Focus Group June 13, 2000

Flagstaff, Arizona

We are all here to talk about what advice these veteran teachers would give to a beginning first year physics teacher. Could you go around and say your name and say that you do give permission for this to be tape recorded, that would be great.

Leanette Burdick: My name is Leanette Burdick and I do give permission for this to be tape recorded.

Dave Thompson: Dave Thompson from Coconino High School and I give permission.

Ted Lyons: Ted Lyons from who knows where and I give permission too.

Leanette Burdick: I’m from St. John’s High School.

Julie: So the first question I wanted to ask is, "What’s the most important advice that you would give a first year physics teacher?"

Leanette Burdick: Ted’s the thinker.

Ted Lyons: Mine would be to find a mentor or mentors. Do the people search to find people that would support you, whether they are in physics or science or not. Find people that you would feel comfortable saying, "Where is the faculty restroom." and those important questions that need to be answered to make your school year a success, let alone physics.

Leanette Burdick: True. This says "for the physics teacher", but I think that a lot of these things are applicable to any teacher at all. But I think Ted’s right. Things they don’t teach you at the university are the things that you need to survive. How to order. How to get things that you want. I didn’t know I could ask for a file cabinet if I needed one. I thought that it just had to fall in your lap somehow. I didn’t know you could ask for things. You do need someone to act as your mentor to tell you how to do these things and you need support. You need to learn how things run, things about finance. They don’t think we need those things until we become administrators, but I think they are dead wrong. I think we need to learn how the operation of the school runs.

Dave Thompson: I’ll piggyback on the same thing. That’s critically important to have someone that can help you out with it. And again, as Ted was saying, it’s not important that they are a physics teacher or even a science teacher, but someone that can help you out and give you the moral support, a sounding board, things of that nature. But the most important advice I can give a teacher, and I’m not going to say a physics teacher, because I don’t think that we can narrowly discern from one to the other, is be yourself, don’t try to put on any false fronts, hats that don’t truly fit you. If you try to pull the wool over the students eyes, you are only going to be eaten up by them. So it’s critical that you sit down with yourself and ask yourself, what is your real philosophy in education. What do you truly want to do? If you can’t answer that question to yourself, then how do you expect it to get to your students? That’s something a mentor will help you with, being able to help you develop that.

Ted Lyons: If we try to look at the physics teacher in particular, verses just any teacher, one piece of advice that I would give for physics, and the other sciences as well, is to not be afraid to answer questions with, "I have no idea." For us to [feel] "we don’t want to go there, because the kids might ask this," then you are stuck, the kids are board because you are doing nothing new and exciting. I think really for a physics teacher, the key is to try to feel comfortable in the situation where you don’t know everything. The neatest situations I run across are the ones where they go, "Well, what’s gravity?" You can look at them and say, "Well, I don’t know. In fact, no one knows, and if you figure it out, you just won the Nobel Prize." To give them the idea that science and physics are not this dead field of studying what people did a hundred years ago and memorizing it for the test, but in fact, that science is about what we have today and progressing from that point forward. I think we neglect that with out students. For us to be able to say, "I don’t know" and the best is "nobody knows!" I think is really cool.

Dave Thompson: That’s important to not be afraid, to be able to look at your students and use them as a resource, because they are going to use you as a resource as well. Being able to have that confidence in your own self, you’ve got to be confident in yourself to say, "I don’t know." I mean, let’s face it, you are the teacher, you’ve got to know everything.

Leanette Burdick: It’s true. In other disciplines, they have a much greater chance of appearing to know everything. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like my kids come from teachers who give them the impression that they know everything and that they have every answer. They sometimes get frustrated with me. I’ll tell them, "I don’t know." How come you are not as smart as Mrs. So and So? (agreement from others) It’s hard. It becomes an ego trip for us to be able to answer questions, so it is important that we don’t get caught up in that ego trip. I also think it’s important to be very flexible.

Dave Thompson: a key piece of advice

Leanette Burdick: Because otherwise you’ll go crazy. You are going to have an idea or philosophy of what it is you want to accomplish and what you want to do. Each student is different, each school is different, each community is different.

Dave Thompson: each day..

Leanette Burdick: That’s right, each day, is different because of all the curve balls that get thrown at you. We would love to have all the equipment to do this lab. I think that’s one thing that separates teachers that stick with it and teachers who die out after a couple of years, is your ability to adapt to what you have and to be able to just go on and be creative, and do something with what’s available.

Dave Thompson: Remember, if we expect our students to learn, then we can’t ever be stagnant in learning ourselves. As a teacher, you’ve got to always be available or open to learning. That flexibility is critical, from the second that all of a sudden you have a bus evacuation drill that blew your great plans all to heck. That’s reality that student teachers and new teachers don’t ever see, but those teachers that are very successful, as I was saying, you’ve got to roll with those punches.

Julie: What advice would you give for professional development to a first year physics teacher?

