I’m now reflecting on it a little over a year after The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back.

Our affair started with a little innocent fooling around while I was in college.  Take an education class or two, teach a lesson here and there.  Then it intensified with student teaching.  As a physics teacher I got to play with toys in front of an audience!  And the audience, at least some of it, really seemed to like it!  And some times I got that special rush that comes with seeing the light bulb come on.

That feeling, the feeling of kids “getting it,” is what I imagine a hit of heroin might be like.  The shiver that ran down my spine; that look of appreciation and understanding; and especially when a kid could do something worthwhile that he or she couldn’t do before.

It turns out I was being deceived and deceiving myself at almost every turn.  In my last few years as a professor, I routinely had course evaluations telling me that mine was the best class they’d ever taken.  But I also routinely had students weeping in my office, unfairly dealing with my love’s capricious heart; unfairly dealing with the reality that, on its face, teaching is simply a bad idea; and unfairly dealing with the fickleness of who evaluates you.

It seems that at the ends of the continuum, the system works pretty well.  In the early grades, I learned to read and write and add and subtract.   In graduate school, I learned to analyze and craft an argument (and, I think, to read and write much better).  In between the ends I learned a great deal, but most of that learning came by doing and you don’t really do things that matter in classroom settings.

You mostly sit still.

Thus, most of us leave formal schooling knowing how to sit still, and to read and write and there isn’t much else that most of us know.  We’ve all been taught about geometry, evolution and the Civil War.  We’ve been taught many of these things many, many times.  But if you scratch through the surface understandings, you won’t find much underneath.  In spite of being taught the so-called scientific method over and over and over again, few adults think scientifically.  In spite of being taught over and over again about diet and exercise most of us are fat.

I’d learned in graduate school to look critically at the system and at the individuals within it.  For most of my twenty years in teaching, I’d not only been passionate about teaching, but also about the study of teaching and learning.  That study led me to understand that global warming had led glacial change to exceed academic change and, therefore, it was time for me to change direction.

I’d worked for most of my twenty years in the profession trying to make schools better.   Joining the faculty at a new charter school, I wished to make better schools.  I had an epiphany there that led me to want to make something better than schools.  And that epiphany ended my twenty-year romance with teaching.

And left me feeling alone in my new paradigm.

Standing there, in a room with 25 teenagers, trying to get them to think about why convection matters,*  it hit me that teaching is a fundamentally bad idea.  I don’t mean (just) a bad idea for me.  I mean a bad idea.

Put aside for a moment what you know about schools and focus on how you came to understand the things you understand most deeply and remember too what you know about kids.  Now, imagine someone suggesting the following:

Hey!  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put 25 teenagers in room together for an hour and have them listen to a single adult tell them about the Magna Carta!  And then, have them move down the hall and listen to someone else tell them about parabolas!  And then how heating causes expansion!  Isn’t that a great idea!  We could have them do something like this hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year!  We could put 2000 fifteen to eighteen year-olds in a building!

Clearly, that’s just not a good idea.  I think I realized that when I was a teenager, but had managed to suppress that realization until I was faced with the realities of school in a new way.  I’m convinced that we’ll look back in another 20 or 30 years and be shocked that we did this to damn near everybody, much as we look back now on the horrors of segregation in America 30 and more years ago.

So, the affair is over and I’m trying to figure out how to move on.  I still have the things I learned from years of studying the system.  The creative destruction of my conceptual framework is both creative and destructive.  I’m saddened by my loss, but hopeful about the future.

I raise my question about what to do next in a way clearly derived from the way the system has made me think – an SAT analogy question:

Typewriters are to computers as schools are to: ________________.

I have ideas about how to complete the analogy, but I can’t do it alone.  I need partners in my paradigm.  Who will join me?

*Yes, convection really matters.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Barry Schwartz lays out a compelling argument on how the affluent are afflicted by too much choice.  He describes the problem of having too many choices for salad dressing, jeans and cell phones.  And more importantly in medical care.  And when to marry and have kids.  And how to save for retirement.

Historically, we didn’t have conspicuous choices about any of these things.

Schwartz also briefly touches on the problem of having no choice. That’s not the focus of the talk as it’s not the problem of the affluent folks he’s talking about and to.  Americans, generally, have too many choices in a lot of things.

In situations without choice, Schwartz notes, we’re miserable but we can blame the world for our misery.  In situations with too much choice, if the choice doesn’t meet our expectations, we blame ourselves.

