via iO9

Check out this gallery of awesome art pieces that combine mammal skeletons with steam-punk-esque machinations by Ron Bell.

Bell’s series “Osteomechanics” and “Crania Mechanica,” integrate animal bones into imagined machinery. With the heavy use of brass and electrical prongs, they have a steampunk feel, but Bell’s core inspiration comes from 18th Century scientist Luigi Galvani, who experimented with delivering an electrical spark to animal muscles. The sculptures are supposed to evoke a sense of mystery, leaving the viewer to wonder at the era and person that gave rise to these strange little machines, and what scientific problem they were meant to solve.

Last year's masterpiece

Click here to Sponsor my Moustache: Funds will be dispersed by the Movember Foundation of Australia to assist with men’s health campaigns by Beyond Blue and the Prostate Cancer Society of Australia.

Why give a stuff:
Men are far less healthy than women. The average life expectancy for men is five years less than females (78 compared to 83).

Men access health services 30-40% less than women, thereby denying themselves the chance for prevention and early detection of common diseases.

From the bizarre multiverse of Goats:

Moustache Fighting was invented by the Sandinistas in 1967. Guerilla cells would often be isolated in the jungle for months at a time with no way to communicate with Liberation Front leaders. Moustache Fighting was the natural way to resolve disputes amongst soldiers and establish leadership hierarchies.

Il Revoluçion needs funding.

It’s that time of year again. The month formerly known as November has once again been transformed to raise awareness of men’s health issues with the power of upper lip growth.

Visit my mo-space where donations are welcome (apparently I’ll get free burgers if I raise over $25 in the next couple of days).

With a quick check of the rules (pdf) by my housemate meaning I had to shave a gap between my sideburns and the ‘tache (I already have one rule violation by starting a day early to celebrate finishing school), here is the result of my first week of facial hair growth .

This week’s storm in teacup is brought to you by comedy-news-quiz show (we can’t afford individual shows in Australia) Good News Week and Akmal Saleh.

Akmal took the opportunity of national television to go on an expletive filled rant about the people of Rockhampton. This has upset Rockhampton, and the little git has apologised. Too be fair apparently he was punched in the by some woman in an alley who accused him of being a paedophile wog, but hey, who hasn’t?

The ever reliable Morning Bulletin reports Akmal’s version of events at the Rocky Show earlier this year:

The funny man had three days off in Rockhampton and decided to take a camera to the show with his two mates.

The friends dressed in traditional Arabian outfits and did a Borat-esque skit.

The trio was lining up for a ride in sideshow alley when an angry mum confronted them.

“Listen here mate, you’ve got to have permission before you video people’s children,” the woman said.

Akmal said he tried to tell the woman she had it wrong and offered to show her the tape.

“Bulls—, you’re f—ing taping people’s children and you’re a pedophile, you dirty wog (expletive),” she said.

“Go away you idiot,” Akmal said before she punched him in the nose.

She whacked him again, “full-on punches” to his face.

“We just bolted,” Akmal said.

“I thought if we stayed we’d be lynched.”

But we’re all mammals aren’t we … wait … what … that’s not right

Credit: 365:14 – Taxonomy Fail by sidesmirk, on Flickr (Creative Commons – Attribution, Share Alike)

But it’s a good thing.

Sydney’s Mercy Ministries has gone bankrupt.

While being promoted as a counseling and psychiatric care operation for young women, allegations surfaced last year that the ‘treatment’ consisted of isolation, denial of drugs and exorcisms to expel their inner demons. Showing Scientology isn’t the only cult that preys on people in need.

Megachurch Hillsong, which was the driving force behind the ministry in Australia (it is still operating overseas), has ditched the mess and run away screaming.

The major lesson learned over the last month is that no matter how awesome I am, I am not a magician.

Teacher’s cannot expect to walk into their classrooms, open their box of tricks, and have children play along gleefully (not even with music and white powdery ingestables).

