HUNBlog

In Memory of Cherri Brinley

A dear friend of mine passed away over the weekend. She was a middle school science teacher, and she was the best I've ever known. She was the best because she enjoyed teaching and because she truly cared about her students. I know that may sound trite, but there is no better way to convey the truth of her professionalism as a teacher.

She also taught science the way it should be taught. She serves as a perfect example of how inquiry and PBL can be done effectively.  I know that inquiry and PBL are difficult, but Cherri was able to do it. She was able to do it because it was fun for her. She constantly learned new things and sought out new projects. And she did the projects alongside her students. Cherri's students even trained other teachers on her lessons in rocketry for NASA.

When I first met Cherri she was undergoing chemotherapy. She was also struggling, I think, with her self-confidence as a teacher, but I could see then that she was special. She asked me if I thought she should apply to a program at NASA and if I thought she was qualified. I told her she was exactly the type of teacher they needed. She applied and was accepted, and she proceeded to take that opportunity and turn it into an amazing run for herself and her students. I watched her confidence and her hair grow back over the next few years, and I was constantly amazed at her resilience and dedication.

Cherri was dedicated to doing things right even when it wasn't easy. Like any science teacher who uses inquiry in their classrooms, she had parents and administrators who didn't always understand the value of what she was doing. I know that it hurt her when she was rebuked for "not using the text book" or "taking too many field trips" but she knew she was doing things right and she perservered.

Her students certainly know she did it right. The number of former and current students attending her funeral service was testament to that. The number of students signing her guestbook, and the experiences they shared are a testament as well. But the greatest testament to her success is the number of students from her classes succeeding in high school and college. I know a lot of teachers through HUNSTEM, and I know her students are well thought of. This is the truest assessment of teaching. Her students are not only successful in their studies after her teaching, but they remain interested in science whether they plan to pursue it as a career or not.

Cherri couldn't beat cancer the second time, but she has forevor won the minds of her students and the hearts of all who knew her.

I'm writing this tribute to Cherri in HUNBlog to show that science can be taught through the principles of constructivism. It isn't easy, but when done right, it's the best way to teach science. For any teachers who are using inquiry and PBL, keep at it. Keep learning and keep searching for new experiences for yourselves and your students. Stay strong in your knowledge that you are doing it right.

Look to Cherri Brinley for inspiration. I know I do.

A New Paradigm for Public Education

A while back I wrote a blog about a new paradigm for public education (Devil's Advocate). I also mentioned the need for a new paradigm for public education in this entry: Why We Can't Blame Teachers.

I'd like to spend much of this year expanding on this paradigm.

I haven't been blogging for awhile, though my students have been contributing to HUNBlog. I will try to write my own entries throughout this semester, primarily on my thoughts about this new paradigm, but on other things too.

Anyway, here goes:

Let's start from scratch. Let's assume that there has never been public education but we now realize the need for it. In today's milieu, what do we need to do to insure the best education for every student?

Here are a few ideas I want to develop. I'll be brief and general at this point. Let me know what you think and we'll see where this goes:

School is not a centralized location. Students should meet with their teachers in a variety of locations, such as informal science centers, museums, public libraries, parks, plants, factories, office buildings, government buildings, etc. Accomodations and transportation can be arranged, and integrated curricula can be developed. A centralized school can be used for some lessons, test taking, assemblies, etc.

Curricula should be integrated across all disciplines.

Technology should be used to provide resources to students at all age levels. I'm not talking a lap top for every student, that's already obsolete. I'm talking about something along the lines of a pda/phone. Textbooks, internet access, podcasts, bulleting boards, etc. should be utilized to communicate to students and collect assignments (electronically).  Come on, seriously, if we're starting from scratch, isn't this a no-brainer?

Content standards can be assessed through standardized tests, but this should only be half of the students final grades. The other half should be performance based. Students should have to show that they can apply what they've learned to actual tasks.

Funds for public education should come from the industry and businesses that benefit from a well educated population. Businesses and industry should be taxed according to the number of employees, and funds should be distributed to schools/school districts according to the number of students they educate (with some adjustments for cost of living differences, perhaps).

Funding should be coordinated at the federal level. National standards should be developed for the integrated curriculum, with content strands and expected outcomes for skills, but there should be plenty of room for teachers to adapt the guidelines to their student's specific needs. Teachers should be paid well, and they should be trusted to develop appropriate curricula and assessment for their students.

Okay, have at it!

the nba finals

    For our presentation, we found out the ratings, salaries, and information for the NBA finals and the all - star game. We came to the conclusion that there is no relationship between the ratings and the years of the nba finals.

We learned that the popularity of the players in the past affected the ratings of the NBA finals. We also learned a lot of information about NBA star's salaries and how the nba finals works.

From other presentations we learned about the history of football and amusement parks. We also learned things like how tall is the tallest rollercoaster is to how many touchdowns the Chargers made last season. 

