Posted by mr.driver on Dec 19, 2023; 3:44am
URL: https://nabble.aealearningonline.org/My-Science-Learning-Reflection-tp18921p21183.html

My favorite teachers in school were typically the science teachers.  I remember Mrs. Buckholtz, Mr. Cadman, Mr. Woelber, and Mr. Holts.  Those teachers were good at relating information, but also making it interesting.  I can remember compliments that Mrs. Buckholtz gave me.  She told me I did a great job in test taking.  I remember the humor that Mr. Holts used to make class fun.  And I remember the hands on projects of Mr. Woelber - high school physics - home made hovercraft, rockets, and dust explosion.  Some of the experiments that we did for physics in the 90s would be unlikely to be approved in the modern era.  Mr. Woelber, who was ancient in the late 90s, said that in the 70s he would bring a gun to school and shoot a rollerskate on the track.  They would measure the distance the rollerskate traveled to figure out the speed of the bullet.  CRAZY!  We got to fire rockets, and thought that was pretty cool.

I don’t recall the less enjoyable aspects of my early science education.  I’m grateful that my memory seems to latch onto the positives and let go of the negatives.  I will say that I don’t remember much about science before grade 6.  I would have been in late primary or early middle school some 30 years ago and I’m sort of coming up blank on what was less than enjoyable.  

The positive impact that teachers had on my teaching practice is profound.  The way that they ran their classes made teaching look fun and made me pick a career in education.  Warmth, humor, knowledge.  I thought these were excellent characteristics that I wanted to model.  I have a strange journey - I started college as a science major, but after the first semester, I had two things happen that made me switch majors.  First, the science teaching advisor was on holiday, and when I went for my advisor meeting, the fill-in person told me that I should give up on teaching and go into big pharma to make some real money.  “Forget student teaching, just take an extra semester of classes and then go work for Johnson and Johnson.”  Thats nearly a direct quote.  Ok, I didn’t expect that.  Secondly, I had a really engaging politics professor.  He claimed to be a spy in the cold war on the Berlin Wall.  He said spy sounded cool, but it was actually really boring.  He was assigned to just listen to radio communications all day.  He had some very cool stories, and some cool perspectives on world politics.  He also predicted that Afghanistan was going to build the capacity to carry out an attack on the west - he said that before 9/11 happened by a full calendar year.  Anyway - he sort of talked me into dropping Science and taking on social studies.

Now that I’m nearly 20 years into my career, I find myself back in science education.  I’ve taught overseas for almost all of this time.  International schools don’t follow regulations like in the state of Iowa and so you can teach outside of your certificate.  Often, these schools have ‘gaps’ that need to be filled.  I’ve become a professional gap filler.  Leaning more into Math and Science, which are more in demand, than social studies.  I enjoy being a gap filler.  Also, I found that Social studies were getting a bit touchy to teach.  Especially in international settings, with differing social mores, I found it difficult to be teaching history or economics and easier to teach math and science -which are typically not political hot buttons.  

So there’s a little bit of my reason why I’m here and how I got started.  I remember my science education fondly.  I can’t actually remember the ‘bad part’ - and it had a profound impact on my career choices and personal interests in my adulthood.