Dave Thompson: I’ll give you one. Take it with a grain of salt. Try two to three new things every year, and that’s it. At this stage, by the time you’ve done for five years, you’ll be able to do anything you want. You’ll have the support of the district, the support of the administration. It’s when you try to change the world overnight that you are going to crash and burn. You’ll burn yourself out. You’ll feel frustrated. If I asked you to invest money, it would be nice to say I can invest it all and then tomorrow I’ve got one hundred thousand dollars from this one thousand, but it takes time. You invest a little bit at a time. And as you invest it, they you turn around and you look and you say, "hey, I have a great investment, look at the growth!" The same idea is in education. You are going to be teaching a course and you are going to say, "here are some great ideas." You will try to steal as many ideas and then you will say, "you know, I want to try this." It might be something that people would think, "Why would you ever want to do this?" Give it a try. If it works, Great! If it didn’t, doesn’t matter. You still tried.

Ted Lyons: The only thing I might say is that Dave has two to three too many for the first year.

Dave Thompson: (laugh) That’s right.

Ted Lyons: In the first year, it’s more that you try to keep your head above water. You try to do too much, meaning, particularly professional development. You might feel, "Here’s this week long conference in Houston and my principal said I can have the money, so I’m going to go." And so you get ready to do that, and yeah it’s really going to jazz you, but the reality is, for you to be gone a week, it’s going to take you two to three weeks to get ready, and it’s going to take you two to three weeks after you get back. Most first year teachers that I know of are struggling to begin with. To throw that in, that one week of "wow, this is really going to help me" cost them a whole nine weeks of that semester. You have to start early and after you teach awhile you can change that, you can do more and more and more. When you are first starting, I think the biggest problem is that you tend to try to do everything at once and we end up getting very little accomplished, because we are not saying, "my focus is how to take attendance and get it to the office before they have to come get it and yell at me"

Dave Thompson: And I’ll learn that one of these years.

Ted Lyons: And I haven’t learned it yet. You have to be very, very selective your first year, as far as professional development. Your principal will tell you, "you need to grow in this" and not worry too much about the physics aspects in order to grow. If you want to do that this summer, that would be good. I see so many teachers that teach all day, they think they can take the night class and those are the ones that last maybe a year, sometimes three.

Leanette Burdick: I’m in a different situation than they are, because I’m very isolated. So one of the things that helped me most that first year and has helped me since is being part of science teachers organizations within the state, and then national things is icing the cake, but if I can even make it to the local meetings. If you ask Ted, I don’t make it very often…

Ted Lyons: I was trying to think when you were at the last… anyway.. that was what I was going to add too. If I were to choose one thing, as a physics teacher, I would recommend to new physics teachers in this state would be to join the state physics teachers association. It doesn’t take a lot of time. You don’t want to use up a lot of time. A couple Saturdays out of the year. Really, the thing I think it does the best is not to learn physics or teaching, but to start to build those mentors that are not just in your building, but that are around the state. Because, face it, if you are a physics teacher, chances are , you are THE physics teacher. And who do you go get advice from? There is nobody else in your school. You have got to go to the other schools to find another physics teachers.

Dave Thompson: You will be very professionally isolated because you are THE physics teacher.

Ted Lyons: We are pretty lucky in this town because there’s three of us. That’s amazing. That’s really unusual for a town this size to have three physics teacher, plus all the university folk.

Dave Thompson: You are going to be in a situation in Chicago where you have that same benefit, of others. But you are going to have to seek out that benefit. Just like in here, you will still feel geographically isolated even though you are in a huge district.

Ted Lyons: It’s weird, I look at the people in Phoenix. They are actually, I think, more isolated than we are because we are. We have a small enough group, that we know, "oh, the physics teacher at Coconino? Oh, that’s Dave!" You go down to Phoenix and somebody, at North High School will say, "Who is the physics teacher at Central?" They have got no clue. We at least, run in to each other. Down there, I don’t think they do. I think the really tiny places, you are isolated and I think the really large places you are really isolated as well, unless you go out and do a little seeking with groups like the state physics teachers or local groups, or whatever.

Leanette Burdick: Even just the generic science teacher’s association, if that’s all there is.

Julie: Does that cover all the organizations you belong to?

Dave Thompson: The NSTA, the ASTA (the National Science Teacher’s Association, the Arizona Science Teacher’s Association) the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) Any of those. Also, put yourself in an organization like a listserv or anything like that, where you might have a question, "How do I do this?" You can post it out there, and with technology today, literally you will have a background of hundreds of people helping you.

Leanette Burdick: And then it depends on how politically active you want to get. I know, my first years, I belonged to NEA and AEA, which is the teacher’s union. That’s something that I think everybody has a decision they have to make for themselves, whether they want to be active in that or not. Money made up my mind, quite frankly, it’s awful to admit. It was a few hundred dollars a year I just didn’t think I needed to spend. There may be some benefits there, professionally for you.

