Ask Slashdot: Online Science For 8th Grade Students? 225
Peterus7 writes "I'm a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I've been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I'm asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!"
Slashdot (Score:2)
Get them to read Slashdot. I promise their lives will be much more fulfilling. :P
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Reddit is the hivemind.
4chan is the dark underbelly of the internet. When archangels travel within 4chan, they do it as a group, with heavy air support.
Tl; dr: 4chan is virtual hell
KhanAcademy (Score:5, Informative)
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I second this. Also, go to Wikipedia frontpage, follow links that you find interesting. The amount of stuff I've learned doing that is immense.
Then again, I'm way past school age, and back then I'd only look at stuff the teacher DIDN'T tell me to look at. Maybe you should instruct them to look at Fox News, tmz, Hello magazine, and a good dose of X-Factor and Big Brother reruns.
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When I was a teenager, I went to the city library and sat and read Encyclopaedia Britannica for hours.
Same here. I used to cut class and go to the library. The books there were way more interesting than the classes. Also, truant officers never check the libraries.
After reading the encyclopedia, I have never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit.
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Khan was valedictorian of his high school class and attained a perfect score in the math portion of his SATs. Khan holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Khan_(educator) [wikipedia.org]
U mad bro?
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So he can do it. Good for him.
Ted Williams was the greatest hitter of the modern era of baseball. He sucked as a coach and a manager--because all the qualifications in the world doesn't mean that you can then get someone else to do it.
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Get offline and do experiments (Score:5, Insightful)
Do real experiments. The kids will remember that.
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Nitrogen triiodide was what really kept my classmates' attention.
Cool if your high school chemistry teacher allowed you to synthesize NI3 or NI3(NH3) and then use it. Was he fired afterwards?
NI3(NH3) is impressive for stability demos and maybe even a very cautious practical joke. We did not make it until university, where one of the chemistry lecturers was slightly mad - the labs had to be evacuated on several occasions because of the experiments he encouraged.
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Also, let me add - this was 25 years ago. Schools seem to be much more twitchy about such things these days.
Yep. 35+ years since I was in high school. We played with all sorts of "dangerous" stuff in our poorly-equipped chemistry and physics labs. It included some organic synthesis and distillation as well as pyrotechics (the usual Mg, Na+water, etc.), and we also played a little with throwing around lightning, and spinning while holding heavy gyroscopes. Of these, the gyroscope sessions were probably the ones with the smallest safety margin.
Re:Get offline and do experiments (Score:5, Informative)
These practical experiments will give the conceptual basis of what will be tested if the kids ever take an AP Science exam. They do not need to be fancy. Heat water measure rate of change. Build a gravity accelerated race track, film the cars, and analyze using free video analysis software. Run 1mw laser though pieces of plastic. And, the most important experiement of all, give them measuring instruments, let them measure things around the room, and then compare results. They will be amazed at how different everyone's mesasurements are. At that age, mean, mode, median, and rage are valid math concepts.
As far as online goes. Look for any and all animated experiments. PHET has many of them. You can download videos of experiments, or have the kids make them, and make scatter plots relating various variables using Tracker Video Analysis. The construction of these graphs meet many objects for high school math and science. I have found online sources to simulate any experiment that I want to do. Most of these are accesible to almost any age group by simply by adjusiting pre-lab instruction and post-lab assessment
Just like in any expeiment, the pre- and post-lab are the thing. Most kids will lean very little from a lab without a pre- and post-lab. Doing the lab is only going to be so successful. The required analysis of what the student has observed is a key learning process. In any lab, online or not, know the concepts that are to be taught, and how they will be reinforced and assesed. For instance on PHET you can make resistors catch fire. Why do they catch fire? Will they catch fire faster if the resistance is increased of the potential or current. This creates an exciting learning activity.
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Build a gravity accelerated race track, film the cars, and analyze using free video analysis software.
Galileo did it with inclined planes, without video, and without video analysis software. How does the video and software make it any better?
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An inclined plane is a pretty good way to slow things down. If you need to rewind it, put the ball on top of the inclined plane again.
