It's only a test..

I did it. I took my Praxis 2 Physics content exam today after about 1 month of trying to remember what I learned 10 years ago in my 5 years of HS/College Physics. I haven't posted anything for a while now and I've had lots of things running through my mind that I thought were worth getting down.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard "you'll do fine" or "don't worry about it" in the past month. I can't say that I was worried about it per se but I also was not willing to just take for granted that I would do fine without some major review.

Up until about a month ago, I was planning to revisit all the odd problems from my college first year physics text and take the test next summer. Why the odd problems? Because the answers are in the back of the book of course!

I was on chapter 3 of 37 when I started to look at other options and to research the exam a bit more. My content exam was a paper based test with limited test dates to choose from. I seem to recall there being 5 or 6 text dates in one academic year. The first text date of the 2010-11 school year was today (conveniently the last Saturday before my fall quarter of grad courses start). All the other test dates fall somewhere smack dab in the middle of a quarter. I know myself as a student and studying for this exam and my courses is not a viable option while working full time.

Hence, I decided to dive in and take it now rather than wait a year.

I purchased a review text (very superficial coverage of the material) and a suite of practice exams from an online provider and started my studying.

In the process of studying, I realized that I hadn't really learned the material last time I encountered it. Back then I had learned how to solve problems by plugging numbers into formulas but I probably couldn't have explained to you what was going on. This underlying concern has been a source of anxiety for me in the past 6 months during my observation hours. I witnessed students coming up with off the wall examples of oscillatory motion and the teacher turned to me for comments on whether or not they were simple harmonic motion. I had a gut feeling that they weren't but I didn't understand SHM enough to say beyond a shadow of a doubt so instead I questioned my decision to go into teaching and had a mini melt down.

The importance of teaching/learning for understanding became so obvious to me as I wrote out about 200 flashcards for about 1/3 of the review material and still didn't "get it."

So I did the only thing I could think to do - I tweeted - and my PLN came to the rescue.

Thanks to @fnoschese for passing along the multi-media web resources that most certainly were responsible for my confidence today. It is, however, only a test! The real success for me in this process was that for the first time I was focused on understanding rather than memorizing. I looked at the formulas with an eye towards talking through the relationships between the variables and really understanding them. It is working towards this understanding for myself and for my future students that will make teaching and learning physics worthwhile.

I am so grateful that in the process of studying for this exam, I actually have learned something.

Thanks for reading. - Andrea

In case anyone is interested, here are the resources that @fnoschese suggested:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%22ap_physics_b%22
https://online-s.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys212/gtm/No_Login/page.html
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%22ap_physics_c%22
https://online-s.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys211/gtm/No_Login/page.html

My attempt to convert non-Tweeters

I have become quite the Twitter evangelist in my class discussion boards. Whenever I see the opportunity for a plug, I throw it in there.

The latest attempt actually fulfills an assignment requirement. As part of my Multimedia Instructional Design class, I had to create a video tutorial. It was recommended we use Jing, but as it turns out I was lucky enough to win Camtasia at #edcamp Philly, so I used it instead.

I wanted to quickly show how effective Twitter can be and to challenge the perception of Twitter that many people have. I know it was a perception that I had as well, right up until I downloaded Tweetdeck after EdCamp. I was instantaneously converted.

To illustrate the effectiveness of Twitter, on Sunday I tweeted the following out to #edchat and #ntchat:
"show my preserv classmates the pwr of twitter. if ur reading this,reply w/content area, locale, blog url & RT #edchat #ntchat"
Over the next 24 hours I got responses back from 22 different people from all over the world. A huge thank you to everyone who responded (see the list below).

Here is the end product of my assignment. I'm happy with how it turned out and thought I would share it. Please pass it along if you think it may help others get started in Twitter. - Andrea




1katty
English, HS
Pakistan
http://www.katherinemaloney.blogspot.com

chrisnilsson
physics, instructional tech
Texas
http://cafe.lcisd.org/blog

stangea
5-6 Grade
Saskatchewan
http://bit.ly/a85jr6

senojc76
instructional tech
Texas
http://chadtheteacher.com/blog

rfgrasso
history, 8th grade
California
http://www.rgrasso.blogspot.com

mrstephenwolfe
elementary
Alabama
http://www.MrStephenWolfe.wordpress.com

tronward
2nd grade
Minnesota
http://bit.ly/dvSFRZ

hshawjr
special ed
Maine
http://bit.ly/djRqHN

ron_peck
social studies, HS
Oregon
http://historygeek29.blogspot.com/

kellyhines
3rd grade, PD trainer
North Carolina
http://thefilecabinet.pbworks.com She works on a Cherokee reservation.