In schools, we have the problem of too much choice compounded by the problem of not enough choice.

We have effectively no choice about what to teach — a New York State Earth science teacher must teach the content on the Earth Science Regents Examination.

On the other hand, the array of materials and methods to help us teach more effectively can lead to either analysis paralysis or more straightforward disappointment.

It also seems that if we want kids to learn this stuff, we have to teach them in a class on the stuff, even though we know that it typically doesn’t yield durable understandings. (Watch Malcolm Gladwell’s TED Talk and consider the need for extra chunky educational approaches (and consider how Gladwell’s talk is seemingly in direct contradiction to Schwartz’s)).

So, we have no choice on either the content or the the fact that we’re supposed to make something like 25 kids at a time understand it in roughly 180 forty minute blocks (plus, in New York State an additional 1200 minutes of lab time).  But we’ve got scads of choices on materials and methods we use within those constraints.

We are stuck between no choice and too much choice — what to do?

We want neither to maximize nor minimize choice but rather to optimize it.  As we go about the work of our grant, we need to consider how to make our materials and programs to be not only the best choice to fit their niche, but also the easiest choice to make and a choice that leads to further options that are both manageable and desirable.

We want to make some choices for our teachers and provide heuristic and logarithmic ways to help them make other choices from bounded sets of choices — and still allow for their own creativity to enrich the project and their teaching.

A choice we’re making is that it makes sense to use the local to understand the global.  We assume that participants in the project have made that choice too.

We need to:

• Create and/or compile a set of conceptual and technological tools that help students and teachers learn about their local Earth system science (and to do so with the collaboration of teachers).
• Create a scaffolded approach to move outward from the local.  The emerging database should be a central part of this.
• Remain ever flexible and able to respond to what we learn from our work and our collaborators.
• Describe and teach how big ideas meshes with the need to optimize choice.

What kinds of choices do you, as a teacher, want help in making?  What kinds of choices do you want to make without much input?  What else are you thinking?

An aside:  If you only listen to the audio of this talk, you miss several amusing visual aids (but it’s still good).

Note that I’ve blogged about related issues before as part of Blog Against Theocracy. I hope I had something new today.

It looks to me that Reiss was very unreasonably pushed out.  The people who did the pushing, I’m guessing, didn’t actually read the text of the talk.

Here’s an excerpt:

Many scientists, and some science educators, fear that consideration of creationism or intelligent design in a science classroom legitimises them. For example, the excellent book Science, Evolution, and Creationism published by the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine asserts “The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support”.

I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument.

In an interesting exception that proves the rule, I recall one of our advanced level chemistry teachers scoffing at a fellow student who sat with a spoon in front of her while Uri Geller maintained he could bend viewers’ spoons. I was all for this approach. After all, I reasoned, surely the first thing was to establish if the spoon bent (it didn’t for her) and if it did, then start working out how.

So when teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have (hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching) and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion. The word ‘genuine’ doesn’t mean that creationism or intelligent design deserve equal time. However, in certain classes, depending on the comfort of the teacher in dealing with such issues and the make up of the student body, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue. If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works such as ‘how interpretation of data, using creative thought, provides evidence to test ideas and develop theories’; ‘that there are some questions that science cannot currently answer, and some that science cannot address’; ‘how uncertainties in scientific knowledge and scientific ideas change over time and about the role of the scientific community in validating these changes’.

Having said that, I don’t believe that such teaching is easy. Some students get very heated; others remain silent even if they disagree profoundly with what is said. The DCSF Guidance suggests: “Some students do hold creationist beliefs or believe in the arguments of the intelligent design movement and/or have parents/carers who accept such views. If either is brought up in a science lesson it should be handled in a way that is respectful of students’ views, religious and otherwise, whilst clearly giving the message that the theory of evolution and the notion of an old Earth / universe are supported by a mass of evidence and fully accepted by the scientific community”.

I too can pull interesting exceptions from both my own schooling and my own teaching.  My high school physics teacher was the very highly regarded Dick Sentman.  We sometimes watched Wile E. Coyote breaking the laws of physics. I think it helped me understand school science content about as well as anything I did in school.  He didn’t make claims, of course, that we could pause while falling.

Obviously, this is a different ball of wax — there aren’t many people out there who think that the physics of Warner Brothers is the physics of the real world.  There are a lot of people who believe that the creation story of the Bible is how the world was created. And we, as teachers, don’t want to make light of that.

It is different.