There's a major benefit of an actual ball and inclined plane over a video of it.
You *know* the ball is going to follow the laws of physics, whatever they are.
When you watch a simulation, you don't know whether the simulation is right or not. You're not learning from the real world any more, you're learning from models and calculations. You're like the anti-vivisectionist girl
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If you want an introduction to mechanics and astronomy, to the scientific method, and the experimental method, the 16th century, with 16th century techniques, is a pretty good place to start.
Objects were falling too fast for Galileo to measure the speed, so he rolled them down an inclined plane to slow them down. Genius.
And he did it all without even an 8086 chip.
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>Hmmm. Well, turing had a computer design back in the 1800s. Maybe you should be using that to post on slashdot, and I'll start teaching with 19th century techniques.
I can't work out whether this is a pathetically unsuccessful troll, or just the work of a retard, but I think I'll plump for the latter.
Real life better than video (Score:2)
If you are just going to demonstrations, then I see no reason why kids should not just be watching videos.
There is a huge difference between seeing something live and watching a recording. We are all used to seeing amazing and impossible things on video for entertainment. Doing something real in front of a lecture has a far bigger impact. Plus students get the chance to ask "but what if you did X instead of Y" and see the results (assuming it is safe!).
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"They will be amazed at how different everyone's mesasurements are."
Really? I recall being the only one in my high school chemistry/physics classes who really cared about that.
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But when you get to set them on fire yourself... it's "Holy SHIT!!! We got to BURN SHIT in CLASS TODAY!!!" and they'll talk about it for weeks. This is what is called a Golden Opportunity to actually teach them what's going on.
Exactly. And you don't have to do dramatic experiments/demonstrations every week. Just one spectacle per month will get your students interested in the subject and will earn you a reputation as the Teacher Who Does Good Shit.
Our older daughter's physics teacher recently got them to play with the van der Graaf generator (I have similar fond memories from high school). She was one of the eager volunteers for some hair-raising experiments, including shooting sparks from her fingertips. She told us that almost
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2) Nobody remembers how to measure anything these days. I spend a large part of my time explaining to PhD students (and the not so occasional postdoc) how to measure stuff, and why their measurements might not quite match their equations, and why they shouldn't always believe their (or my) results. And why some measurements are pointless, because the error is larger than the number they're looking for. We've gotta start teaching this stuff early.
Experiments vs Technology (Score:2)
I've taught a course called Technology in Science Education, and my premise was that technology for the sake of technology is the wrong way to go - a sentiment I hear echoed here pretty frequently. HOWEVER, there's a reason we use technology - it gives us abilities that we don't commonly have. And this addresses that other common critique when someone wants a technology for education - it's not just a "Cool, see how this is on a computer now?" thing, or a replacement for hands-on experimentation, but rath
Re:Get offline and do experiments (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember our science teacher getting a very large steel drum, putting some water in it and heating, then quickly screwing on a tight-fittning cap and dousing the thing in iced water. It collapsed on itself in a satisfyingly noisy way, showing just how substantial atmospheric pressure is.
One more vote for real experiments.
Re:Get offline and do experiments (Score:4, Interesting)
Our teacher would always have a "demo" if everyone was in their seats on time and quiet when the bell rang.
Some of the 'epic' ones I still remember:
Coiled a gas tube through a beaker. Filled the beaker with liquid nitrogen, so then we had liquid natural gas (not sure what they run to chem labs). He lit the beaker on fire and then dumped it on the floor. It was like watching a bead of water skitter across a hot skillet, except it was on fire.
They also got 2 massive blocks of dry ice. Lit up magnesium and put it in the center. We then removed the dry ice and what was left was a solid chunk of carbon. Magnesium is so insistent on burning that it ripped the oxygen from the CO2 to sustain itself.
One day we went out to the football stands and he had a rig setup that would drop a bowling ball straight down just as another one shot off the side. Used to show shit falls just as fast even if it's moving sideways.