Ted Lyons: Most physics teachers also teach other things, so the National Biology Teacher’s Association and you start going down the list of fifty bazillion things you could be a member of.

Leanette Burdick: Yeah, you have to choose.

Ted Lyons: It comes to economic issues very quickly.

Julie: What ways have you used those organizations to help you the most, or have you found them to be most useful. Besides asking questions, like was mentioned…

Leanette Burdick: The conventions. Those get me jazzed about all the possibilities. Even our little state one, that’s not all that.

Ted Lyons: Hey! (He runs meetings.)

Leanette Burdick: No, I’m talking ASTA now, ASTA has a convention, usually in October, it’s a couple of days. It’s not the biggest thing the world has ever seen, but there’s always something I can get excited about there. It revs up my teaching. Of course, I’m one of those people that, you know, I buy into everything hook line and sinker. I could be hypnotized in a flash, because I take suggestions so well, but you have to come back and do what Ted or Dave said and sift through it. You can’t do everything you have to decide what you can use and what you can’t use. But, gosh, there’s some great ideas and the energy of your colleagues, you can feed off it.

Dave Thompson: It recharges your batteries.

Leanette Burdick: It really does.

Dave Thompson: It does.

Leanette Burdick: And you need it.

Dave Thompson: You’ve got to understand, in education, you are going to have a serious go at it. You are going to have these ideas. You are going to want to change the world tomorrow, which is wonderful. That’s part of that philosophical belief. Then you are going to sit down and say, "OK, I’m going to change it tomorrow, but I’ve got to take a step first." It’s going to take some time. You are going to feel that point where it just like, "I can’t do anything anymore." It’s almost defeatist. Going to these things is highly recharging in that sense. There’s professional organizations, there’s awards that are available for these things as well. There’s tons of those things that you’ll get. And again, they’ll fire you up, they do.

Leanette Burdick: I would ask him how fired up and reenergized he got…

Julie: For somebody who is reading the transcript, can you say what…

Dave Thompson: What I’m saying is…

Ted Lyons and Leanette B.: Because if you are National Science Teacher of the Year for 1999-2000…

Dave Thompson: Now when I go to them [conventions], I look at them in a totally different light. I’m telling them, "folks, we don’t get the pats on the back." I haven’t been reviewed in seven years, I think, that I’ve actually formally seen anyone, or anyone has said, "You know, Dave, you are doing a good job." Who is going to say that for you?

Leanette Burdick: I did.

Dave Thompson: That’s what I said, and so someone needs to come in. It comes back to that isolation, because you will probably be THE physics teacher.

Ted Lyons: My turn on it, which is a little different, and it seems to be my theme at the moment is that it all seems to come back to again to the networking. When I go to conferences, I don’t pick up, maybe it’s my brain, the content ideas, I don’t get as much out of the content as I do from getting an email list or finding somebody who is doing something and having a chance to talk and bounce ideas off of. To me, it’s the networking aspect that is important in those associations.

Leanette Burdick: One more thing about this before you go on. I would keep my eyes open for summer professional development activities, because they abound. I have two colleagues who are here at NAU this summer, from my department. I feel kind of guilty because I would have told them. They both paid money out of their own pocket to come back to school. They never heard of any Eisenhower workshops. They are sitting in regular CEE or in undergrad biology classes trying to pick up content that is useful, but not nearly as useful as something like this (this workshop) is. So keep your ears and your eyes open. Do the networking like Ted said, because those are the things that really help. Really help.

Julie: What are the best resources you would recommend to the first year physics teacher?

Ted Lyons: Mine is the green book. I didn’t have a chance to see what the title of it was, but there is this really neat book and I’ll give it to you.

Dave Thompson: Is that the demo one?

Ted Lyons: It’s not physics, it’s how to survive your first year of teaching, is what it amounts to. It’s the best book, I think, for first year teacher type stuff that I’ve ever seen. It talks about class management. It talks about those things, it’s really cool. I really like it.

Dave Thompson: There is a book that’s very similar to that, its called "The First Days of School", by Wong.

Ted Lyons: That might be it.

Dave Thompson: It’s about yea long.

Ted Lyons: It’s about yea long, paperback, longer than it is tall.

Leanette Burdick: Harry Wong.

Ted and Dave: Harry Wong.

Leanette Burdick: Actually he has a set of videotapes too that you can watch.

Dave Thompson: Excellent, excellent resource.

Leanette Burdick: For any teacher.

Ted Lyons: Especially for first year teachers.

Leanette Burdick: Yeah, but they really good for any teacher, because we can always use ideas too, and we don’t to admit it sometimes.

Ted Lyons: If I knew where mine was, I’d probably be using it.

Dave Thompson: I will show it to you because it’s in my briefcase.

Julie: Other resources?

Dave Thompson: For physics, the modeling curriculum is a great resource and the PRISMS curriculum (Physics Resource Instructional Strategies Motivation)

Leanette Burdick: At one point it was a white binder, now it’s a blue binder, now they are reviewing it again.