But we also know that the research on how people learn is clear.  If we want durable understanding to develop, we must engage existing conceptions related to the scientific conception.  The National Research Council’s Committee on How People Learn put it this way:

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Pretty clear, if you ask me.  (There are links to research on how people learn on the Learning Links Page of the blog).

How can we forbid talking about these key conceptions about the origin of life on Earth and expect kids to understand evolution?

It’s essential to remember what we’ve been doing for a very long time has failed miserably.  Close to half of Americans think the world is several thousand years old (as opposed to about 4.5 billion years old).  The reject evolution.  That suggests to me the new to do things fundamentally differently.

Ironically, Reiss also notes:

One very rarely changes one’s worldview as a result of a 50 minute lesson, however well taught.

I guess the same can be said of the Royal Society’s worldview.

The First Bit: “Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do”

A while back, a link to Jonathan Drori’s TED Talk “Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do” was posted on the Earth science teachers’ listserve, ESPRIT.  The video is a good one.  If you’re familiar with the Private Universe Project, you probably have some understanding of the first two thirds of the video.  Here’s the video (If the video doesn’t play, click the link to open in a separate window.):

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do

Drori references the Private Universe videos and if you’re unfamiliar with them, they are very much worth a look.  Note too, the list of ‘Related Resources’ on the page.  Minds of Our Own has more videos of the Harvard and MIT grads.  You need to log in to learner.org to watch these videos, but registration is free and simple and gives you access to a fascinating library of materials.

The Second Bit: Reveling in the amateur

What I liked about Drori’s video was praise of the amateur (and the partial dismissal of the professional).   He says that good scientific interpretation — good science learning — is grounded in the amateur in the best sense of the word; from the root of the word, meaning “of love and passion.”  He also noted that the overly polished presentations in some science museums actually obscure the science

In developing educational materials, I can’t help but worry about slickness. We need enough of it to, as they say, attract eyeballs.

But I think it’s a min-max problem.  You don’t want the student-curriculum or teacher-curriculum interaction to be about the slickness.

If you go to the exhibit hall of NSTA, slickness rules.  It’s cool, in a way.  If a science geek (like me) wants to have fun on the exhibit hall floor, there’s plenty of fun to be had.  But we shouldn’t be enticed by the shiny baubles.  (I hope that flashing LED necklaces don’t really help the sales of textbooks, but I strongly suspect that they do.)

I think there’s great advantage in teacher made materials and I think that teacher made materials can beget student made materials.

And student made instructional materials are the bees knees.

In developing educational materials like Virtual Fieldwork Experiences, slickness needs to be subservient to pedagogy.  The value of familiarity and pride that comes from creation often trumps the value of spiffiness.

This post, perhaps, is a long way of saying: Just do it.

Make the stuff — whatever the stuff may be — labs and worksheets, curriculum maps, virtual fieldwork experiences and whatever kind of equipment you can.  Revel in being able to do it even if it isn’t all that spiffy.

Of course you don’t need to make everything — there is a lot of good stuff out there — but probably not enough stuff that’s relevant to the science that’s local to your school or home.  Homemade equipment or curriculum is almost always cheaper too.

So, revel in being an amateur:

• Take pictures of the science you can see.
• Make VFEs.
• Make equipment.
• Write curriculum materials that are focused on where you live, learn and teach.

The learners you work with will see you as someone who immerses themselves in stuff that matters and you can better figure out how to immerse them in that same stuff.

I’d promised quite some time ago to get back to this general idea and to share my hunches about what might go on the blank.  I don’t think it will be something simple enough to fit on a single blank, though if a term is crafted for the class of institutions and experiences then we might have something.

I see the educational system as akin to the ecosphere.  As the ecosphere is made of countless interconnected ecosystems, the edusphere is made of countless interconnected eduspheres.  That’s already the way it is, of course, but let’s be mightily presumptuous and rebrand.  Presumptuousness is a strength and I should, after all, go with my strengths.

What might different edusystems look like?

• Schools actually do work ok for some minority of kids, so they’ll linger on.
• Homeschooling is already on the scene and making a growing difference in the edusphere.
• Apprenticeships are proven to work pretty well for different vocations.  I expect that there will be some broadening of apprenticeship that will not only spread to other occupations but also to non-vocational use.  How, for example, do we (or should we) apprentice citizenship?
• Microschools. What?  Eh, I don’t like the name either, but it’s the best I’ve come up with so far.  This would be groups of something like 10 or 20 students with some range of ages where they would have a van or two and would go out and explore the world.  It would need to go beyond simply looking, but also making sense of the world and reporting about it to others.