What is really important for setting up a classroom for a smooth and successful learning journey^ is just that – the set up. It is so easy to gloss over this, and I certainly have been a lot. I mean these kids have been in school for eight years already, they know how a classroom learning environment works by now*. Reminding them of that is not my job as a middle school teacher, right? I should be able to just dive right into my lesson, yeah? These guys should know how to work in groups already, surely?

Wrong. Wrong. And more wrong. And apparently “group work” needs to be replaced with “co-operative learning”.

Setting up the classroom can be considered something of a classroom-level teaching strategy. Control your classroom as a whole and you won’t have (as much) trouble with individuals. It can be as simple as a seating plan that places some control over who can interact with who (something I didn’t get a chance to experiment with) or letting students have lesson goals (which I tried out in Man vs. Machine).

When it gets into co-operative learning in small groups another great set-up strategy I tried was to assign roles to students within groups. One version of this is to nominate a leader (who then delegates roles to others). This is deceptively simple, but depends on some maturity in your students to avoid their self-righteous Napoleonic instincts coming out. Maybe okay with year 9’s, but perhaps not the best idea for year 8’s. Thus I spent a bit more effort in planning groups and assigning roles to each student within the groups.

Groups were being asked to ‘invent an organism’ (similar to this activity from The Future Is Wild website). Groups contained:

• An artist: responsible for creating their creation (various media were supplied; crayons, collage and craft), they must be positive towards any ideas
• A speaker: responsible for reporting to the class afterwards, during the task they need to clarify any suggestions from others, and repeat information that others do not hear (they should be the only team member that the teacher can hear)
• A messenger: responsible for trading craft materials, stimulus materials and spying on other teams creations (they are the only team member allowed to leave their work area – perfect for fidgety kids)
• A lawkeeper: responsible for keeping all team members on task, resolving any arguments, and bargaining with any visiting messenger

These were based on some role cards a lecturer showed us from this collection of groupwork/coop learning strategies. I adapted them to a more create-and-present style task, and also tried to build in redundancy duality. The artist could be split into a scribe and an artist, and the messenger could be split into a spy and a courier (this is what I initially had, but our on-site mentor pointed out some concerns about having 2 out of 4 team members free-to-roam). Due to a bunch of students bunking off to music, we actually ended up in groups of 3, and so the superfluous “leader”-like role of lawkeeper was ditched from most groups.

One of my fellow student teachers introduced a similar co-operative situation in a physics class, students who weren’t fulfilling their assigned duties were asked if they had resigned or retired by the other kids in class.

The idea of these roles aren’t to restrict the students to particularly ways of working, but to give them opportunity to experience things in a more controlled environment, so that they might then be able to apply those experiences when faced with more realistic (or indeed real) situations. Rather than being in a a group where all students often try to all be scribe-speaker-lawkeepers at once, students can now see the benefit of each of them undertaking specialised roles, and even get some feel for which role best suits them.

Oh and the title of this entry was entirely an excuse to post this video:

On the side the design-an-organism lesson is a fantastic idea (despite its relation to teleology) and I will be returning to it later.

^oh, come on, it is fun coming up with these phrases

*I and my supervising teachers did often question this though, given their propensity to call out, get out of their seats without asking, throw things at one another, not brings pencils, books or classwork into the room, etc. etc.

I survived!

Hooray! Huzzah! All limbs and most senses still intact. And there is a whole month left for the real teachers to try and undo the damage I did and set those poor little souls back on the right path. Yippee!

Last day of practical teaching was last Friday (I got a cute card with pretty colours!). I handed in my post-prac report and philosophy statements in yesterday. And today was spent cleaning and dealing with the Race that Stops the Nation. Oh, and tomorrow I’ll have to return to school because I stole my supervising teacher’s Math text (Sorry!)