Dave Thompson: If you have the opportunity before you start teaching, and Illinois has major…

Leanette Burdick: I think Iowa, Ames Iowa.

Dave Thompson: It’s one of those I states.

Leanette Burdick: It’s the Midwest, somewhere.

Dave Thompson: Go to it. It piggybacks closely with the modeling and..

Leanette Burdick: It’s based on learning cycles too and inquiry method.

Ted Lyons: I like just some of the little gadget books, like Tick L. Liem, (like "tickle-em") It’s just a book of little inquiry lessons, but it also, the nice thing is, that it also has these little activity and then some questions, and then he actually tells you what some of the answers are. So it’s really helpful. There’s another book by Jerold Walker, called The Flying Circus of Physics, which is , it asks really unusual questions. Some of them, nobody knows the answers to, some of them are relatively simple. Also of them are the ones that you think you know the answer to, but you really don’t. Those are pretty cool. I like that as a resource.

Dave Thompson: Another one, you can definitely get, critical, it’s called, Physics Begins with an M It is great. I’ll bring in a copy of it for you. The next one is Physics Begins With another M. It’s myth, magic, and mystery.

Ted Lyons: Cool.

Dave Thompson: What it does, it always start, each chapter, it says, what are thy myths about this, what are the mysteries about it. and then some magic with it, always some demos. It’s a great, great resource.

Ted and Leanette: I want to see that too.

Dave Thompson: It’s really good. It’s by Jewitt.

Ted Lyons: Another one, I can’t think of who wrote it, but it’s, Why does Toast Always Land Butter Side Down? I didn’t like the sequel to it. That one, it was so good, one of my high school student ripped it off. How many times do they want to rip off a book? But it was really neat for ideas for kids who are wanting to some kind of a project, wanting some kind of an idea, they have a bunch of little neat things in there that were basically questions. "Hmm I wonder" open ended type. There’s one book, this is for any teacher, I strongly, strongly recommend this book, it’s an easy read. You sit down and in a night you are done. It’s called the The Saber-Toothed Curriculum, and it’s out of print, but you can still find it. I don’t know how they do it, but every time I ask a book store, they come up with one. The Saber-Toothed Curriculum, (J. Abger Pettwell) It really makes you think about why do you teach certain things.

Julie: Can you think of any other books or videos or laserdiscs or movies, or organizational websites.

Leanette Burdick: I like The Mechanical Universe, the highs school edition.

Dave Thompson: The Mechanical Universe is a good one.

Leanette Burdick: It comes with a whole se of teaching materials, too if you get the high school version. Actually, this year, something that was ok was the ESPN… did you guys use that at all?

Dave Thompson: No.

Leanette Burdick: They have a set of tapes that relate physics to sports. Some of it’s not so good. But some of it’s interesting. The kids kind of liked it. There’s a lot of good software out there.

Dave Thompson: There’s some wonderful CD’s or Laserdiscs on demonstrations and stuff. The list could go on and on, but you can also take too much too.

Julie: How about, what field trips have you actually found useful?

Leanette Burdick: There’s your field trip man [Dave] right there. Start small. My kids do two field trips a year. I’ve never had the guts to take them to Magic Mountain or Knott’s Berry Farm, like Dave does. I take them down to Castles and Coasters, which is our in-state excuse for an amusement park. It’s not very big, but the kids have fun. We do labs on the rides and presentations. They have a good time and that’s fun.

Dave Thompson: Did you go during the Physics Day?

Leanette Burdick: I try to go then, but this year we couldn’t. We just went in March or something.

Dave Thompson: I don’t know that there’s any one field trip that’s going to be better than another. They key is to make sure that it’s applicable, that you can show real life, what’s going on, and what you are trying to develop within the classroom. If you can make it tangible to the students and they can actually see it, touch it, taste it, smell it, then it becomes much more than some esoteric information that you are covering in class that they never believe that they will never use or see. A field trip can be as much as going over to the playground. That can be a wonderful, wonderful field trip. It could be up to extents like doing a theme or amusement type park. But don’t try to take on something like, "I’m going to do ten of these things today." Get your feet wet and you will see what things are going on and those are great resources.

Leanette Burdick: I seriously have a hard time stomaching the four hour trip to the valley with my kids and I don’t know that I would be able to handle the thought of taking them to California.

Dave Thompson: We’ve been to Los Alamos Particle Accelerometer for three days. We’ve been all over, on a nuclear sub and working those out. But start small, work on them. What is excitement" What are the kids being really driven by? How can I have another tangible that they can reach out and see it in real life?

Ted Lyons: One of the problems I struggle with is, "Cool, they get to be with me for a day, two days, a week", but I’m not nearly as thrilled when my colleagues take them somewhere for a day, two days, or a week, and so there are other things than physics class.

Leanette Burdick: Especially if you are on a block schedule.

Ted Lyons: So that becomes a real concern of mine.

