Where Are All The Teachers??

I know it has been a while since I wrote on the blog. I haven't been feeling too well. I had a spell of dizziness and imbalance. I think it is due to the constant heat here and not replenishing my body with the necessary nutrients. I'm feeling better now, but I'm still not 100%. On top of all of that, the MEDO classes are keeping me busy and I'm trying to keep up with those. All in all, its been really busy the last few weeks. I think that may have something to do with me not feeling so well. I think I'm working hard and need a vacation. We have a long weekend next weekend and then the week off. So it will be good.

We have our WASC accredidation team coming this week to check out the school and make sure everything is going normal and well. Hopefully that will go well, we'll see. I'm not to worried about it, but they will be pulling teachers out of the classroom and asking to speak with them throughout the day. I really don't want to be one of the teachers to be pulled, but I have no control over that.

We had a carnival at school on Friday. There was an eating contest for the students, a dunk tank with teachers and a water balloon fight at the end. The one thing I noticed, and it is something I have noticed at other schools, is the number of teachers who were not at the carnival. I'm sure they were not in there classroom working, and they probably skipped out on the day. Most of them are older teachers who have been in the profession for a while. This really bothers me because it shows that these people are not teachers for the right reasons. They do the minimum they have to do to get by and refuse to go above and beyond what is required of them.

For me, we are here for the students, even though they may be spoiled and do not appreciate everything we do, we are still here for the students. If teachers are not willing to put a little effort into making these kids better people and making the school a better place, then they should really think about why they became teachers and what they are doing in the profession.

Besides that, I'm trying to keep kids from skipping out early and staying at the fair the whole time. What kind of example does that show when teachers are leaving early or not showing up at all? Some of these teachers complain about the students and complain about the way they act, but they are not doing anything to fix the problem. In fact, they are actually adding to the problem.

Off the soapbox, time to get some work done.

Aaron

Thai Cultural Workshop

We had the second part of our Thai Cultural Workshop today. Again, these are the classes we need to take in order to keep our teaching license for next year. For this trip, we went to Ayutthaya, which was the capital of Thailand for about 700 years before Bangkok. It is a very historic city with many temples and old ruins.

The workshop went well and we discussed several aspects of Thai Culture and customs. I have to type up a formal report over these aspects. I will email the final report when I have it completed. For now, I will simply talk about these pictures that I have posted.


The first two pictures are of ruins from the old capital buildings or temples for the King. I'm not sure exactly what buildings these used to be, but I do know that they were important government builidings. From what the workshop leader told me, most of the buildings were diminished and turned to rubble from bombings and fire by the Burmese.

The next three pictures are from a temple that we visited. The first is of Buddha, or at least what I thought was Buddha. From what I've been told, this is actually an important monk, but not Buddha. I still like him and think he is a jolly man, so I will call him Buddha for my sake and because I cannot remember is real name.

The next picture is an actual Buddha. Apparently, this is one of the largest Buddha's in Thailand, for obvious reasons. You can see how big it is because of the people at the bottom of the picture. It is huge and pretty amazing.

The final picture is of some bells that are right outside the temple. People would go by and ring them. I'm assuming its supposed to bring good luck to ring them in order. A lot of the culture over here is based on karma and good luck. They do things because they believe it will bring them good luck. Another example of this is we went to an elephant show after the temple and they had an elephant stand on two different stools and people would walk underneath the elephant because it was supposed to be good luck. Elephants are seen as sacred over here, a sign of the Buddhist religion. To me, this is ironic because the Thai people parade them around the streets of Bangkok like a side show, trying to get foreigners to buy 20Baht bags of food so they can feed the elephant.

A few things about the temple that I noticed while I was there. You could not where shorts, so I had to go in jeans and it was hot. Definately a little uncomfortable for me. As we were leaving, some Thai woman came after us screaming about paying to enter the temple. I believe this is really a load of BS because no one else has to pay to enter the temple, but because we are foreigners, they think they can take our money for being tourists. She was cussing us out as we were getting on the boat.

This is something I have noticed. Many Thai's see a westerner and they think, "They have a lot of money." Which, in comparison to the normal Thai person, we do make a lot more money than them. But they feel that because we are Westerners, they can exploit us for our money and its alright. I guess they justify it by saying that since we are not from their country and we have more money than them, its alright to try and take our money, whereas they would never do something like this to a Thai, because that would garner bad karma. Just something funny that I have noticed.

Aaron

Science Inquiry

We had a Science Inquiry Day with the Bangna Campus on Tuesday. I was a moderator for one of the sessions. What happened is kids were asked to create a science project for science class and then they voted on who they wanted to present the project at the science inquiry conference. These pictures are from the conference.

The first is of a shoe that has a pocket on the outside. Two of my kids performed this experiment. They were trying to create a shoe pocket to hold items (keys, money, etc.) but they wanted something that was not intrusive and could keep the contents dry. The experiment was trying to find material that would was waterproof. They had several different types of material and poured 50ml of water on the material. After a certain amount of time, they measured how much of the water had dripped into a tray below the cloth. The third picture is of the two girls who presented and their materials.

The second picture is the poster of one of my boys who presented. His experiment was over soil compaction and if compacted soil could soak up as much water as loose soil. He placed some soil in a cup, poured water on top of the soil and used a stop watch to determine how long it took for the water to fall through the soil. Then he took the same amount of soil and compacted it by pressing down on it, poured water on top and used the stopwatch to determine how long it took for the water to fall through the soil.

