closer to teaching but you aren't given much time to plan out a lesson. I mostly tried to go over the material and hope I could answer the questions from the class. I always left tutorial wishing I had time to organize something for them.

My supervisor at Dalhousie and a few of his colleagues started offering courses where the students taught the class. I was fortunate to take three of these courses; Solid State Physics II: Semiconductors, Advanced Quantum Mechanics I: Quantum computation and quantum information, and Advanced Solid State Physics I: Optical and Electronic properties of Semiconductors. For each of these classes, I taught three lectures. We became experts in the small sections we covered and got a good overview of the sections others taught. The feedback from the professors and students was great. I did take it to heart especially for Quantum Computation since the comments were from undergraduate student and actually very constructive. I took the feedback to heart and always changed my next lesson to reflect what was asked of me. This helped my lesson style and marks. The last lecture even got some comments claiming it was the best class of the course. Left me beaming for the whole day.

Currently, I'm teaching the physics portion for the Princeton Reviews MCAT course. I'm not a fan of covering so much material in one class but it's more of a review class. I'm constantly wishing I could delve deeper into the material and go off on tangents. This doesn't mean I think the course is a waste of time. I think it's very effective at increasing students MCAT scores, there is a lot of strategy and experience on what is important to study for the test. Anyhow the class is giving me experience creating 2:30 hour long lessons, example problems, and handling student questions.

Well that's what I've done. I hope my education degree steers me toward being a greater teacher.

The ArXiv

When you're in an academic setting you have to read a tun* of papers. Many of these papers will be old (5 to 10 years ago, otherwise you may be better off with a graduate textbook) and are needed to understand current papers. You still read the new papers to get a sense of what's out there. Most importantly you want to know if some one has scooped your research.

In physics, there is a great resource from Cornell University the arXiv. This website is a pre-print hub, researchers use it to spread their gospel while academic journals consider it for publication (a process that can take as short as a few months to as long as year). Putting your article on the arXiv gives your work the chance to be reviewed more immediately.

So why should you care? You don't submit anything to academic journals. Well there are sections devoted to

• Physics Education
• Popular Physics, and
• History of Physics.

It's a great resource if you want to get to the subtleties of the physics you teach in the classroom.

For this post, I went to the arXiv to see what's new in the education section and found "Falling spring and falling catenary as cases of force propagation" by two Korean researchers. Though the English is a bit rough in parts you can get the gist of everything. The boon of the paper is figure.1 which shows the spring

• under no forces,
• hanging from the ceiling, and
• at a moment after the spring is detached from the ceiling.

It's a great graphic and gets to the heart of the paper. Forces can propagate and they always do for large objects. Thinking about this system gets me in a tizzy. The class standard of considering a point particle won't get you the answer. It's a chance to give the students some real life intuition. You can go to so many places from here. It's a great set up into the mechanics of helmets and seat-belts or you could go into sound and waves (one of my favourite topics).

Well I hope you folks find the arXiv useful.

Later, JaM's





* A tun is an imperial measure of capacity, equal to 4 hogsheads.

It's all about rainbows...

Physics is a great subject because it applies to everything. Including such magical things as unicorns and rainbows... Well maybe not unicorns, but you can physics the hell out of a rainbow.

In my little world rainbows have become common place parlence because of one video in particular.



This guy is high on life. In fact, he has the correct response when looking at a rainbow. He loses his sh*t. The video is so inspiring; others have created derivatives of this video





There are improper responses to seeing a rainbow; like this one



seeing this makes me want to go out to the world and shake someone teach them about rainbows. I've been mulling it over in my head the past few days.

Class would begin with a picture of an oily puddle. One with lots of colours. The class would discuss where they have seen this phenomena and maybe start to think about how the colours appear. Is it the colour of oil, what happens to light that hits it etc. Maybe go into the lab and try out a few experiments with the depth of oil (or even vary the substance) versus the colour it produces.

Next we would watch the crazy ladies response to the rainbow in her sprinkler system. We would then discuss if she has a point or not. From there we would could go into index of refraction and basic geometic optics.

Ciao, JaM's

What am I doing on here.

main(){ cout << 'Hello World' << endl; return 0; }

• So I'm a geek.
• I am a few more things but a big geek.
• I geek-out on learning.

I've been in university in some shape or form for the last 10 years. At the moment, I'm a Ph.D. candidate (in physics) but I hope that changes. I've been a learner for so long; now I want to teach. I've applied to the local university (MSVU) last week. I think my chances of getting in are good.

I've decided to blog because I've run across some great blogs about teaching (Dy/Dan, f(t), Tales from the Chalk Line, etc). I'm hopping I can document my experience from the start of my application to Education straight through to retirement. During my friends B.Ed. she wrote a great many of reflections. I might as well start reflecting now.

I want to get as much as I can out of this blog

• a sense of communtiy with other teachers in the blog-o-sphere
• a place to reflect on teaching
• other people scrutanizing my grammar and language (which needs a healthy dose of critique).
• I want to stop using "I" in every sentence.
  

Cheers, JaM's