Julie: What do you recommend to new teachers to prevent burnout.

Leanette Burdick: Change. Disequalibrium.

Dave Thompson: Cool.

Ted Lyons: New teachers, don’t try to do too much. Find somebody to help you.

Dave Thompson: That’s right, back to the very first thing we were saying about having some of those support networks and somebody to sound those ideas off. Because you are going to go home crying sometimes, saying, "Oh god, I had one of the greatest ideas in the world" and you are going to fall flat on your face and feel that you are a failure. Someone’s going to come back and say, "No, you are not a failure, you gave it an effort." And then back to the other thing. What really prevents a burn out for me? Every now and then I get two or three letters that I sit down and read. You will see these things and the students will baffle your mind. Keep a file of these things, notes that you make to yourself somewhere, because one day you are going to open it up. Guaranteed.

Leanette Burdick: Pretty much every March and April. Maybe May.

Dave Thompson: Well, March through May.

Leanette Burdick: True.

Dave Thompson: It’s a powerful tool when you can bring home a letter that can literally make you cry when you read it. That’s why I do it.

Leanette Burdick: I think the other thing too is you need to have realistic expectations for your first year. When I said change and disequilibrium, I meant for somebody with my experience, not a first year teacher, because that’s all you have is change and disequilibrium the first year. You need to realize that the first year, is, in my experience, the hardest year. I wanted to quit so badly after the first year. I did not want to go back into the classroom. It was an incredible amount of work. I had four different preparations, none of which I was actually competent to teach. It was way too much effort, very stressful, and not what I expected at all. But my husband kept saying, "Just one more year, just try it one more year and see." The second year was so much better. Teachers need to sign on for two years at least and not let your first year experience be all they have.

Dave Thompson: Yeah. You can usually almost remember your second year. The first year you are going to try to be friends with everyone, the students. You are going to learn real quick that you get eaten up. You are the teacher, remember that. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have strong friendships, but it doesn’t mean that you are their friend. We ask favors from our friends. So think about that. That’s very hard for a new teacher because they want to be liked. You will be liked when you are respected.

Leanette Burdick: Keep some time for yourself. I would say, for a first year teacher, this is really difficult, because your time is so spent. Save a little time for yourself. Do something fun, do something different, something that is not physics, something that is not teaching. Save an hour a week if that’s all you can do, to do something else, a hobby, to get away, to forget about it, for just a little while.

Dave Thompson: And you have personal days or sick days. People think, "you can’t use them."

Leanette Burdick: Take yourself a mental health day.

Dave Thompson: You need to just relax and go a lay by the pool . I need to go and just read a book that has nothing to do with school. Pull yourself away some time. The kids will be there when you get back.

Julie: Let’s see, we finished talking about the professional teacher organizations we belonged to.

Dave Thompson: What other organizations do you belong to?

Ted Lyons: Sigma Xi, National Biology Teachers.

Julie: What is the basic structure of a lesson that you find to be most effective?

Dave Thompson: My basic structure of a lesson that I find to be the most effective is when I have the students.. I’ll go back to that resources. Leanette mentioned that it’s based on a learning cycle. If you can have the structure be where it’s an exploratory-type stage, where they can actually explore some concept, inquire about it, doing something of that nature, where they are kinesthetically touching, feeling it. Things of that nature, where they can hopefully bring up any misconceptions, that’s the goal, then you have a groundwork, or foundations to actually start developing the rest of your lesson upon. The ineffective lessons are those that are structured in that are structured in a sense where we are just giving the information, where they have no basis or no prior knowledge to build on.

Leanette Burdick: Hosing them down (with information), as Dan ( Dr. MacIsaac, a physic’s education professor leading the workshop this group is participating in) said… I have been using learning cycles for a long time. Maybe it started with PRISMS. I took PRISMS about 8 or 9 years ago or so and I really liked the learning cycle. I don’t care what curriculum it comes through. I really like it. I really like that structuring. It works well with my personality. I really think that there’s a lot of personality issues in teaching. I like to be able to let the kids have some interest and an exploration of some type, whether it’s a lab or a demonstration, some type of questioning session that you can do, to give them some kind of a reason to want to learn this, some kind of a motivation for learning. It makes it their necessity and not just my necessity, really. It makes those lessons seem a lot better to me and the kids seem to enjoy them.

Ted Lyons: One of the things I really like is to start with the discrepancy type situation, because in physics, the rule is, "if you think you know it, you don’t, if you think you understand it, you don’t, and if you think you are wrong, you are probably right." I really like, even more than just the exploration, I really like discrepant events. You start them going, and they are getting the answer, and you are leading them down the path. And you say, "Yup, you are right, right, right, and what about…?" And it’s totally unexplainable. You pull out this thirty second demonstration and it totally blows everything that they’ve just told you that the whole class was certain was true. That thirty second demonstration totally blows the entire thing out of the water and they can’t explain it. I really think that you learn best when you are forced into the uncomfort zone. If you can be comfortable, you are going to sit there. Afterwards, you may have been presented with things that could have led you to a totally different answer than you would have given originally and they say, "I would have gotten that."

