I teach science and help develop science programs for schools. I also write and lecture about science and learning, most recently presenting a series of science lectures in Europe about the life of Galileo in Rome, volcanic eruptions and the lost civilization of Akrotiri in Greece, and marine fauna in southern France. In addition, I offer science commentary in media, speaking about health issues related to aging in films produced by pharmaceutical companies and developing science related scripts for television commercials and documentary film projects. My main interest is teaching, but being able to "speak science" has thrown some unusual opportunities my way.
I was always a science scavenger and tinkerer. As a child I spent many winter afternoons in the garage of our house in Danvers, Massachusetts salvaging items like jam jars from the trash bin to use as beakers, old chains and bike parts to use in building crude Rube Goldberg contraptions. Yet I was also into natural science, collecting minerals and studying small samples of leaf litter and debris under a Sears microscope that was handed down to me by my brother. I was also a wanderer. As a teenager I lived in the Berkshire Mountains at the edge of the Taconic State Forest. In spring, my dog and I would wander off into the woods and explore the remains of old hunting lodges and farms. I still have some of the old primitive tools and jars we excavated on those "digs" thirty years ago. As an adult, I'm still really fascinated by the scientific history of things, particularly tools.
My Teachers and Mentors I have been inspired by a number of scientific mentors in my life. I'd especially like to mention the scientists I worked with at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I was exposed to many new skills and ideas that open up a new direction in my science teaching.
"As a science teacher, my time at MIT was transformational."
At MIT, I worked in the lab of Dr. Rubner, who inspired me by taking a personal interest in secondary level science education. He created space in his research group for science teachers to come and work, as a way to gain research experience and enhance their teaching. Susan Rosevear, who was also critical to the project, managed the logistics of integrating science teachers into materials science research teams and helped them to find ways to connect their research experience to the classroom. This science education outreach model is one of the most sophisticated and personalized I have come across.
My notebooks from MIT are densely packed with sketches and notes of my time with Professor Rubner's research team, and I use this material often in developing my own science lessons, replicating the tools and techniques in simpler forms in my science classrooms in New York, Paris and Florida. The image above is of a manipulative model of the organic light emitting diode (OLED) that Professor Rubner helped me develop in his lab. My classroom concept involved substituting dehydrated sea firefly larva for the ruthenium compounds used in the OLEDs that we built and studied at MIT. It's a simple concept, yet each piece of the model correlates to a coordinate piece in an OLED, and the model does emit a brilliant, blue patterned light, which excites my students in my lab.
Another manipulative I developed at MIT is a model to demonstrate the principal behind the atomic force microscope in a simple, kinesthetic way. Over the years I have modified the AFM manipulative model by adding a coordinate plane to its top surface and requiring students to "probe" along the coordinate plane to create a topographical concept of an unknown object sealed inside the model. I added the coordinate plane to the model because my students were studying that topic in their math class, and it presented an opportunity to integrate our math curriculum into the manipulative models used in science class. The picture below actually shows me photographed through my AFM model.
"Another manipulative I developed at MIT is a model to demonstrate the principal behind the atomic force microscope in a simple, kinesthetic way."
My immediate supervisor at MIT was a young German materials scientist name Hartmut Rudmann, who patiently trained me in a series of lab processes, including one called "cryogenic pumping". My students and I also replicated this process of "pumping down atmospheres" of pressure in my science elective this term by using dry ice, a steel cylinder, a rubber membrane and rubbing alcohol.
My hope is that the kids will take the ideas behind our simple manipulative models with them to higher levels of science study in their future. As a science teacher, my time at MIT was transformational. I was able to learn so much from the experience, and I was able to learn it in my own way. Rubner also gave me the freedom to package and retool my experiences in his lab for my students in unorthodox ways, and he offered so much encouragement and support for the process. That certainly inspired me.
I also have a huge collection of science biographies of my heroes, like Darwin, Galileo, Ernest Rutherford and many others. As I get older, I'm more and more interested in the history of science, particularly the "big ideas" like the atom and the cell. I find that learning about the earliest concept of a big idea in science helps me to better understand the present concept of it. If you know where an idea originated, it becomes clearer, more like a story than a discrete set of facts. Science seems more logical and makes better sense if you know the stories behind it.
I'm always learning new and better ways to teach science and I don't know everything there is to know. But what I do know is that you have to question kids actively and draw them into discourse. A professor of mine at Wesleyan University told me that "good questioning is good teaching".
I also rely often on experiments and a type of science demonstration that is a bit different from those my teachers used in the 1970's when I was in school. I tend to move into the center of the classroom and gather my students around me. I then recruit students into the demonstration and ask them to perform different parts of it. I also try to "scale up" and "scale down" experiments so that they can be handled and manipulated by my students, and I tend to photograph them in the lab and make notes on the interactions I observe in the laboratory. I use these notes to shape and modify my teaching in subsequent lessons.
"So much of life is modular, homogenous and over engineered; I find that students seem to crave science lessons with texture, humor, and something unusual or counterintuitive."
I am also slightly "eccentric" in my expressions and teaching personality, and I use routines and expressions that breed familiarity in the classroom. It seems that students tune into what I call your "teaching signature" and they seem to appreciate teachers who have some form of unique identity or personality that comes out in classroom. When I was a young teacher, I was disturbed when students would mimic or imitate an expression I used in class. Yet with time, it seems that a teacher's identity, whether it is quirky, silly, strict or serious, is a huge asset in the classroom because it humanizes the experience of students. So much of life is modular, homogenous and over engineered; I find that students seem to crave science lessons with texture, humor, and something unusual or counterintuitive. Science can be messy, noisy, sticky, moldy, hot, cold and everything else, so kids can't really resist it. The trick in keeping them excited about science is to avoid turning the mystery into the mundane. Explain some things but not everything. Leave some good questions for them to answer later in life.
