When I first started reading Mr. David Wees's blog post about gender bias in education, I would a tad bit confused. I did not realize that it was a suggestion from another person until I read," Mark writes..." I began to read Mark's suggestion and was astonished at what was being suggested. Mark suggested that some teachers are unknowingly bias when calling on students to answer questions in the classroom. Mr. Wees said that he probably wouldn't attempt this at his school and to be honest, neither would I. While taking EDU 400, I was taught that males students are more prone to developing special needs than females. Since special education is what I am teaching then that was the comment that I made to him. I am not really sure how to take this though. Thinking back to when I was in school, the girls were called on more than the boys because the boys always coward away when it came time to answering the teacher. His blog post was very interesting to me and I am wondering if he wasn't going to do it at his school, would he go to another school to perform this experiment? Maybe that was a question I should have asked. I also found it interesting that there was a short bio on Mr. Wees at the end of his blog. In all these weeks on commenting on teachers' blogs, this was a first for me.
C4T#4 (part 2): Playground Physics
By: David Wees of Canada
I think this man has one of the most brilliant minds I have ever seen!! In his most recent blog posting, he used a day at the playground with his son and turned it into a physics lesson. He instructed his to slide down the slide to illustrate friction, then his son went to the sliding monkey bar to illustrate inertia...who knew that one could use a playground to teach a physics lesson. I commented and told him my opinion of him. I also told him that I hoped to be like him (his creative ability and ways of getting new ideas across to students) when I got into the classroom. I love how he was about to do his lesson plan while also spending quality time with his son. I think that is one the most important things in a family.
Thank you for the compliment, Daphne, I appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteOne of my views is that we should, when possible, use things kids already understand to help them learn new things. The point of the playground physics post was to show that you can an ordinary thing that kids (hopefully) do on a regular basis and use it to teach some principles of physics. I should also note that the physics ideas are actually represented by the use of the playground equipment, I'm not trying to draw analogy.
So my challenge to you is this: take a look at some activities that your students almost certainly already do, and see how they are related to some idea or area of knowledge that you are teaching, and see if there is a way to use these activities to help students see that the idea or area of knowledge you are trying to teach is actually a familiar one.