Leanette Burdick: [They say]"I don’t need to run the lab, I know the answer."

Ted Lyons: I really believe that a lot of learning happens when there is a little bit of an uncomfortable situation. That’s why, one of things that I do that I really like on my labs is the "test-trial." I have a problem, because it conflicts with the whiteboarding [students whiteboarding in small groups is a teaching technique], so someday I’ll get to rationalize the two, but almost every single one of my labs has a test trial at the end of it. Let’s say, we are doing a lab on rolling a cart down the ramp. They’ve collected data, so they are finding the relationship and time.

(tape side switch)

Ted Lyons: If a kid is doing a lab, like a cart down a ramp, and they start to collect information and they got their stop watch, one of the first questions you get is, "How many data points?" Let’s say they are going to start it here, and then somewhere down the ramp, they are going to measure time. How long does it take for a meter or two meter? "How many data points do I have to collect, I’ve got one." "Well, you need to figure out what the line is." "Well, I’ve got two, I can draw a line." I often found that my labs…, when I said "It’s lab day" They would go "(sigh)" And they would run through the motions and take their time and everybody was probably getting all kinds of similar results. But if you have a test trial and you say, "Ok, let me see your data. Oh, you haven’t tried it at 1.75 meters. Using your data, what’s the time going to be?" And you give them a relatively narrow window that they have to be within. They have to then take their data, and it’s also a good way to get the idea of controls. That’s part of my lab write up. If they didn’t list something as their controls, I can change it. If they didn’t list that the slope stayed the same, I’ll change the angle of the ramp. They say, "you can’t do that, that’s not fair." You didn’t say it was a control, you could do this. So you bring up all sorts of things that force them [to think] in the test trial. It’s really funny to see these kids, who have done this lab, if the lab is worth 20 points, 15 of it’s for the lab, 5 for the test trial. So they will come up to that, you can just feel the tension. The whole attitude changes. It’s really cool. What eventually happens, is they definitely stop asking me how many points to collect, because they will start collecting everything. They’ll even collect some and hide them, so it looks like there’s a gap. I say, "Oh! You didn’t do this." And they so, "oh good." and you see this little piece of paper. It’s really funny. They over-collect data. They really get uncomfortable at that test trial. You can just see it. They hug each other, they scream when they get it right. If they get if wrong, they are really bummed. I think it’s that uncomfortable place is where some of that learning comes, where it’s the discrepant event. You can lead them down the path and say, "explain this" Or whether it’s the test trial kind of deal. That’s where I find that they learn most. I try to incorporate those.

Julie: Anything else?

Dave Thompson: Don’t be worried about over-planning a lesson now. In your first year, plan, I mean, write and write and write things. To a point where you almost script it out, what you are going to do. Because you are going to be having the best laid out lesson, but the kids are going to take you over here or over here. Ted, and Lynette, and myself, that’s the best thing, that’s what we want them to do, because that’s what Ted is saying, that’s where true learning is going to happen. That is where these questions come out. Students also take you and want to lead you down this road because they know they can use up time this way. You’ve got to be able to figure out how to get yourself back to where you were. If you don’t have a good plan, in the sense of knowing where you need to be going, then you will have no idea if you got there.

Leanette Burdick: (laughing) That’s so true.

Dave Thompson: I see student teachers, it’s so funny, though. They will come in with great lesson plan. They will have it written up as their plan, and once they get off track they are lost. They have no idea, they are stammering and trying to get back, "time out, time out, that’s not where we are supposed to be"

Ted Lyons: That made me think of something else. The reason I thought of this is because one of the best student teachers I ever had, one of her first lessons, she tried something that I really like. It was kind of funny because, one of the things I’d like to do is have things… if kids come in and they see that you are going to do a demo and it’s out on the table. When they come in, they look, they play, and then, it gets kind of boring. So I always pull stuff out, stuff I’d hide around the room. They’ll raise a question, and I’ll open this cupboard, here’s this thing that I wanted. I was thinking of it because, my first student teacher, one of her first lesson, she hid some stuff and she couldn’t find it and she was so nervous she lost it. She didn’t remember where her stuff was. I really like that, again, it’s part of that, with the kids, keeping them off-balance. If everything’s always on the front table, and they see it, they will think, "oh, he’s doing another one of those." But if something pops up… I think that’s important to build into a lesson, the variety, the unusual, to some extent, discrepant type things.

Julie: I’m going to skip down to the last questions, and then we could end it with talking about the best lessons. So, What’s the most important advice you would give to the first year physics teacher who is a woman?

Leanette Burdick: I’m curious what they are going to say.

Dave Thompson: I’m curious for you. I’ve just got to go back to the very beginning, I said, you’ve got to be yourself.