Standard broadcasting will recommence shortly, starting off with the main lessons learned about dealing with living and breathing students, Education Queensland, classroom controversy, and the terrors of technology integration in the classroom.

My first mathematics assignment was an essay on the role of calculators as teaching tools (not just a computing device) in middle years classrooms. From this, I have been able to adapt a few of the techniques I researched into lessons and activities for my year 8s.

Man vs. Machine is a lesson I adapted from an activity from Creative Mathematics Teaching with Calculators (Amazon). Essentially a flashcard quiz, students have to solve the problems as quickly as possible. Some problems require a calculator, some can probably done faster in their heads.

I created a fancy-pants activity sheet for this lesson*. I think activity sheets appear to work very well to scaffold students in this age group. There are still several students who take a long time to write stuff down and draw up charts – this is from either lack of ability and tools, or a need to make it look pretty and perfect. That said, there are some problems with activity sheets that I might mention in another post.

For the lesson summary click through.

This activity sheet started with quick summary of my calculators in math research; their ubiquitous nature, parents’ fears, an example, and research that shows calculators do not harm skill development if used properly. The front page also contained a clear statement of students learning goals for this lessons. Highlight this so students read this first and get context for this lesson. Instead of reading the large text I skimmed over it for them, asking some questions during that (Who likes calculators? Who thinks you don’t learn as much with them? Who uses them when out shopping?).

The bottom of the first page outlined the lesson sequence or “Today’s tasks”. Students read the first task and then set about to it. They had to fill out a T-chart on the “benefits” and “downfalls” of using a calculator. Here students are told if they are stuck for ideas, they should try reading the first page text in detail as it has some ideas. Students work on the chart as individuals for 60 seconds and then in pairs for 90 seconds. At this stage each pair contributes to a chart on the board. I did half the pairs giving a positive and the other half negative, but you could alternate or another method. Try to clarify vague answers such as using a calculator for “big” sums – do they mean large numbers, or many numbers, or many different operations?

Students then return to their task list, if you feel like being tricky ask them which step they are up to. Steps 2 and 3 were actually the pairwork and group discussion respectively, so they are actually up to step 4 – the quiz. This should have them all excited. The quiz could work as individuals, pairwork or groups. I think groups allows for more comfortable balance of competitiveness and cooperativeness. Try to put students in random or mixed-ability groups to provide balance. Set some sort of callsign or buzzer technique for students to use when they have the answer.

The questions should be a mix of those that students can do without a calculator (basic number facts), those that a calculator is helpful (adding long lists of numbers, subtracting large numbers, multiplying 2- or 3-digit numbers), and those that a calculator is pretty much essential (division by 3-digit numbers or greater, very long lists of numbers). Try to include mostly those in the first two categories, which will allow students to recognise that calculators are actually only vital in certain situations.

Also add some “thinking” and “hosejob” questions. “Thinking” should mean more complex problems. One I used was a shopping list; students had to work out the change from $50, two groups gave the total of the items, not the change (they also forgot to include units, units are important!). Thinking may also include fill-in-the-blanks, such as 55 x 5 = ? x 11; a few students gave the answer of 55 x 5 rather than what the question asked (perhaps that should be counted as a hosejob). The best hosejob is to have a complex sum such as 452 x 1899 + 2456 ÷ 16 which most students will probably use a calculator for, on the next card have 2456 ÷ 16 + 1899 x 452, the exact same problem with the exact same answer. Some students will see the link, some will be able to once it is explained. Another good question is to add or subtract whole millions, students can learn that “big numbers” take a long time to put into a calculator; you don’t need a calculator to do: 5,000,000 + 3,000,000 – 2,000,000 + 500.

As students answer questions I asked them to explain how they got their answer. Students will be hesitant on how to phrase this, so help a few word them. Instead of saying “I used a calculator”, students should be saying “I put that exact sum into the calculator” or “I did the first part in a calculator and then doubled it”. It is important for students to realise you can do some problems in different ways. For the shopping list question you could add all the numbers, and then subtract this from 50; or you could start with 50 and subtract each number in turn; personally, I would add all the numbers and subtract 50, and then change the resulting negative number into a positive.

