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Teaching Tool or Learning Noose   I only had to experience the headache of dealing with cell phone distractions once and in only one class before I dedicated teaching time outside of class to figure out how to use all of those attention-grabbing marks that you see in the Tally Chart of Cell Phone Notifications below for just one class period like this one was to help me teach instead of letting cell phone distractions keep me from teaching. There are quite a few novel ideas I and other teachers have come up with to make cell phones a teaching tool rather than a learning noose. I will discuss some of the things that might be considered that could turn cell phone usage into a teaching tool rather than a noose-ending learning tool for every minute a student is in class later in this post or break such ideas out individually in subsequent postings on the subject.  Cell phones can be toxic to a learning environment. (Thank you to Mary Garza for her FB post) A teacher in the U.S. had her stu
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  Getting Student Attention, and Everybody Else's Too One way to get your students' attention is to plan a competitive event that appeals to them and everybody.  This recounts one such event, a Rocket Competition. It happened that my sixth grade students never had flown a rocket, much less competed in flying them.  So, naturally I had to plan it out over a longer period of time than just a week.  I got permission to start a school identified rocket club.  I developed lessons on rocketry and the history of rocketry.   Given that the Columbia Space Shuttle had just recently disintegrated before our eyes as it re-entered the earth's atmosphere because of a hole in its wing, space was fresh on my students' minds. Artist rendition of Columbia STS disintegrating on reentry I remembered a small rocketry outing I put together several years before and used the concept for the Deady Rocket Science Club (The DRS Club for short).  And I felt it would be a great learning experience
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  Doing the Mess Around Nobody has a clue of the skills students will need to bring to bear when they enter the workforce.  Technological, environmental, social, cultural, parental, political and communal skills are a changing very fast because of the increase in speed that the Internet accords communication.  There is not a great deal of lag time available to develop curriculum, educational resources, teaching skills, and jobs training and coop programs to be developed for to fill the jobs that will be. Students and teachers and employers end up “ Do’in the Mess Around ,” as Ray Charles would say; of course not literally, but figuratively.  Oh, it’s a lot of fun do’in the mess around, that’s for sure, but in reality everyone is wasting time jumping from academic objective to academic objective just to say that standards have been adhered to.  But, very, very little is understood, transferrable to other applications or remembered.  Parents look the other way when students resort to che
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Motivational Moments
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STEAM, STEM With Art Is Busting Out All Over

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STEAM or STEM? Why incorporate Art into learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (S.T.E.M.)? The Answer?: “Grab Them by Their Imaginations and Their Hearts and Minds Will Follow!” I became a S.T.E.A.M. - "Engine of Ingenuity" instead of just a S.T.E.M. on a tree, so to speak, when I saw a picture of an awesome bridge. In my mind's eye, I saw not the bridge, rather, I saw the equation of a parabola.  That is when I started appreciating the mathematics of overpasses and suspension bridges.                              I found mathematical representations of these images in engineering books, and I began to understand the math they were describing, as my  High School  Physics teacher described the same thing in class.                       “AWE …,” my breath would catch as I drove by a freeway overpass and envisioned the parabolic equation that represented it.  I would modify the parameters in the overpass’ parabolic algorithm to stretch or steepen it. I bega
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