Leanette Burdick: I’ve never seen, for me, being a woman, that my colleagues have ever looked at me as being anything other than a colleague. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’m a fairly large (tall) woman, and the other thing is I’m a biology transplant, so I wonder if it’s that I don’t see myself as being somewhat inferior and so I don’t notice if they treat me inferiorly.

Julie: So you don’t look at yourself as a physicist?

Leanette Burdick: I don’t, exactly, I look at myself as a physics teacher, which is a whole lot different, definitely, and a competent one, definitely, but not a physicist. I really don’t see it as an issue for me. My colleagues are all great about it. I don’t know what other people’s experiences have been. My experience has been fine, the community has accepted me as being a woman and being a science teacher in general, my students have (accepted me) I don’t see any attitudes. They don’t treat me any differently. Now, when it comes to talking cars, I can’t always keep up with the conversations, if they want to bring out engine types of examples, I may steer them to something that I know a little better. That’s been interesting, because it seems like a lot of the males, maybe this is a generalization I shouldn’t make, but it seems males enter into physics classes with better backgrounds in physics. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve tinkered with their dads, and had those opportunities to observe in nature, or if they have just been more observant in nature and the females haven’t been taught, it hasn’t been valued. But quite often, that’s the one place where I see is that I don’t have the experiences they have. I have to relate my physics to other things, my experiences as a mother. My children, their heads being accelerometers, when you speed up. As far as advice is concerned, I’d like to spend more time, at some point, so I could be on equal footing as far as examples and life experiences, but I’m not sad that I don’t have them. I think I can relate to the females in my class and there’s an advantage in that respect, that I can pull up examples that they are more comfortable with?

Dave Thompson: What do you have for a ratio?

Leanette Burdick: It changes from year to year. This last year I had probably twice as many females as males in my physics class. But it depends on the year. I do think that having a female physics teacher makes them, maybe a little more comfortable, but I have to say that going into Ted or Dave’s class, I don’t think there’s any difference there. I think they would feel very comfortable in these classes. But I know that there are some male physics teachers where they might not feel so comfortable.

Dave Thompson: I can’t add anything to that, other than I just know that the ratio in my own class is a bit more female than male, about 2/3 female, which has been growing in the last five years.

Leanette Burdick: So have mine. When I first started, it was predominantly males.

Dave Thompson: We’ve got to be close to done, because I’m out of cherries( he’s eaten a whole bowl of cherries during the interview.)

Ted Lyons: That’s one’s real hard for me, because I came from a family of teachers, it didn’t matter if you were male or female, you were teachers. The only one who really wasn’t was my father. My mother made more money than him. She was a professional" and he was "the laborer" so I didn’t even think of it that way.

Julie: So would you guys like to do the best lesson question individually later?

Ted Lyons: I’d like to hear what their best lessons are.

Leanette Burdick: I’m not sure I know what my best lesson is.

Ted Lyons: I had a question, by lesson, did you mean lesson unit?

Julie: How ever you want to define it. I was thinking of a one day thing.

Leanette Burdick: This is kind of a frightening thing to say, but my favorite things are in modeling and prisms, while Dave uses modeling and prisms and Ted’s used the modeling. So it’s not like they are going to hear anything terribly new in that respect.

Ted Lyons: I know what my favorite is. It’s with light. I love the topic of light. I think it is the best thing, because the things you can do with it. It’s not the physics, like, "Let’s calculate Snell’s Law" It’s not that garbage. It’s all these things that are so obvious and nobody knows. It’s the question like, "Why is the sky blue?" "Oh, okay, let me tell you." or "what comes on top of the rainbow?" "What’s a mirage?" It’s the everyday thing that "Why don’t we know that?" We stopped being four years old way too early, we should still be four years old. What is light? It’s what you see. You see it all the time, but we stop thinking about it and questioning it. So you can do so many thing that are cool there that turn out to be a discrepant event, that is not discrepant event in that it is one of these hidden things in the environment, but it’s that they came to the wrong conclusion. That’s by far my favorite area to play with.

Dave Thompson: I’m trying to think what my favorite lesson is.

Leanette Burdick: You know, I’m having a hard time too. And it’s because it changes from year to year. It depends upon the students that I have and how they react to it.

Dave Thompson: That’s right. What might one year just be the best thing going and it’s like sliced bread, and the next year we are going to throw it out. In projectile motion, one of my favorite things is launching water balloons at me. The students, I give them a challenge that they have to design an experiment to figure out how far, with this launcher, where they are going to put it, there are all these variables and what are the controls and basically it’s just open ended and the target is me. So that’s their test trial. I do the same thing with most labs, come up with a test trial or something of that nature, but I like that where a lesson actually is involving the students where they have to make those predictions. When they are correct and they are jumping up and down and they are hugging each other excited about it, that becomes the best lesson. I remember one lesson we were doing on the Doppler effect and I was driving the car with the horn going. They had to measure the speed of the car, based on the fact that the horn was blaring and they had tape recorders and they had to measure the frequency as it was approaching and then receding and then go back to the music room and try to figure out the velocity of this car was, so I’m driving down the road going (Dave makes the Doppler high, low pitch horn sound, funny) back and forth in the back of the school and all of a sudden the police come in. The kids always talk about that one.