I could go on at some length about microschools, but will save that for an a later post.  I want to hear more from other folks.

In this post, pondering balance leads into a discussion of what should be at the center of teaching and then back to balance in the form of considering one’s niche.

Thoughts on Balancing Dynamic Entities

I’ve spent a lot of time so far this month immersed in technology and a bit of time immersed in nature (and thinking a lot about geology in the process).  That’s all for the purpose of pedagogy – trying to help teachers and their students understand the Earth system.  I think in the modern Earth science classroom, technology, pedagogy and geology are inseparable.

In fact, this trio has always been inseparable in the classroom, but the technologies used today are far different than they were as recently as ten years ago.  Does that change the balance?   I don’t know.  Maybe in a dynamic equilibrium sort of way?  That is, the scales may be balanced, but the stuff in the balance pans is ever changing.

To teach science well, the triad of content, pedagogy and technology have always been essential, though you might argue that it has been a technology infused duo of content and pedagogy. Be it blackboard, stream table or Google Earth, technology has always been a piece of the pedagogical puzzle.

Some of the struggle here is that not only are we teaching about the complex system that is the Earth system, but we are also teaching within the complex system that is the system of education.  Both systems are composed of a great many (effectively infinite) actors acting across many interrelated levels that dynamically interact.  No easy task.

Both systems are technology rich, too.  And in both systems, we often use technology to maximize.

In the system of schooling, we are often pushed to maximize many, many things:

• Test scores,
• Graduation rates,
• Critical thinking skills,
• Literacy of many sorts,
• Politeness,
• Environmental stewardship,
• Return on investment, and,
• Much, much more.

We’re also expected to minimize certain things – budgets and misbehavior are perhaps the top two on that list.

Optimize, don’t maximize.

Maximizing and minimizing are mismatched with balancing.  You cannot, for example, simultaneously maximize learning and minimize cost.  Stretching toward one extreme may mean losing sight of the other.  Good teachers and administrators, of course, already know that and whether they recognize it or not they seek to optimize.

Is technology a tool for optimization?

We should be using technology to support both our pedagogy and our geology.  Some might think that means technology is a tool for that end.  Well, sort of.

We certainly use technological tools (be they rock hammers, pieces of chalk or computer software packages), but technology writ large should only be thought of a tool in the way that we think of language as a tool.  Sure, they’re both tools, but they are oh so much more.

Our work as educators should be to build understanding.

One might argue that optimization is maximization within constraints.  What is it that we want to come out of the practice of schooling?  Well, apparently all that stuff in the bulleted list above, but for me it’s understanding or a specific sort.  Understanding that informs action.

Is that kind of understanding more likely to result from student-centered teaching or teacher-centered teaching?  Here I’m unsure of the answer to my own question because I think it’s the wrong question to ask.   We’re off the mark if we think of ourselves as either content-centered or student-centered.

Teaching should be understanding-driven, or understanding-centered. That’s an idea I picked up from Andy Anderson, while in grad school, now long ago.  All kinds of folks still talk about this false dichotomy between teacher-centered and student-centered teaching.  Understanding-centered teaching isn’t some happy midpoint between teacher- (or content-) centered teaching and student-centered teaching.  It’s something else entirely.

That doesn’t mean that student-centered and content-centered teachers aren’t out there.  When you ask a student-centered teacher what she teaches, she may well answer, “I teach kids.”  Indeed.  And sages on stages who are genuine fonts of knowledge about their content areas are out there too.  There are good teachers in both categories, and maybe some on a line in between those two things we think of as extremes.  But no one would claim that teaching is one dimensional.

We may be able to characterize aspects of teaching on lines, on scales from one to ten (or whatever), but there are so many aspects to effective teaching that we end up not a set of scales or even a matrix, but rather, a multidimensional hypervolume (Hutchinson, 1957).  Zoiks!  How can you balance that?

A multidimensional hypervolume is how Hutchinson classified an ecological niche.  Pedagogy, geology and technology are perhaps three important “niche axes.”  Hutchinson also noted that niches are not simply the jobs of organisms, but also what limits them.  (This definition of niche is richer and more on target than what I remember from high school biology).

