Sample of Student Work from time in China

 Ancient Cultures Project - Companion to our world literature, culture, religion, and  mythology units.

Featured here is the game from the Ancient Greece group.  

The game board is Mount Olympus and players progress up the sides of the mountain using magnetic pieces and a wire

path.  Each player is an Olympic athlete competing in the name
of one of the gods and can call upon their deities favor during
the race.  Each deity's favor manifests in a way related to the 
deity, for example: Hera is spiteful, she can cause racers ahead
of her champion to stumble and loose a turn.

The game is won when a racer claims the "Flame of Intelligence"
from the peak of Mount Olympus, recreating the "Crime"

of Prometheus and the origin of humanity.

Featured above, students from another group are play-testing the
game.  At the conclusion of the play test they will provide
feedback to the group who designed the game on the rules and
complete a short quiz so that the designers can check if their
educational goals were met by the experience.

Assignment:  Design a game that can played in a classroom without any presentation or input from the game's creators, and provide the players a chance to learn what it was like to be a member of a given culture.

This project represented the Final Assessment for grade 11, Semester 1 for students in my English class at The High School Affiliated With Xi'an Jiao Tong University.

Students began the project by examining important questions of their own culture and the role culture plays in their own identity.  The project also built off of the final assessment in the prior year which was a Personal Narrative.

Throughout the semester students engaged in connected projects and learning activities including retelling of myths, giving informative presentations on the culture and more.

After the play tests, featured in these pictures, students wrote a self evaluation and reflection paper.

Orientation

Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
August 28, 2016
I'm the one on the left.

When viewing my life in terms of a physics class, I'd say that my overall displacement with respect to career goals and geographic location is rather small compared to where I thought I would be when I graduated high school.  The distance I've traveled to get here is a great deal larger.

When I graduated from Poway High School I wasn't sure if I wanted to teach, learn computer programming, or try to make a living acting.  I attended community college to stretch my meager savings while I made up my mind and earned a BA in English after transferring to CSUSM.  By this point I knew that I wanted to teach, but I also wanted to travel and was out of money for my credential program.  This did not present a problem to me, it presented a solution.  I left to teach in China, expecting to be gone a year or two.

Five years later I started thinking about coming home but didn't feel that I had enough of a shield to survive reentry.  I decided to expand my education and get experience working with international school programs.  I earned a Post Graduate Diploma from University of Nottingham Ningbo China in Applied Lingusitics and then began teaching English at an international school program in Xi'an.  I intended to stay a year.  This is where I met the lovely lady in the picture.  In all I was in China for 10 wonderful years and am now home and nearly finished earning credentials in English and Physics.

I am currently student teaching English classes in North County, San Diego, CA.  I've been told by a great many people that English and Physics is a strange combination but I honestly don't understand why.  Physics, and most of science is about exploring the unknown to discover the known while English is about exploring the known to discover the unknown.  One helps us understand cause and effect while the other helps us care about cause and effect.  Understanding the scattering of light which results in a double rainbow makes the sight all the more majestic for how complex it is.  Taking in the simplicity of its beauty and just breathing with the fleeting experience does much the same. Together the experience is double enhanced.

Personality Test results

I knew that I would become a teacher by the time I transferred to CSUSM.  I had always enjoyed working with people to help them accomplish their goals and helping explain things to others.  For this blog entry though, I've taken a personality test.  I do not personally place much stock in personality tests for a number of reasons.  First, I tend to be close to right down the middle on nearly all of the answers.  Second, I know from discussing the matter with cognitive linguists that personality is fluid and context dependent.

In defense of the personality test however, I have had a long interest in cognitive sciences but found myself unable to pursue that.  While I find neuroscience fascinating my true loves are the stars and the human need to tell stories.  My love of human space exploration was my gateway into Physics a cornerstone I hope to build off of in my future classrooms.

I find that because I tend to be a rather middle of the line personality a lot of my students find me easy to talk to and get along with.  They recognize that I am in the class to help them and to share their discoveries with them.  I tend to curb my more cynical tendencies with optimistic analysis of problems that arise in the classroom.  Not all students respond to this but a number of them do.

This picture is on a replica of a Saturn V I built in a space program
simulator that allowed me to experience the real world physics of
space flight.  Through many failures and hours of fun I came to
realize that I not only understood the physics of orbital mechanics,
I really enjoyed learning that physics and talking about it with others.

For this blog I also took a teaching and learning style survey.  Unlike the personality survey there was one area where I had a strong preference.  I was very centrally aligned with regards to Active and Reflective learning, Visual and Verbal learning, and Global and Sequential learning.  I did have a strong preference for Intuitive learning over Sensing learning though.  This might explain why I am such a fan of Project Based Learning and Learning by Inquiry methods. I have never enjoyed, nor seen much value in, learning facts and figures.


I have worked with students who are primarily Sensing learners before.  Most of my students in China had been conditioned to think of education as Sensing learning and were uncomfortable with Intuitive learning.  I know that in a Science class there will be more place for Sensing learners to excel and more room where I can support them.  My hope is to build a classroom that helps Intuitive learners, such as myself, attach meaning to the facts and figures that they are learning so that they can better retain them while it helps Sensing learners grasp the theories and concepts through understanding those same facts and figures.

To say farewell at the end of this blog is my nearly four year old companion, named in honor of a location that inspired me to start learning Physics once again.  So below is a fond farewell from Luna.

Born June 2, 2015.  Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
Currently living in San Diego and loves collecting sticks.