Leanette Burdick: My kids always come up with the wrong speeds on that one. I do have a couple of things and I don’t call them lessons, though they are activities that the kids really like and actually, one of them, the community really likes, and so even though it is another one of those that I just dread, I don’t dare get rid of them because it’s one of the reasons that my physics enrollment stays up to where it does. One is from the modeling stuff is having them design a roller coaster out of a meter of wire and then they have to build a spreadsheet and do all the calculations. That’s really fun and I try to do that before we go to the amusement park because that really does give them a new appreciation for what they are riding on and what the engineers who have designed that roller coaster have gone through. The kids really like it. I had one kid a couple years ago who on the FCI (Force Concept Inventory Test) as a pretest got 25 out of 30. I’m thinking this is going to be a really fun year with this kid because he’s already at the master level and I’m going to teach him what? in mechanics anyway. And when we got to that, he ate it up! He loved that particular thing because it was something that was very challenging for him. The second thing is a project that is not really a lesson, we talk about things that are involved with it, but they build a two-man cardboard boat.

Dave Thompson: Oh, that is a great one.

Leanette Burdick: Out of cardboard and water soluble glue. Actually the last couple of years, I’ve amended it so that they can use flour and water because the glue has gotten so expensive. I don’t have any money in the budget anymore so I let them make paste out of flour and water if they want, which actually works better.

Dave Thompson: Where do you test it?

Leanette Burdick: We actually have a little pond in town, no pool will let us anywhere near.

Dave Thompson: That’s my problem.

Leanette Burdick: I did it three years in a pool. The first year I only had three boats, because I only had seven kids in physics when I started teaching. That wasn’t a problem. Three boats and they only lasted two minutes, forty-five seconds, was the winning boat, so the pool looked fine. The next year it got a little worse, then the third year, St. John’s pool was being refinished, so I called Mount Valley and I told them that I wanted to do it up there and they were foolish enough to say yes. So I went to their indoor pool and I think I had twenty-five kids in physics that year so I had a lot of boats and a lot of them lasted for the full fifteen minutes. Oh, my gosh, it looked like mud when it finished. It was awful. It took them days to get all the glue out of their filters. I never asked to have it in a pool after that. We are very fortunate, we have some bodies of water. It’s a little warmer climate than here, you’d never get away with this here unless you did it in the fall, before the weather gets cold. We have Limon Lake and Limon Lake loves to have us because they love any excuse to have people come there, but last year, there wasn’t enough water in the lake so there’s a little pond that’s about a mile from the school and we had it there. The water’s always so muddy that it doesn’t make any difference. Part of their grade is, if they don’t clean up every bit of cardboard, and load it up and take it to the dump, then they get an F. But the kids really like that and it’s something that I forgot to say for number 1, "What’s the most important advice you’d give a first year physic teacher," at least in the situation of a small town, be a part of the community, make yourself a part of that community so that you are not just an outsider, so that you are someone that fits is and belongs. you don’t have to necessarily change yourself, but in some way belong to something and make yourself a part of it. This physics boat race is a community event, they love it. They love it. People come watch and cheer and I just keep wondering, "What’s all the excitement about?" The kids get in, they get wet, they sink, they get their boats out, it’s over, but they do love it. It is something that endears the physics class to the community.

Dave Thompson: I was thinking this next year to use one gallon milk jugs and string and make a boat.

Leanette Burdick: That would be fun. Those things wouldn’t sink ever.

Ted Lyons: I was trying to think, what’s the contest?

Dave Thompson: Designing the boat.

Leanette Burdick: That’s where it’s gotten to, with my boat race, so many kids last 15 minutes, that it’s down to design. Too many of them cheat. It’s too difficult to catch the cheaters with things like Thompson’s water seal. It comes down to the design of the boat. If they design a boat that cuts through the water well.. A lot of them make pontoon boats, but trying to get those things to move through the water is ridiculous. This year I had some kids who did a paper maché type of thing. They took cardboard, got it wet, peeled the layers of cardboard apart and then took a canoe and used the form and paper machéd a canoe. It was gorgeous and they won. It was two girls. Out rode the boys because their boat was so much better designed.

Ted Lyons: What you said about the community. One of the neat things about physics, that could be in other things as well is to do things that require family input. The project-type idea, where they go home and they drag in the family. Give them situations where they have to go home and think about that discrepant event that happened and they go home and they say, "hey Dad, they did this.." and the family learns physics. That really seems to build a lot of support for science verses where they go home and they have got homework and the parent looks at the book and says, "I can’t help you, go away." Instead, it turns into this discussion. It’s that community thing.

Julie: Thank you guys very much. I really appreciate it.

Ted Lyons: You are more than welcome.

end of tape.