A great engineering/physics question.

It is still very early in my teaching career and I'm not by any means reaching my own standards, but I did come up with this question that I'm proud of.

Light travels from air into some unknown medium as show in the figure.

1. Is the index of refraction larger or smaller than in air? Show a proof explaining your choice?
2. Calculate the index of refraction of the unknown medium using a protractor. Note that the index of refraction in air is 1.0003. 
3. What is the critical angle between air and the unknown material?
4. Draw an accurate path for a light beam that travels from the air into the unknown medium and reflects at least one time inside the medium.

I just finished marking this question. Most students did an excellent job of question 1. I'm proud of that. 

Question 4, however, left most of my students in the dust. In a weird way, this also makes me proud. Some students just drew an incident line inside the medium being reflected that was larger than the critical angle. Another group of students just threw their hands up and listened to the cries that there is no angle that will work. Other correctly drew pictures with an incident ray that goes into the unknown medium from the left side surface, refracts, then reflects off the top side surface. This is the correct answer, but then when they tried to get correct angles they failed and said it was  impossible. They failed because the reflected angle is much larger than the critical angle. They started their reverse engineering by stating that the reflected angle was the critical angle. Their failure I attribute to my own inaptitudes as a teacher but now I know about it. 

If you have an idea on how to improve the question please leave a comment. If you know how to help me teach the skills my students need for the fourth question that would also be helpful.

Anywho, that it is for the today. 

Mr. Samson

Bugil Academy : I got a Job!

Hello World,

I got a job working at a school in Cheonan, South Korea. My school, Global Leader Program (GLP), is part of a larger school Bugil Academy which is a boarding school. The GLP is a program funded by some large corporation here and is designed to prepare Korean students for western colleges and universities. The students have had to write tests to get into the school, so they are all motivated and academically astute. A great deal of courses are Advanced Placement, the curriculum created by the CollegBoard.

My job is to teach physics. Which is great because that is my training. Though in teacher's college I have been leaning more towards teaching Math. My curriculum is AP physics C and B based. Because the classes are small and have relatively few behavioural problems, I'm excited to develop my curriculum for when I go back to North America.

How do we teach 21st century students with web 2.0?

The students of the 21st will have a very different experience then the one I grew up in. For one teacher’s will no longer be the most easily accessible source of knowledge. I think this will lead to a shift in the role of a teacher. Lectures are most likely going to be a very small part of a teachers job. This is already true in elementary and junior high, but I see trends in secondary to move away from the model. It is only a matter of time before it spreads to University. Why should I listen to my professor lecture on Newtonian Mechanics when I can go on iTunes to watch a professor from M.I.T. do the same thing for FREE? Why should I limit myself to the degree requirements of a university? Why can't I tailor my education to my needs? The knowledge is out there. It is NOT our job to disseminate information.

So where do we carve out a place for ourselves as teachers for these students? For one we need to embrace the web as a tool for teaching.



Furthermore, we are expert learners; we have the know-how to discern the truthiness of information. Our job will be to show students how to engage with the information, how to produce it, and how to share it with the world in a safe and credible way. We will be moving towards giving our students a media literacy with course outlines like the topics shared in Dr. Alec Couros’s blog post “90+ videos for Tech. & Media Literacy”.

The interactive web capabilities of the web 2.0 are engaging youth to create, participate, and most importantly give them a place to share their world view. Teacher's shouldn't be fighting with their studentshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif to listen in class and stop going on facebook. We need to help them go on twitter, blogspot, youtube, and wikipedia to help them create the content they want. With this we will have to carry on Larry Lessig's discussion on copyright and patents.

This will go a long way since we have no idea what challenges our students will face when they become employees. The pace of innovation is growing at an exponential pace. In my life I have seen the death the death of the Renaissance Man and know even the analog in a subject like Physics is over. There is not a single professional academic who knows the breadth of knowledge that spans all of their department. There is such a connection between subjects physical chemistry, medical physics, bio-physics, geo-physics. We connect them all and yet we still have separate buildings for these connected subjects. Our students will need to navigate the plethora of options and find their way in it. I’m not sure how this is going to happen and how we can help except to be one of many mentors they will need on this journey.