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We made nitrocellulose rockets, tie dye lab coats, ethanol, rootbeer, and Hydrogen we blew up. All pretty cool. O chem was rad.
Experiments don't have to be useless. There just need to be better more interesting experiments and ones which are practical as well.
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Yeah, whatever. Mod me down. Mark my words, though, if some teacher cold-cocked you and yelled "NEWTON!" -- that is a lesson you'd remember for the rest of your life.
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Show video game content (Score:2)
"That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest-son-of-a-bitch in space! I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years! If you pull the trigger on this you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!" -- Alliance Sergeant in Mass Effect 2
Youtube and Instructables (Score:2, Interesting)
Diffusion Limited Aggregation (Score:2)
http://www.khanacademy.org/ (Score:2, Informative)
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An even simpler list google science simulations http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sicence+simulations&btnG=Search&meta= [google.com] . There seem to be a whole swag of readily available free sites.
3D Printing & modelling (Score:4, Interesting)
Teach the kids about 3D printing (see http://reprap.org/ [reprap.org] maybe even get one of the cheap printer kits or an UP! Printer if you have budget.
These things let kids unleash a form of creativity and spatial learning that is hard to find anywhere else. No need to actually teach them how to design 3D objects - they'll be scrambling to figure it out for themselves! Keen students will print their own 3D printers. Less enthusiastic ones will download from http://thingiverse.com/ [thingiverse.com] and create "Mash up" objects.
Inevitably one of them will print a penis for shock value, but kids are like that.
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Er, that is fairly well removed from the concept of science. Science is about, you know, the scientific method: observe, hypothesize, experiment, refine, repeat. The closest I can see this coming is material science, like finding the optimal wall thickness for a given force, but I'd say that's closer to applied engineering.
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I'm not a grad student at the Media Lab, and I'll second everything the poster above said. I've been using Scratch with 5th grade students for physics and even some simple ecosystem simulations (all student created) for about 4 years now. The programming language is simple enough to get out of the kids' way and let them create what they want. Whatever you are teaching - if the kids truly understand it they can show you by creating a sim for it, and if they don't understand it they have to figure it out i
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Cassiopeia project [cassiopeiaproject.com] also has some great videos, especially if you want to interest boys with raging hormones in science.
math and science gizmos (Score:2, Informative)
Check out http://www.explorelearning.com/ for math and science simulations (aka Gizmos) with corresponding lessons.
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Gizmos are great, but pretty expensive... figure out when you are going to use them and start the 30 day trial right before you need it!
Some resources ... (Score:3)
1. The Today in Science [todayinsci.com] listing of birth and death dates of scientists, and notable events. (For example, today is the anniversary of the publication of Einstein's paper on General Relativity, Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie.
2. Interactive science simulations [colorado.edu] from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
3. Science news articles at PhysOrg.com [physorg.com], New Scientist [newscientist.com], and Technology Review [technologyreview.com].
Real, or educational? (Score:2)
AAVSO?
http://www.aavso.org/ [aavso.org]
American association of variable star observers?
Kids could observe, but its probably a heck of a lot easier to use the lightcurve generator. Don't tell them about the different kinds of variable stars, let them discover it for themselves.
Topical subject: Earthquakes (Score:2)
Computers can be used to detect earthquakes:
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/quake_network [wired.com]
You can get a free sensor from the Quake Catcher network (or use a laptop).
http://qcn.ucr.edu/ [ucr.edu]
Another subject that might be interesting: Fossils.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/Fossilhow.html [enchantedlearning.com]
Bert
Periodic Videos. (Score:3)
Remote Sensing for kids (Score:2)
Periodic Table Table (Score:3)
I'm not sure how directly applicable it is, but The Periodic Table Table at http://theodoregray.com/periodictable [theodoregray.com] is a great science site.
It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.
A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.
Zooniverse, NASA (Score:3)
You mentioned Galazy Zoo, but there's actually a larger effort called Zooniverse [zooniverse.org], which includes:
... and the other astronomy like stuff.