The final picture is two of my students eating popcorn. A girl, not one of my students, had an experiment to determine which popcorn popped more kernals, Orville Redenbacher or Pop Secret. She popped 5 bags of each for the same amount of time and at the same temperature and then counted the un-popped kernals. As part of the experiment, she brought 6 bags of popcorn in for the conference and the students were able to eat the popcorn.

Overall, the conference went really well. I think the kids enjoyed it and had a good time getting out of class. The kids had to ask at least one question and some of them were asking the same questions as others or asking questions that were just answered in the powerpoint. I noticed this and used it as a learning experience today in class. I asked the students if they noticed that the questions were being repeated, only phrased differently and how some questions were answered less than 30 seconds before they were asked?

Many of the students, both presenters and non-presenters, noticed this. The presenters said it was annoying answering the same question several times and being asked a question they had just given an answer for 30 seconds ago. I told the students that they now have a sense of some of the frustrations that teachers go through. Some of the students understood this, some of them didn't. It was good to open their minds to a different perspective.

Aaron

Burned Out

Its official, the third quarter is long and has taken a toll on me. I am pretty burned out from the whole quarter without a break. Not to mention the beginning of MEDO classes and trying to get started on exhibits. I truly think that next year will be much easier. At least I hope so. I feel that I am putting a lot of hours into this semester and its wearing me out. Comparing this semester to last semester I feel I am spending more time on the students and what they need. I recall giving the lesson last semester and then sitting at my desk getting work done and trying to stay caught up.

This semester I am giving the lesson and then answering questions and walking around making sure the students understand the concepts. This is good and I think it is improving the students attitude as well as my teaching skills, but it is definitely taking time away from preparing for classes and getting things completed. I have been in the last few weekends to get caught up on stuff for classes. Not that I enjoy going in on the weekends, but I don't have much choice. I have to do that to keep up with everything. Hopefully that will change soon. We have a long weekend coming up in early April and then I get a week off to come home. After that its just another month and then the year is over.

We do have the other half of our Thai cultural workshop this Saturday. I will write more about that later and send a copy of the report that I have to complete for that.

I've always been told the first few years are the hardest and most difficult for teachers. Hopefully that is the case and things will become easier as my career goes on.

Aaron

Lesson That Bombed

Today, I tried a discovery activity with my 6th graders that required them to make a few connections with previous information they have learned about. Unfortunately, it failed miserably and I am concerned about how this will affect the students mentally. We were starting a lesson on the area of a circle and we had just discussed the area of a parallelogram.

I took a circle and cut it up into pie pieces, then placed them next to each other with opposite orientation (imagine the sides of two pie pieces running along each other, with the point from one piece touching the crust from another piece, then continuing that pattern, first piece points down, second piece points up, third piece points down, etc.).

By doing this, we form was resembles a parallelogram. The height is the radius of the circle and the base (or length) is half the circumference of the circle. From here, I tried to get them to see relationships and justify how we can derive the equation of a circle from this method. I even put all the equations they needed up on the board. But the students had a hard time seeing that if C=pi*r^2 in one equation, they could replace 'C' in another equation with pi*r^2. I tried and tried to get them to see it, but they just could not make the relationship.

I spent the whole class and all I got was a glazed look and many students saying they did not understand. There actually were a few students who said they understood what was happening, but most of them did not. However, most of the one's who did not understand were the weaker students and they often give me a confused look. I am beginning to think that it was to early for these students to see this type of activity. With the reactions to this activity, I feel they are not ready for understanding the reasoning behind where equations come from and how we develop them.

Now I am forced with a decision.

1. The activity is not something the students need for the lesson. Really all they need is to plug numbers into the equation and solve. So they really do not need to understand this activity to complete the homework. So if they were completely lost during this activity, which many of them were, it is not necessary for the completion of the lesson or quiz.

2. Part of the problem that these students had with making these connections is that they have not had to do that in the past. It has always been, "here's an equation, plug numbers into it and get a number back." If I accept this and move on without trying to clear up the activity, I am not helping them develop critical thinking and abstract thinking skills. However, I feel I could spend another two days on this activity and many of them would still not understand.

As of right now, my goal is to have the students come in tomorrow and make two circles with a compass, one to cut out and one to keep as a circle. Then I am going to have the students complete the same activity and hopefully they will be able to see relationships if they are actually engaged in the activity. If this doesn't work, then I guess it doesn't work and I will have to accept it.

At the end of the lesson, I was very discouraged. I wasn't sure if it was something I was doing or if 6th grade is too young, developmentally, to comprehend this activity. If its the case of development, then its still something they need to be introduced to because its going to show up later, so why not now.

As a side note, I have been extremely busy the last few weeks and feel that I need a break. I have spent the last 4 free Saturdays in the school working, prepping or grading for about 4 hours at a time. I feel that I am having a hard time keeping up and can't get ahead. I will say that I have also noticed that I am giving more time to working with the students, instead of presenting the lesson and then working on other things. I am presenting the lesson and then walking around and clarifying things with students. This is taking time from me working on class activities, but hopefully it will help the students in the long run.

Aaron

Staff Meeting

We have staff meetings every Thursday after school. Recently, that has been focused towards our WASC Accredidation, which is coming up very soon. So its been rather lengthy and busy with all of that going on. One thing I noticed is that many of the teachers have difficult time settling down and listening to the principal when he needs them to pay attention and is saying something important.

I find this very ironic because I'm sure that all of these teachers have experienced this aspect with students not settling down and paying attention in class. The teachers probably complain and make a big deal about the whole situation. The problem is that many of these teachers are the same way and cannot settle down. The irony in that is amazing to me. When placed in a similar setting, teachers revert back to the same actions that upset them so much when performed by their students.

Aaron