The one thing I’ve seen recently that has inspired me is Raghava KK’s TED talk “Shake up your story”. Raghava makes the case that we should not strive for the Renaissance man in the sense of breadth of knowledge we should focus on breadth of view points. We should be cultivating empathy so that our students who will deal with a more connected world will be able to understand the people from other cultures they will interact with. And as my friend Jun Allard said to me not long ago you can't farm out empathy. In the current economy isn't that something we should build on.

21st Century Students and Web 2.0

The students of the 21st will have a very different experience then the one I grew up in. For one teacher’s will no longer be the most easily accessible source of knowledge. I think this will lead to a shift in the role of a teacher. Lectures are most likely going to be a very small part of a teachers job. This is already true in elementary and junior high, but I see trends in secondary to move away from the model. It is only a matter of time before it spreads to University. Why should I listen to my professor lecture on Newtonian Mechanics when I can go on iTunes to watch a professor from M.I.T. do the same thing for FREE? Why should I limit myself to the degree requirements of a university? Why can't I tailor my education to my needs? The knowledge is out there. It is NOT our job to disseminate information.

So where do we carve out a place for ourselves as teachers for these students? For one we need to embrace the web as a tool for teaching.Furthermore, we are expert learners; we have the know-how to discern the truthiness of information. Our job will be to show students how to engage with the information, how to produce it, and how to share it with the world in a safe and credible way. We will be moving towards giving our students a media literacy with course outlines like the topics shared in Dr. Alec Couros’s blog post “90+ videos for Tech. & Media Literacy”.

The interactive web capabilities of the web 2.0 are engaging youth to create, participate, and most importantly give them a place to share their world view. Teacher's shouldn't be fighting with their students to listen in class and stop going on facebook. We need to help them go on twitter, blogspot, youtube, and wikipedia to help them create the content they want. With this we will have to carry on Larry Lessig's discussion on copyright and patents.

This will go a long way since we have no idea what challenges our students will face when they become employees. The pace of innovation is growing at an exponential pace. In my life I have seen the death the death of the Renaissance Man and know even the analog in a subject like Physics is over. There is not a single professional academic who knows the breadth of knowledge that spans all of their department. There is such a connection between subjects physical chemistry, medical physics, bio-physics, geo-physics. We connect them all and yet we still have separate buildings for these connected subjects. Our students will need to navigate the plethora of options and find their way in it. I’m not sure how this is going to happen and how we can help except to be one of many mentors they will need on this journey.

The one thing I’ve seen recently that has inspired me is Raghava KK’s TED talk “Shake up your story”. Raghava makes the case that we should not strive for the Renaissance man in the sense of breadth of knowledge we should focus on breadth of view points. We should be cultivating empathy so that our students who will deal with a more connected world will be able to understand the people from other cultures they will interact with. And as my friend Jun Allard said to me not long ago you can't farm out empathy. In the current economy isn't that something we should build on.

Tennis

So the other day I woke up with a great idea to center some math (and science around); Tennis.

The idea would be to watch several tennis players playing aces where they send the ball down the line. Hopefully this will generate some questions such as

• how fast the ball is going?
• how do they get the ball to hit the line?
• why do they make noises when they hit the ball?
• how does the spin of the ball effect the motion of the ball after it hits the ground?
  
• etc...

From this you could get into approximating the path of the ball as a straight line. With the aid of similar triangles students could calculate the speed by knowing the dimensions involved. By knowing the position the ball strikes and the height of the tennis pro and reach. Getting the tennis players height seems to be like an easy stat but the reach might be harder to get. In order to solve that part of the problem some statistic could be used to explore the ratios between height and reach etc.

In order to get a deep analysis the students could then move on to 2d projectile motion and see how the values change in this realistic model. Then what would happen if air resistance would be a factor?

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.