Besides that, a number of science agencies have various educational resources. From NASA, for 5th to 8th grade:
Other agencies have stuff too, but I don't know where it all is off the top of my head.
Physics Simulators (Score:5, Informative)
Hey! I'm just going through a teacher's program right now, and I've been looking for resources to use with smartboard. First of all, if you don't have a smartboard go here:
http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ [johnnylee.net]
Then try out:
Algodoo (costs about 25 euros): Great physics simulator. I would say it would be useful even for university students. You can, however, adjust the difficulty level. It's good for kinematics, some optics, buoyancy, some fluid dynamics and a few other things. I started off with making a piston pump system.
http://www.algodoo.com/wiki/Home [algodoo.com]
Crayon physics: Great for intuitively exploring some physics concepts. It costs about 20 bucks. It's similar to above but it's closer to a game. There are a series of challenges that you accomplish (try to move a ball to a star, overcoming a series of obstacles. Learn some physics concepts through osmosis.
http://www.crayonphysics.com/ [crayonphysics.com]
Celestia: Great freeware for exploring our galaxy (and neighboring galaxies). It implements astronomy knowledge into a space simulator. It allows to you to visit out solar system and beyond. As humanity discovers more, you can update the planet (i.e. with new exoplanets). This one is super cool, a little like Eve Online but IRL. You can also install Star Trek universe updates if you are a trekkie, as well as Star Wars.
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [shatters.net]
Ok that's the coolest stuff. There are other things out there but they aren't as impressive. ScaleoftheUniverse is neat, but limited in classroom utility: http://www.scaleoftheuniverse.com/ [scaleoftheuniverse.com]
Re:Physics Simulators (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget these:
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html [gettysburg.edu] - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know
Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/ [stellarium.org]
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download [ap-i.net] (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html [stargazing.net] - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)
NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/ [nasa.gov]
Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/ [hubblesite.org]
If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html [orbitsimulator.com]
Various Roller Coaster Simulators
Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/ [rasmol.org]
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/ [umass.edu]
Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)
Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/ [umass.edu]
Measurement Tools (Score:2)
Various mechanical and electronic measuring tools abound for use with the PC and for manual use.
They need to learn how to use such tools no matter what sub-discipline they enter. Even if they never use such tools much, they must know they exist and how they work, because they will then know people can do work with those tools on such projects.
Tools to measure and compare distance, time, velocity, weight, PH, temperature, frequency, polarization of light, etc. are all absolutely needed to understand science
Diffusion Cloud Chamber (Score:2)
Bad Premise (Score:4, Insightful)
"I.. have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online."
I call bullshit. You're noticing students motivated by non-school things, that happen to be online. Put school online and they will be equally disinterested as before. (Although you get to be that teacher going "Look! I'm hip! I get online! I'm so cool!").
Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).
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Or, show me an experiment that an online program has better interest-level and/or student outcomes (from the same population of student).
Like the hole in the wall experiments?:
http://solesandsomes.wikispaces.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/05/1542231/Using-the-Web-To-Turn-Kids-Into-Autodidacts
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I don't see any experiment, nor demonstrated better outcomes in any of those links. Citation needed (meaning: short quote, link/book, page number).
What I do see is this: "On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645070639938954.html
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"Yes, it's true that you won't have many resources for "gold standard" double-blind, same population proof for online education, but being in education, you must certainly know that no such study is even possible. Education research just can't happen that way."
As a statistician who teaches experimental design, I totally don't agree with that. Citation needed (short quote, link/book, page number).
students are very motivated by anything online? (Score:2)
Such as Facebook, twitter, farmville...
Start with something out of the ordinary and build (Score:2)
The best way to get kids attention is to start with something that defines intuition, and really focus the discussion on that to begin. Example: we all know that when you cool a substance, it goes from gas to liquid to solid. When you heat it up, it goes from solid to liquid to gas. Look at the noble egg—goes in the pan as a liquid, and as it heats.........wait, ok, well that's a bad example. We all know that when you something turns into a solid, it gets denser, and we know that dense things sink in
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Look at the noble egg
No, not noble eggs. They don't combine with anything so you can't make a good omelet. :-D
There: use humor! Science humor!