Reflection can also continue after the quiz to recognise how they might improve their T-bars further now. I then asked students to complete a personal reflection on what they learned today and hand it up (the last part of the activity sheet).

My students responded quite well to this lesson. I worked with 12 students at a time (4 groups of 3 for the quiz – randomly assigned by colouring in the “learning goals” box on their sheets). I think the quiz might get unwieldly with the whole class, students won’t work together as well in larger groups, and distanced groups are at a disadvantage of reading questions (always read questions out when showing them). I probably should have done the pre-quiz activity as a whole class and then the quiz in two groups (students not in the quiz worked on assignments). You may also want students not involved in the quiz in another area to those who are; even though I turned desks around for students not in the quiz, some astute students tried to remember answers they heard being called out.

Other things to look out for running this activity:

• make sure all students have a calculator – this was another reason for splitting the class, to let those who don’t have one borrow from those that do
• check students calculators are on the right setting (perhaps do this in a prior lesson) – quite a few students have managed to set their calculators to odd settings, such as rounding to the nearest whole – you can using these as learning points
• have a clear buzzer and buzzer rules – buzz after you have an answer, be quiet while another team answers
• watch your time – discussions are interesting, however, especially if you have split a class, you want to have even time with each group (my second group had about 1/3 the time of the first)

Image credit: He’s going to do math for me by firepile from flickr (CC by A)

*I’d put the sheet up, but not all the images are free. Maybe after the Mayan apocalypse I’ll have an umbrella website I can host that sort of stuff.

I am fresh off my first week as a pre-service practice teacher. Three more to go.

I have been assigned to a rather large state high school (no names please). I am workingwith one of their many (I think there are at least seven!?) year 8 classes (that’s 12-14 years old). I am working with two overseeing teachers on the student’s “core” classes – Maths, Science, English and SOSE (“Studies of Society and the Environment – a humanities amalgam). I have also snuck in a double period of Japanese with the same class into my schedule. This will give me a chance to see how second-language eduaction works in Queensland.

Pracs are important for pre-service teachers. There are some skills you cannot learn without opportunity to test them in the field. Teaching groups of your peers is not quite the same as teaching actual rambunctious twelve year olds (though some may have the same maturity and social skills). Getting things to work just right is as much trial and error, building relationships, and luck, as much as it is having the knowledge.

I had my own trial and error, building relationships, and luck, rollercoaster ride at the end of this week. My overseeing teachers were away for several lessons on Thursday and Friday – so I was working with substitutes. Unsurprisingly the first one was a bit chaotic, but then Friday’s lessons went quite well (not perfectly, but well). I was impressed that most of the students who misbehaved on Thursday recognised their behaviour was inappropriate and took steps to improve themselves.

The main thing that I learned did not work was contributing to classroom noise – funny that.

• Raising your voice – negative and antagonistic
• Talking over children – how can children obey instructions if they don’t hear them
• Using vocal calls for silence – I was trying countdowns from five – too long, too noisy.

Things that do work are usually silent and get children to reflect on their behaviour. This way things are not inappropriate because you say so, but because they know so.

• Stay calm – don’t let external sources (like an ICT failure) affect your attitude to the students
• Waiting for silence – instead of talking over them
• Silent cues for silence – hands on heads is working great for me, even it might seem a little primary school.

And there are some things I’m not sure of yet.

• Asking inattentive students to repeat instructions – is it embarrassing?
• Reminding students of school’s core values – potentially nagging?

Another good technique was to write the time we would start a video at on the board, and delay it as children misbehaved; although, in the end, one student messing around with some magnetic props erased it altogether. Not perfect yet.

Image credit: 我要生氣！ by sizumaru from flickr (CC by A.ND)