Evidence | Artifacts (All | Highlights | Stories)
-
Early Workflow Success
After teaching physics for a year, I had a general sense of the pacing and frustration with not figuring out students’ misconceptions early. An incorrect assumption in math and science travels with you and makes further understanding more and more difficult. I tried giving more homework, but grading would backlog and I still had the…
-
Year One, Honors Precalc
Out of college, I applied to the Bentley school to teach. A new high school, about to go into its fourth year and it needed a physics teacher. I did not get that job (though I would a year later) In early August, they suddenly had a math opening. I called them up, and explained…
-
How I ended up in education
As a child, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. The best I could come up with was to be an inventor. I was fascinated with how everything worked and wanted to understand it all from machines to how people interacted with each other. In my childhood, I moved every…
-
First Year Teachers Workshop
I went to this workshop part way into my second year of teaching. It was profound how much experience you gain in a year. Compared to teachers who were in the profession for just under three months, I was an expert (and the leaders of the conference were far more knowledgeable than I was). My…
-
Relevance: Physics Homework For Choir Students
At the Bentley School, the choir would compete in a signing competition in Hawaii every year. This would take them out of a week fo school and we had to make packets for them to do while they were off campus. For the physics students, I built packets that were relevant to their trip, such…
-
Assorted Professional Development Artifacts
These are my, professional development goals from October of the 2003-04 school year. That year, I was a third-year teacher, a second-year physics teacher and was teaching my seventh new course and developing my third new course. Additionally, they had me doing Upper School scheduling, running student activities, coaching volleyball and preparing to be Science…
-
Other Duties as Assigned
Bet you didn’t know that I was the student activities coordinator in a past role? Bentley had me doing all sorts of things as they grew the school. I worked there during their Upper School’s years 4 through 7. Advisor Student activities coordinator Daily schedule committee 9-12 and later K-12 scheduling of students, courses, teachers…
-
Early Attempts at Managing Workload
2002-03 Wow, teaching is a lot of work Planning out my week based on the schedule. These two artifacts are indicative of a career-long effort to keep busy, balance workload and somehow keep periods of intense effort down. I am far better at this now, and yet, it continues to be a challenge.
-
Course Planning and Moving into Physics
Ideas when moving into teaching physics Bentley was a new school having only taught 9th grade conceptual physics before. I was charged with building out physics, and an AP offering in physics I sent the following to the administration regarding my proposed job as a second-year teacher. They agreed to drop me from AP Calculus…
-
Rejection!
Some of the rejections I’ve received over the years. Some of these would have been really nice talks too. This project, a great one by former colleague Sarah Rainwater, was also not selected. Some people just don’t know quality when they see it. I do recall that the people on that team took the rejection…
-
Avatari Project
The Avatari project started with a conversation between Ryan Winkelmann and me on gamification in education. We quickly brought in Karen Mills and looked at the 7th grade history project (we also had Nancy Adair and Paul Hagen join in). The premise was straight forward. The 7th grade research project was long for that age.…
-
Admissions Mock Classes
At Eastside Prep, we would have mock classes for prospective students. They would join together and participate in a class environment. This served to advertise the way we teach at EPS, in addition, to allowing us to observe classroom behavior of students. This system was fascinating as an educator. You would get an opportunity to…