Well, OK, maybe not. :-(
Wish I had mod points... (Score:2)
I'd use them to assign off-topic to all the posts concerning teacher pay, benefits, workload and state budgets.
Come on people. This teacher is just trying to do a good job and we have to turn into an on-line teaparty or NEA advocacy forum?
Really fun starting points (Score:2)
These two sites talk about science errors in movies and TV shows. It's a great way to start a discussion because you're leading in with something fun and familiar, and possibly even something that they've seen and thought "oh no WAY could that work."
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ [intuitor.com]
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/ [badastronomy.com]
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Sadly, it's been too long since Phil's done a good Bad review. Shame, because there's been a lot of good ones these past few years, like a recent trailer talking about how we only use 20% of our brain. The old cliche used to be 10%, so maybe progress is being made. :-P Eh, maybe I'll take up the gauntlet. I have some web real estate somewhere, I think.
Making science engaging... (Score:2)
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You win the thread even if you were joking.
Because science and math and engineering really are the tools we have to fight Sagan's demon haunted world of ignorance.
Wow, you came here for advice? (Score:3)
Three comments in, and it's a knife fight about the school system between the "Burn The Schools" crowd and the "Teachers and schools are noble places of unicorns and rainbows and they just need another fifty million billion zillion dollars" contingent.
My advice: Eff the Intertoobs. Take them out to see science and engineering in action. Go to a factory. Go someplace something gets built. Take them to some hub of commerce. Take to a stock exchange or a bank. Teach them that the numbers matter, that they have purpose and meaning. Show them the real world works, and not the filthy 1-dimensional world views you get in places like this. Field trips, my boy, field trips.
Nitrogen triiodide (Score:2)
You should know the rest.
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Short hours
Hahaha... do you really thing a teacher's day end when the last bell rings? Or that many teach summer school just to make ends meet?
Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently
This doesn't seem to apply for any teacher I know.
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It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!
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It's just all so damn sad. I'm falling into a puddle of my own tears. Oh my! I mean, education only makes up around 55% to 65% of state budgets. Why, whatever will those poor destitute people, do? Clearly, they need 100% of all taxes to go to education. Then everything will be perfect and everyone will be well educated and teachers will finally be able to stop living on the street, sleeping in the gutters and living on cans of cat food!
Citation please.
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Of the $127 Million budget, $48 million is earmarked for education and $37.5 million of it is set for K-12.
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html [ca.gov]
So, while the OP is wrong in his numbers, and that should be called out, he is not wrong in his general point that the public school system has plenty of money.
Public education is the single largest line item in the states budget.
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Of the $127 Million budget, $48 million is earmarked for education and $37.5 million of it is set for K-12.
Thanks.
On a side note, numbers on that link are in thousands. ^m^b.
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Education degrees aren't real degrees and they cannot be compared. It is both a joke and a shame in all the other schools on every campus and has been for decades.
I agree with that, but they cost just as much as the "real" degrees do, not to mention that a college degree really isn't much more than a piece of paper that gets you a job these days anyway. Also, even in a "sham" degree, they still make you do shit that takes just as much time as the crap you have to do in any other degree. The difference is merely that "education" as a topic, is bullshit. The fact that it's a joke doesn't necessarily help the people who have to go through it, though.
My mother was a t
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My source is the National Teachers Association. The very first state I looked at was my own state, California. What did I find? STARTING salaries are $41k, and AVERAGE salaries are $68k. That means that many are making over $95k. Very simply, this is not
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Off-topic with OP but On-topic with Parent:
So strip collective bargaining rights?
I never understand this class wars business, where the rich pit their non-unionized minions against the unionized employees. Teachers make a liveable income but it's not a life of luxury like the actual upper class would have you believe. To the poor right: stop voting against your interests! If you are upset because you think teachers have it better than you, the solution isn't to bring teachers down, it's to fight for an incr
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Short hours, long summer vacation, lack of supervision, great retirement benefits, union benefits, tenure, and discount at Border's books all come to mind. Not to mention that teachers pay increases have outstripped inflation consistently which cannot be said of very many fields. I don't begrudge teachers what they are paid, but they are represented by the largest union in the country, and they are not under compensated as a group and I am tired of hearing that refrain.