drgarcia
educational psych, college
Washington DC
http://gnagarcia.wordpress.com/ http://tcpcg2011.wikispaces.com/

mrdfleming
2nd grade
New Jersey
http://mrdfleming.blogspot.com

stevefitzwater
Math
United Kingdom
http://www.learning2learnandteach.blogspot.com

teachingwthsoul
New Teacher Support
California
http://bit.ly/9HEtfF

grade1
1st grade
Ontario
http://bit.ly/95mi7N
http://bit.ly/ci77PF
http://bit.ly/cefoTd
http://bit.ly/boUqPI

soingirl
2 - 3 grade
British Columbia
http://bit.ly/d4WnNz

msgajda
Math, Science, Bio, Chem
Manitoba
http://msgajda.wordpress.com

gret
ESL, Elementary
Argentina

dancallahan
technology specialist
Massachusetts

cmdecarolis
history, HS
New Jersey

danseabra
languages
Brazil

havalah
kindergarten
Massachusetts

My how they've changed

My dream was always to be a teacher. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be an elementary school teacher. In junior high, I wanted to be a junior high school teacher. In high school, well... you get my drift.

I started college with the intention of being a physics education major. I even started down that path and took my first education courses. A mentor of mine at the time, advised me that if I ever wanted to pursue a Master's degree in physics I would have about 2 years worth of classes to take before that would be possible (at my school, the education curriculum replaced most of the upper division physics courses). That made sense to me so I switched to a physics major and never looked back.

Now, 10 years after graduating with my physics degree, I'm back at school pursuing a Master's in Science of Instruction with the end goal being to teach physics.

My excuses all these years for why I wasn't pursuing teaching have been pretty set The 2 big excuses I used were not being able to relate to the kids and discipline issues. It was back in mid-February 2010 that I finally realized that these were the excuses that were keeping me from pursuing my childhood dream.

Both of these are potential concerns but I realized the needed attitude shift was mine to make first and foremost. A friend of mine from church kindly pointed out that I struggle relating with kids in part because I'm not yet a parent and in part because I didn't really have a childhood. I won't go into the speciifics but I spent much of my childhood trying to be mature and responsible partly because anything else wasn't accepted in my household.

During the past 2 years, interacting with children in my church community, I've noticed my attitude towards children start to change. Although I still feel awkward at times around children, I am more often inspired by them and even empathetic to the challenges of being a young person in our society. My how kids have changed now that I've changed my attitude towards them.

I no longer automatically see kids as disobedient troublemakers whose intention is to consume my time and energy. Instead, they are individuals I can probably learn from if I take the time to slow down and pay attention. My interactions with young people have changed so dramatically since the evolution of my attitude began. This change made it possible for me to see my excuses (not relating to kids and discipline issues) as the work of my imagination rather than a fixed reality.

I know that it wil take me a while to learn how best to interact with young people. Fortunately, I've got about 2 years before I'm teaching and a great network of people that will support me through my growth.

I know that I made the right decision 10 years ago, when I changed my major to physics and chose not to pursue teaching at that time. Knowing how much I've grown in the past 10 years, I'm confident that I wouldn't have liked teaching back then. I think dealing with the students would have been a constant struggle - in reality some of the time but in my mind all of the time.
Now, I'm pursuing my dream and my imagination is driving me forward rather than holding me back.

Until next time, Andrea

And so it begins...

Yesterday I attended the first ever New Teacher Camp (http://www.ntcamp.org/) in Philadelphia. The reason I'm typing these words right now is that I'm heeding the call - every teacher should blog.

This comment came during the opening panel discussion on PLNs and was a reference to some other blog post, which I haven't yet tracked down. Nonetheless, I found myself thinking about this statement after NTCamp was over and tweeted out for help on getting started. I got a number of replies back with helpful information about how to get started blogging. The one I needed to see the most though, was the reply that instructed me to write what I'm passionate about.

The thing I am most passionate about is the journey I'm on to become a physics teacher. I'm in my second quarter of a 2 year Master's program Assuming I survive and everything continues to feel "right", I hope to be teaching physics somewhere in the Philadelphia area as of Fall 2012.

I will share in coming posts about how I got to this point. The process thus far has involved a lot of soul-searching and has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster to say the least.

For now though, I'm mostly filled with questions about the blogging thing. Is there such a thing as "blog-iquette"? For example, I'm assuming that I should leave other people and places out of my posts unless I get permission first. What are your thoughts?

To close for now, I'll give the story of my handle "tkubed". Pronounced tee cubed, or for all you mathematical types t^3, it is a nickname I've had since high-school that has just stuck. It stands for Too Tall Tollison. I wasn't even aware that people may be mis-interpreting my handle. Even as I've heard mis-pronunciations over the years, my love of this nick name has prevailed.

Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from some of you on the etiquette of blogging. I'm totally new to this and can use all the help I can get!

Until next time, Andrea