First, a little history.
A few years ago, around the time my twins were born, I rediscovered an old photography hobby. I was never particularly talented at the art, and never devoted the time necessary to improve beyond pretty amateurish efforts, but I always enjoyed it. In looking for advice on buying a new camera (so much had changed since I gave up the hobby in the early 80's I didn't even know where to start), I stumbled upon photo.net. It was my first exposure to "online communities" and featured a number of services to keep people with a common interest connected. I particularly liked the bulletin board interface that included e-mail notification and thought it would be a great model for getting science teachers together to share information. In my brief stint as staff developer in my district, I spent a lot of time trying to create something similar, which is still up and running but at this point almost completely dormant as other services with larger pools of potential users have proliferated (NSTA listservs, e.g.). The forum never really took off. It was useful mainly as a mailing list, since I could post information on the forum and the message went out as an e-mail to about 100 teachers in the district who "signed up" for the forum (I collected e-mails at every PD activity and let them know they would be added to the list).
I still think the majority of classroom teachers of science are behind the times in terms of taking advantage of all the web tools out there and continue to think of the internet solely as a place to look up information rather than a place to form a community. How many teachers have websites to support their instruction? How many regularly read science-related blogs? How many know how to take advantage of subscription services like Bloglines (it's free dammit!)? How many are signed up for NSTA's listservs? What about Podcasts? Google Alerts? And those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure others out there can point to plenty of useful services that I don't even know about. So one goal of this blog is to spread the word.
I decided from the beginning to specialize. I pretty much limit my posts to discussing the teaching of high school biology. I generally avoid topical political events and school issues unless they are directly relevant - I have complained a few times about the facilities and policies that I think are detrimental to teaching science. I have not written much about biology in the news, but that will be something I work on this year.
I write first and foremost as a means of reflection on what I am doing in the classroom. This helps me to analyze my practices and, I hope, improve upon them. I try not to sugarcoat and I am pretty self-critical, which may or may not be a good idea in a public forum. I think, however, that an honest, critical assessment is important both for my own needs and to let any other teachers who might stumble upon this blog know that we aren't all super teachers who know exactly how do handle every lesson and students always come away both enjoying the activity and learning what we wanted them to learn. Teaching and learning are both iterative processes, to throw a little jargon around, and I've always been a little skeptical (or is it resentful?) of published educational materials that make it seem like a straight-forward linear process: Plan - implement - assess - success! It just isn't that easy.
Lastly, most of my posts will be rather short. I find writing a rather laborious task, which should be pretty evident to the average reader. I obviously will also not be the most prolific writer around - for that you will have to check out PZ Myers at Pharyngula - the man must never sleep or there are two of him. If I post once or twice a week I'm doing pretty well. Because of this, I may be asking other science teachers to contribute here. Annie Chien has already contributed and if I find any interest, I will re-configure the blog to make it a group project - much as Sean Carroll did with Preposterous Universe which morphed into Cosmic Variance.
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