Short hours and long vacations are a bit misleading, all the teachers I've ever known have done a lot extra on top of the "office hours" of 9 to 3 or whatever.
Lack of supervision certainly doesn't apply here in the UK, there is a lot of testing, monitoring and so on. You get a reasonable pension here (at the moment) and there is indeed a good union, but tenure doesn't apply to teachers here.
Overall, teachers are not particularly badly paid by public sector standards. A newly qualified teacher straight o
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I don't know, but there seem to be quite a few teachers who go about their job the wrong way. They're extremely short tempered and take offense to nearly everything (even given their situation, this is not appropriate), act like a dictator in their own classrooms (such as censoring speech that opposes their own political views even when the students are allowed to speak), treat their students like garbage (constantly yell and throw out anyone who merely questions or corrects them), and fail to make the clas
Re:Anything Online? (Score:5, Insightful)
They may like teaching, but many of them (that I've seen) don't appear to be good at it. If you don't have patience, you really, really shouldn't be a teacher.
I think we need to make teaching more attractive as a career to build a bigger (hopefully better) pool of applicants to pick from. Regardless of what Fox News says, they are underpaid considering the job requirements and stress they deal with.
Re:Anything Online? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the money that's the problem really. Oh sure, the newbies make shit money, but they eventually do all right.
The problem is the job itself, and its not getting easier.
I am given to understand that garbage men make a pretty decent wage. However, the reason that many don't consider that a field worth aspiring to is because as a job, it fucking sucks. The same thing goes for teaching, only the suckage comes from a different set of causes.
Personally, from my observations, schools would benefit more from hiring more people to help, than they would benefit by paying existing teachers more money. There is no lack of people qualified to do something in a school. What there is a lack of is people hired to do that work. Workloads are high, and classroom sizes are getting bigger. They need more people, but the fact of the matter is that the very unions with their tenure and working to increase existing teacher salaries means that the number of open positions for people who train to be teachers is pretty small. They can't very well hire more people if they have to either give them tenure or worse, not be able to keep them on because otherwise the union will force the district to hand out tenure or to let them go.
Teachers may well be a little underpaid, but what they are mostly is *under supported*.
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uh oh.
did someone hurt your feelings today at school?
it's okay princess, you can tell us.
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I've no idea why you have been moderated flamebait, this appears to be a rather insightful question to me.
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I know you are young and idealistic (and hopefully, a woman), but teaching is a political game, fraught with danger, low pay, and endless politics.
And, I guess, sexism.
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I skipped classes that thought me only basic math and other things I already mastered, in order to have time to learn to code in C, read Dostoevsky, and work fixing computers and writing simple apps.
Thought? Taught, I suspect... not much spelling and attention to detail in Doestoevsky, then. You must have read it in the original Russian, comrade ...
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Congrats on having a vocational, non-well-rounded education.
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Yes, I second Concord.org, especially as the put what they develop under free license (the LGPL):
http://www.concord.org/ [concord.org]
Not free (except to demo):
http://www.explorelearning.com/ [explorelearning.com]
Other random:
http://www.miniclip.com/games/chasm/en/ [miniclip.com]
http://www.missiontolearn.com/2008/03/more-than-50-web-widgets-for-your-learning-mix/ [missiontolearn.com]
http://simulation.northwestern.edu/ [northwestern.edu]
Look for physics simulators; example:
http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/ [dan-ball.jp]
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Go to sites like nature.com/news , let the students read the latest and most interesting papers or blog entries and discuss them afterwards!
http://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org]
can result in good comedy value.
Seriously though you have to decide if you're trying to make them learn, in which case tossing them in the deep end at arxiv is appropriate, or just filling time and trying to be cool, in which case its youtube video time.