Our technologies are not infinitely extendible.  We don’t have an unlimited supply of either cash or time (are those two more niche axes?) to create anything our minds can conceive.  My currently accessible technology exceeds that of some teachers and falls short of many too.  In the work of VFEs, we need to better understand the technological range in classrooms and the range of technological skills.  I need to gain a better understanding of these niche axes.  Again, no easy task.

The project, I think, has the potential to extend the technological niche axes of individual teacher and offer something to the population of teachers (at least that 99+% with Internet access).  In so doing, we can hopefully also extend the geologic axes and the pedagogical axes as well.  And somehow show the National Science Foundation we’ve done so.

I may have wandered away from the questions that started this post, questions may I didn’t state directly enough:

• How can we help teachers maintain or achieve the “right” balance of pedagogy, geology and technology?
• How much time can we expect teachers to be able to devote to the creation and use of VFEs?
• What’s more important — getting a great finished product or getting finished?
• What’s more important — getting teachers into the field and studying the Earth system or getting polished VFEs?
• What can we do to optimize understanding in the creation and use of VFEs?
• Will technologically streamlining the process for VFE creation make that process and its outcomes more didactic?

Those questions arose because I know that most teachers won’t be able to put in the time in a single year that I’ve put in on my still unfinished VFE.  All of these questions have to do with issues of balance.

What do you think?

I see the institution of schooling (including academia) becoming vulnerable to collapse.  I came to Tapestry hoping, more or less, to be part of the overthrow of traditional schooling, and, curiously, I find myself using a more traditional approach than I have since I was newbie in the field.  What Tyack & Cuban call “the grammar of schooling” is very powerful indeed.

I came to Tapestry having given up on school reform. I came to Tapestry to engage in school replacement.  I saw (and still see) the rate of change within schools as, thanks to global warming, slower than glacial.  School reform can improve education, but I think the rate of change is doomed to be subglacial.

Allow me to expand on that a bit. When I was a beginning teacher back in the 1980s, school reform was often described as being like rebuilding a jumbo jet while in flight.  I was attracted to the metaphor. I thought, “Yes! It really is that hard!” I still like the metaphor, but for different reasons.  Now I think, “Yes, it really is that stupid!”  

They aren’t building the next generation of aircrafts by remodeling or rebuilding the current ones! They are making replacements, applying new engineering approaches, perhaps most importantly using much lighter weight materials for the aircraft bodies. Fortunately, they aren’t making these changes to airplanes that are in flight.  You really can’t substantially re-engineer either a school or a plane while it’s in use.

If you try, the thing will almost certainly crash.

That means make the change incredibly slowly. Or die. Or take the thing apart and rebuild it from scratch.

I think places like Tapestry might productively contribute to the partial collapse of traditional schooling, but I think homeschooling will play a stronger role in the end of schools’ hegemony in the edusphere.

Tapestry is an above average urban school, but it’s still essentially a school.  We put 25 or so kids in a room hour after hour after hour; day after day after day; year after year after year and expect kids to emerge substantially smarter at the end of that then they started.

That very commonplace idea certainly doesn’t seem like  a very good idea, but what should we do instead?  That’s a topic for another day.  Or for your comments.

I’ll close with a note to reiterate the point made in earlier posts and responses to comments on earlier posts — I know that it is possible for teachers to overcome the constraints of the system and change kids lives.   I personally know many such teachers.  A key point that I’m trying to make here is that I believe it is possible to create a new operating system for education that would make such an outcome much more likely.

Cheers,

Don

This is the visualization of an idea that I created while doing my dissertation research many years ago.

It’s been on my mind a lot lately. It’s easy to blame other parts of the system for the frustrations you (or I) feel. Of course, placing blame is only of limited utility. If you don’t use the determination of causality (a.k.a., figuring out who or what is to blame) of a problem to help solve that problem, there’s no real point to it. Except maybe to make you feel better. And that’s not unimportant, but…

But, it doesn’t really improve much other than your own state of mind.

If, however, it leads to helping to solve the problem, assigning blame is worthwhile.

It seems to me that the desire is often to blame individuals or classes of individuals (as in the diagram above). I think this misses the mark much of the time. Even blaming problematic institutions misses the mark. Schools didn’t create the problems of society (or at least not most of them). Is it appropriate for schools to fix them?

You might argue that that is what schools are for.  You might be right.

However, schools, as they stand today, aren’t up to the task. As I’ve noted before, most Americans don’t understand basic science, basic mathematics, basic history, and on and on, even though they’ve been taught that stuff over and over again.

