I have moved to wordpress

Can't remember now why I did, but I have moved to wordpress.
Address is here

Progress is slow

Have been playing with electrostatics quite a bit lately, partly to try and establish how to guarantee that the demos will work as expected (see previous blog).
When it works well it is actually very impressive, but taking a video of this gives the impression that it is always this straightforward, which is not at all helpful to new teachers who will expect everything to work perfectly first time, and may be silly enough to not have gone through it themselves beforehand.

On the I.T. front, I stuck a few aul' videos onto youtube and googlevideo. They certainly allow for better quality viewing than downloading straight from thephysicsteacher site, and also allow for feedback which will hopefully prove useful.
The disadvantage is that they are almost definitely blocked in most schools, so can only be viewed at home.
Youtube has a time limit of 10 minutes, which is a pity because apart from short demonstrations, many of the video clips I have are twice as long. Googlevideo is not as popular and I have also had quite a few problems uploading. This sure is one big pain in the rear end.

Bloody Electrostatics demonstrations

Got up at 6:30 this morning to be in school at 7:15 to have lots of time to prepare for a form 5 class on electrostatics which I wanted to film.
Now I'm not normally this dedicated, but because it was being videod ('videoed'?) I wanted to get everything right.
Electrostatics is dodgy at the best of times, but at half eight this morning every thing was going like a dream. To such an extent that I started wondering why other teachers made such a big deal of it. Maybe they should prepare more - like I was doing.

Class began at about 12 o clock. I started the video, and spent the first ten minutes correcting homework on the board, then started into the demos.
Not one worked as well as it did in the morning.
Some didn't work at all.
It was baffling, frustrating and funny in roughly equal measures.

I take that back.
Mostly it was frustrating, especially since I had prepared it so well.
The smug factor had felt good too.

It's possible that atmospheric conditions had changed over a few hours, but I suspect one other variable was that the classroom had had four sets of students sit in there for forty minutes at a time, each breathing in nice clean dry air, and breathing out air which contained a higher percentage of water. As one of the students said: "Come on now sir, I know you blame us for everything else, but you can't seriously think you can blame us for this one."
So;
tomorrow I repeat the process first thing in the morning, then again a few hours later, and if the same thing happens I think I might use hot plates or bunsen burners to dry out the air for a spell and then repeat (what happens the water / water vapour when the air drys? Where does it go?).
Edge of the seat stuff this . . .

'now back to the books, which are less important'

I was reading an article in the Liffey Champion last night about Michael Hanly, who is working for Corcern and spent quite a few years in Zimbabwe teaching in a rural school and working with the local development authority.
Part of the piece reads:

As past pupil of Belvedere College it was there that he admits that he was made aware of important social issues.
"Our science teacher, Mr Grehan, was an inspirational teacher and is partly responsible for my working in this area," said Mr Hanly.
"I remember how any time we would have someone in to give us a talk, at the end of it he would say, 'now back to the books, which are less important'. That phrase of his has stuck with me."

What a wonderful compliment to pay any teacher; that they instilled in the student the notion that there were more important issues out there than could be found in their text-books.
I don't know Michael Grehan personally, but we have overlapped in various forums, and he appears to be an immensely likeable gentleman.
I'd like to think that I could bring a little of his philosophy into my own teaching.

Belvedere College itself seems to be very big on social issues.
As wikipedia says:

The Jesuit ethos of social justice for all and educating "men for others" are keystones of the Belvedere College culture and education philosophy.

Their students spend a couple of nights sleeping on the streets around Christmas, to highlight the homeless problem, and raise funds for them.

It also has a very strong science tradition, as do all schools run by Jesuits. Their applied maths teacher is Oliver Murphy, author of Fundamental Applied Maths. He makes various notes available to both his students and other teachers, and instead of taking money simply asks that we make a small donation in the form of a cheque to a local charity.
It would be nice to think that some day all schools will have a 'social justice for all' ethos, but I won't hold my breath.

Oliver's site is here
Belvedere College is here

Horrible Experiments

There are four mandatory experiments to do with Heat on the leaving cert syllabus.
And we always do them.
And, apart from the first, they can all give horrible (and I mean horrible) answers.

I warn the troops in advance and suggest that a percentage of under 30% would be acceptable. It's not unusual for a student to get a percentage error greater than 100%.
But they generally don't calculate this untill they are writing up the experiment at home.
They don't ask about it in class because they probably think that they would just be highlighting their own incompetence, and I don't mention it because I also am a little embarassed by their results, knowing that they were only following my instructions.

Am I the only teacher who is this inept?
Do many others check?
What do I know? As I keep saying, in this business once we close that classroom door we become kings of our own classroom, and it wouldn't be unusual for a teacher to go from their own secondary school as a student, up until the day they retire, having only ever seen one other person (their old science teacher) teach any given topic.
This can't be right.
Can it?

videoclips videoclips videoclips

Spent an inordinate amout of time putting this page together.
Next step is to find out how many laws I have broken.

I'm guessing that worst case scenario is I will be told to take down various vidoes, so at least I should be able to use them until then.
Between then and now I gots to find out what the alternative options are.
At the very least I need to start streaming these classroom videos.
And improving the appearance of the page.
Right now I'm going to take a break.

Then there's the small task of going back to school tomorrow and actually doing some proper teaching.
Or at least as proper as it gets with me.

playing with podcasts

just checking out how to podcast.
Got an mp3 file here - boring as hell.
Think I need to give this more work.
Back to the drawing board