                                                                                                 -Wilson Chiu, Otney Crawford                                                                                                                                              

Elvis/Taylor blog list video games

Summary:

Video games were first introduced by Nutting Associates in 1970 as a coin operated arcade game. Over time through countless technological advances, the video game has finally evolved into what it is today. An exciting and entertaining aspect to the human life, video games like Halo and Guitar Hero are one of the main parts that revolve around a teenager's life. Also, the Wii has opened up a whole new level of gameplay.

What we learned:

that the succes of a console depends on the number of games released for that console (most of the time).

What we learned from other people:

Basketball was invented in 1891

Movie theater production is going down because of companies like NetFlix and bootlegging movies

Yellowstone National Park was the first real national park

Cedar point has the most roller coasters

Kingda Ka is the tallest roller coaster at 459 ft.

Football originated in Europe

Math project

For our math powerpoint, we chose football as the topic. For the project, we had to chose a topic and search the internet for statistics dealing with our topic. We chose 3 different players to do our powerpoint on; Troy Polamalu, Dunta Robinson, and Chad Johnson. For Chad Johnson, we did a scatter plot and used his total yard gains as our data. Then, we used the trend evident in the plot to predict how Chad's statistics will look in the future. For Polamalu and Robinson, we gathered both of their statistics and compared them to one another. On each slide we included some history of each player.

Since i didn't know much about football (and my partner did) i learned quite a lot about different types of players and how to read their statistics. I also learned how to make and edit charts on powerpoint.[Ashley]

Well looking at other peoples powerpoints, we learned that putting more background information would've probably looked more professional. Also, we could've added a bibliography of the websites we used to gather that information. As far as the graphing part, we would say that our graphs were definetely exceptional. Overall, our powerpoint was pretty good, but we still think we could've done a better job.

Basketball Math Powerpoint

Our powerpoint is on basketball looking at it overall. First, we compared the players height to their points per game on a scatterplot, seeing if there was a correlation  between the players' height and their points per game. There wasn't but we could conclude that some heights had clusters near a certain point per game.

Then we made a table for player's amount of games and their amount of time per game. We decided not to make a bar graph because we wanted to compare the same number of games to each other, therfore, on the table, we listed the players' amount of games in numerical order from least to greatest and then we listed it from least to greatest by their times in a game. We learned from that, that the amount of games they played does not affect how long they play in each game because most of the players have aproximatly the same amount of time in each game (mostly around 35) however there are a few exceptions that are in the forties or in the tens.

Next we made a timeline. It showed the history of basketball's important moments in making the game how it is now. Overall, we learned a lot from this project about basketball and how the player's stats follow a trend based on height and other things.

We learned a lot of things from the other presentations, like stats from football games and their players, movie stats like how much it will cost in the future, and amusement parks stats and facts about their rides. We learned a few general things like why it's sometimes better to use a scatterplot-- or any graph-- than a table.

Movies

         Digitally made movies started gaining popularity around the turn of the twentieth century and now, they are all around us: advertised in commercials, posters and on the web. In the beginning movies were actually a sequence of pictures showed in sufficient speed that it appears to be moving. Our project has an intro and brief history along with some data of the development of movies from the cost of movie tickets to the average earning per movie for disney to the favorite genres of modern day people. We have a prediction of the cost of tickets in the year of 2010. We learned many things like the great increase in the cost of movie tickets from a few cents to around seven dollars. We also learned that the favoreite genre of people is comedy. We've also discovered the increase in the amount earned per film of disney's box office films.

We learned from other people by listening to other people that there are over fifty unique national parks in the United States. The world's tallest roller coaster is Kingda Ka and the 10th tallest is Titan. We learned from our group various properties and abilities of the powerpoint. Cedar Point is the theme park with the most roller coasters.

Football

             Our presentation was about football which originated in Europe. Here is a brief history: football was played in the medieval times in England where it was not professional yet. However, it was played between clubs and not teams. They would meet every so often to play in tournaments. One drawback was that the clubs did not have an universal set of rules. Finally, a few teams met in England to create a universal code. This was offset of modern football in America.

Chargers

Our Power Point is on the San Deigo Chargers and they are on the American Football Coference.  We had to research some history on American football and compared it to how football is played now.  On one of the slides we put a scatter plot and then we put up two gragh thats showed rushing and receiving yards from 2004 to 2007. As our backgrounds for each slide we put up a player from the Chargers and our favorite one was Ladanian Tomilson.

From this project I learned that there used to be 20 players on the field which has change to 11 now.  I also learned the names of some players on the Chargers team.

My partner Devonte' Learned nothing from this project because he is a big football fan and he was the reason we chose to do the project on football.

Well my partner and I learned that Yellowstone national Park is one of the popular parks in the U.S.A. We also also learned about the tallest rollercoster which is Kinda Ka standing at 450 feet.

Recreation Activities

Movie theatres have been apart of American entertainment  as early as 1800s. We saw that as prices go up the theater population decreases as time goes on. We learned that the reason for this is because people now are starting to rent movies and buy illegal copies of movies. From other presentations we learned that  the theater get most of its money from the concession stand. That is probably why popcorn and candy cost an "arm and a leg".