Replied to the blog entries of Betsy Varellas, Emily Zettner, and Wilson Pang

402 session one entry

1. I studied entomology in college, and my first job out of school was working for a green pest control company.  This was the first time where I needed to apply what I learned in school, and use it in a real life situation.  I was able to see population changes depending on the environment, recognize different species of mosquitoes, as well as a few other things.  This gave me hands on, real life experience in seeing bio diversity and more experience with ecological knowledge.  

I also worked at Alameda County Mosquito Abatement in their lab for a part of a summer where I identified local mosquitoes in traps and raised mosquitoes in their mosquito colony.  While raising the mosquitoes, I was able to observe all the stages of the mosquito life cycle daily, as well as observing how crowding in the containers with too many mosquitoes would have a huge impact on the mortality rate.  Again this gave me deeper understanding in ecology and how the environment plays a huge role in survival.

The biggest influence outside of school is probably everyday experiences.  In school I was exposed to many concepts, laws, theories, etc, and just by observing the world around me I gain a deeper understanding of these things just by observations.  I try to look at things, and think about why they are the way they are. For example, I have a plant outside that is growing at a very big slant, growing at about a 45 degree angle with the ground.  Why would this plant be growing at such a weird angle instead of just growing straight up like we would normally think it would? Applying what I know, I came to the conclusion that the growth was caused because there are trees behind it that have grown and became large and wide, this caused a lot of sunlight to be blocked.  The plant grows at the strange angle in order to get as much sunlight as it can.  Other things that I see, I also can think of why this happens, or think about a way to find the answer of the unknown by using a test to find the answer.  Everyday observations help to deepen my subject knowledge and also gives me ideas to help make what we are learning relate to real life experiences.

2.  During the discussion on Ball’s article, I felt like a lot of people thought that in teacher preparation courses, most of it is not about learning the content needed to teach it. When teaching a class, you have to review or learn a lot of content because your college, high school, middle school, and elementary school education has not prepared you with all the knowledge needed. I think Jerry was saying how he learned a lot of content while teaching or watching other teachers.  I definitely agree with this, college and other experiences probably will not give you the content knowledge needed to teach your subject or subjects. I think that I have a fairly strong understanding of a lot of the content, but there is a lot that I do not know very well and some that I do not know at all.  I feel like I am frequently trying to find answers or more information on topics in text books or online.

 I do not know how often it came up in the discussion, but I left feeling like people felt that the longer you taught your subject, the more content knowledge you would have and be better prepared to teach the subject.  This makes sense, because the more you teach it, the more practice you have at teaching it and the more confident you will be in teaching it.  You also have more experiencing in recognizing common misconceptions and what is harder for students to understand. 
One thing that I remember during the discussion was about how some teachers make an agreement with the students about the work they are expected to do.  I do agree with what some people were saying about keeping high expectations of work for your students and that they will often meet your expectations.  This is true, but sometimes the school culture and students' make it very hard to accomplish this. During my student teaching at Mt. Diablo High School, there was "homework" that they had, but they also had class time to do this homework.  If they did not have the class time to do work, they would not do any work at all.  If they finished their work, they would have time to study for their quiz.  From my experience there, about 95% of the students would not do any work at home. In cases like this, probably the start of the year will have very different expectations by the end of the year.  I think you have to slowly raise your expectations, if you  make too big of changes, I think there will be a lot of rebelling and extra problems created.  I do not think teachers should just let students to minimal work the entire time, they need to make an effort to improve their students' ability.

Based on the discussion, I do not think that my opinions changed.   Most of what I heard during the discussion, I agreed with.  I can’t think of any comment made that shocked me when it was said.  No one seemed 100% ready in their content knowledge to teach their classes, which was the same for me and was expected.

3.  I still have many questions that I am thinking about using and researching in great detail.  Two main ideas that I am interested in are not closely related at all.  One question is about how religious views play a role in their advancement in scientific knowledge, if it plays a role at all or what role it does play. I have started doing some research in finding articles on this topic. Most of the articles I have found are more about what should be taught in schools, pros and cons of teaching evolution or creationism in school, and other things about the curriculum of life sciences.  The part that I am more interested in is how religion might play a role in their career choice (a career in a life science related field), their grades in science, and more of how their post   life science class has changed their views in any way.  I'm not sure what a possible experiential learning source would be to help me with this idea.  Possibly trying to find some sort of creationism class and observe it or an interview with someone who has strong religious beliefs and does work in a life science related field and/ or does not work in a life science related field.

          Another question that I would be interested in working on is related to what makes some students turn off to science.  What causes it, when it happens, and what factors can lead up to hating, or lacking confidence in the subject.  I have not tried to research this topic yet, but I have had experience with students who say they do not like science, or they are not good at science.  These students were very young and have not even had much experience with science overall.  This is why I would like to know what happens in their lives that cause them to, at such a young age, already not like science.  Experiential learning sources could be going to a place like academy of science, and observe what age of kids I see, what the kids are doing, who they are with, how engaged they look.  Talking to other teachers, science and other content areas, would be very good experience also to see what they have seen in their experiences.

4.  I like to be in a natural setting and observe animals that are in the area, both big and small animals.  I took an agricultural entomology class that allowed me to observe insects that create large problems for farms, some that cause small problems, and some that are beneficial!

This is a cucumber beetle that is a pest of cucumbers.

 This is a picture of an ant eating a carob moth larvae.

Taking this agricultural entomology class was a class that I really enjoyed.  It gave me a greater understanding of competition, predator prey relationships, and ecology overall as well as adaptations and evolution that made these animals and plants the way they are.  These concepts made me more interested in science which helped lead me to being a teacher.

This is just a picture of my dog Goki protecting my son Charlie!
This doesn't have to do with my content area...

Possible Guiding Questions

5 possible guiding questions:
1. How has human actions led to extinctions or near extinctions of plants and animals?
2. How does small group lab assignments affect the learning of elementary school students compared to individual lab assignments?
3. How does strong religious beliefs change the way students accept or view the validity of  life sciences and evolution?
4. What are the forces being applied in space?
5. What are the causes of students being turned off or lose confidence in their science abilities?