Schools seem intent on teaching that stuff, but I think in a decade or two we’ll look back and see that that was the wrong prescription for the ailments of our society.  I suppose that statement is me placing blame on schools for not fixing our problems.

Much to ponder, and I’ve been pondering much in my hiatus from blogging. Hopefully I’ll get more of that out there in the next little while.

Cheers,

Don

The longer term plan includes having students create things a little like this:

To figure out how to do class-based video production, I’ve started the first one and we’ll work together as a class to make a copy with subtitles that describes ( but does not explain) what happens.  The original, without the descriptive subtitles, can then be used by other classrooms to puzzle over the demonstration.

They too can create a careful description and check it against their initial explanation. Almost everyone has an initial explanation that fails to correctly explain the order of observed events.

I’ve spent an absurdly long time processing this demonstration, and I hope it is ultimately worthwhile. As I see it, understanding the underlying science is required to understand convection and that understanding convection is required to understand an incredible amount of Earth science. Understanding a bit about fire is also helpful for understanding quite a bit more about Earth processes.

I’ll admit the production values need a little work.

Later this week, I plan to post #2: A Water (Vapor) Balloon: What happens when you microwave a sealed balloon with just a few drops of water in it?

SAFETY AND OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE GLASS ON THE FACE DEMONSTRATION:

 I have burned myself in two different ways doing this demonstration:

1. Holding the glass on its side or at an angle before placing it against my cheek. DON’T DO THAT!!!   This allowed the upper rim of the glass to heat up and that created a semi-circular burn on my cheek.

2. I used too large a piece of paper and consequently had a large flame licking my cheek. DON’T DO THAT EITHER!  That was really just stupid on my part.

I am sure there are a number of other ways to injure yourself when you play with fire in this way.  Be smart.  Be careful.  Where eye protection.

OTHER TIPS:

1.  Teachers should spend time processing the demonstration. Too many science demonstrations are dealt with too quickly. Kids may think it’s cool, but they should also figure out what’s going on. Please don’t simply tell them. (Note too that I haven’t told you why this does what it does).
2. Newspaper burns better than paper intended for the copy machine or printer.  And it’s cheaper.
3. The glass needs to be clear and clean so people can see what’s going on.  Wash it after a few uses to keep it clear.
4. The glass needs to be glass so it won’t melt.
5. Razor stubble makes it so the glass won’t stick.  Shave shortly before the demonstration (if your face requires it).
6. Tik Liem, who I saw do this years ago at a STANYS conference, put the glass on his forehead.  I’ve never had my hair short enough to do that.
7. If you leave the glass on, it will leave a hicky, according to Liem.  I trusted him on this and have never left it on for very long.
8. You may know that accupuncturists do stuff like this as part of therapy.  I don’t have any real sense if such things have any health benefit.  (That’s more an aside than a tip, I suppose.)

And, on a completely different note, I’ve added some folks to my blogroll.  Take a look at what Joe and Melisa have to say.

I’ve been lucky in that I’ve twice had jobs that I loved — as a teacher at Norwich High School and as a graduate student (and instructor and researcher) in Michigan State University’s College of Education. I left the first job because I could find something more fun and more important (and because even though I loved it, there were problems that I truly drove crazy and I thought I might be able to help fix those problems). I left the second because I graduated and they wouldn’t let me stay.

Both of those jobs I loved had a few commonalities. Teaching and learning to central to both and so was saving the world. I am trying to save the world, but why? Partly it’s because I think and hope I have skills and knowledge that can be useful in the task. Perhaps more than any of that though, I’m trying to save myself.

While having had good jobs was a blessing, it was also a curse. I know good, rewarding, fun jobs are out there and I can’t settle for a job doing some variant of the wrong thing. Part of what (for me) has made a job fun has been a focus on the public good; on making the world a better place.

So, I’m a goody-goody.

Nah, at least not through and through.

I’m looking to save myself. I’m at my best personally and  professionally when the center of the work is helping others understand important ideas in ways that inform their our action.  That also creates the environment in which I learn best. If I’m doing reasonably well at the task, the energy from my students energizes me. More importantly, students teach me about the world.

Another part of a good job is working with fun and smart people. It looks like I’m doing that too. As things look right now, I’m about to engage in this venture with some very impressive colleagues — we’re committed to doing good work and I think we each hold visions of what might be that resonate with one another. I think that we will make a difference. It looks as though those who got it off the ground already have. An added bonus is that I’m married to one of these wonderful folks. What fun. Life looks good.

G’night.

Don