Posts Tagged ‘Science’
July 3, 2012
Talk about a science experiment that didn’t turn out well:
A teacher on the New South Wales Central Coast has pleaded not guilty to assault charges, after he allegedly dared a group of students to hold dry ice with their bare hands.
Damien Hilton is facing eight charges, including cause grievous bodily harm by neglect, after a group of Terrigal High School students were injured during his science class earlier this year.
The 49-year-old, who was employed as a casual teacher, is accused of daring 10 children to hold dry ice for as long as they could.
The students were treated for burns, with two taken to hospital.
Hilton faced Gosford Local Court today and pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The matter has been adjourned until next month.
Tags:Damien Hilton dry ice, daring 10 children to hold dry ice for as long as they could, Education, Gosford, New South Wales Central Coast, News, professional conduct, Science, Science experiments, Teacher, teacher dared students to hold dry ice with bare hands., teacher pleaded not guilty to assault charges, Teaching, Terrigal High School dry ice
Posted in Professional Conduct | Leave a Comment »
March 1, 2012
It is my belief that the job of a parent is to parent and the job of the teacher is to teach. Sure it’s wonderful when parents take it upon themselves to help reinforce skills taught in class. I am always appreciative of parents that spare some time to revise concepts covered during the school day. But essentially, I am paid to ensure that the parents can spend textbook-free quality time with their children. This is in my view essential to maximising the relationship of child and parent. Children often show a reluctance to work through school material with their parents and parents often get very anxious when trying to get their children to concentrate and listen to their explanations.
It is my job to see it that parents are free to spend time with their children without having to go through the ordeal of maths and science work. That’s what they pay me for.
But unfortunately, it seems that we are not doing a good enough job. It seems as if parents have often been given little choice but to try to fill in the gaps we have left behind. You hear too many stories of parents frantically trying to complete their own childs’ homework, sometimes struggling to work out the answers themselves:
A quarter of parents in Reading admit that helping their children with homework leads to family arguments, according to a survey.
Research by tuition provider Explore Learning also showed 9.2 per cent rarely helped their children with homework with more than two thirds struggling when they did.
Maths confuses parents the most with 41.2 per cent of parents finding the subject hard to grasp compared to the 11.1 per cent of parents who find English difficult.
Nationally, nearly a third of parents admitted homework had caused friction in the family with Reading not straying far from the average when it came to struggling in maths and English.
It’s time we let parents bond with their children instead of getting them to do our dirty work. Homework, if administered at all, should be revision of concepts covered in the class. If the children are not capable of doing it independently it shouldn’t have been given to them in the first place.
Tags:Children, Education, English, Explore Learning, Family, Homework, kids, Learning, maths, Parenting, Parents, Science, Survey, Teacher, Teachers
Posted in Homework, Parenting | 1 Comment »
September 24, 2011
I used to be philosophically opposed to homework in all forms. That was, until I witnessed how my students used their after-school time. It was then, that I realised that ten to fifteen minutes a night would constitute the only meaningful activity some of these students would take part in on a given night.
I am still hardly a proponent of homework, but I do share some of the opinions of author and teacher, Katharine Birbalsingh:
The radio presenter Alan Jones doesn’t believe in homework because children should have time to play outside and learn skills that only time after school with your family can teach. Normally, I would agree. But do children today have these types of experiences after school?
Families are so busy working that when children come home, they often sit in front of the TV for hours or play computer games. Children spend hours every day networking on Facebook. Exhausted parents do not realise just how dangerous these modern technological tools can be.
Technology can open a world of excitement to children. Yet it can also glorify gangster lifestyles through MTV, and encourage the use of bad language and ”text speak” in social networking.
An hour of homework a night distracts children from such activities and enables them to practise what they were taught at school. Excellent learning requires constant revisiting, and homework is the perfect tool to reinforce facts and skills. Teachers often find that children forget what they learnt the day before. At high school, you may not see your history or geography teacher for a few days until the next lesson. Without any homework in between to bridge the gap, often teachers take two steps forward, then one step back in the following lesson.
It is the school’s responsibility to inform parents that homework has been set – easily done through a diary system. The school should also ensure the homework set is of quality and not some assignment that can essentially be downloaded from the internet. Equally, it is the parents’ responsibility to ensure homework gets done.
I object to her call for an hour of homework per day, but I do currently favour 10-15 minutes of revision work, to consolidate on skills and concepts currently being covered in class.
Well, I have taught math in the past. My thoughts on homework was that if students had homework, they didn’t get finished in class. I never assigned homework. Homework was there if they didn’t get finished in class, but most times students did.
Now that I teach Science, it’s the same way. A lot of what we do is in class, hands-on activities. Homework are the questions they didn’t get to because they were goofing off or not focused in class.
In my opinion, teachers who teach the entire period and allow no work time are not good teachers. Students need to know they are being successful and have confidence. They can’t have a teacher telling them they are correct when they are at home.
This topic remains a very contentious one. I look forward to reading your opinions on this much discussed issue.
Tags:Alan Jones, Education, facebook, Homework, Jonathan Cannon, Katharine Birbalsingh, life, math, Parenting, Richard Walker, Science, Sue Thomson, technology, To Miss With Love, tv
Posted in Homework | 2 Comments »
August 20, 2011
I’m sick of losing valuable curriculum time for the purposes of teaching yet another program or peddling yet another campaign. Whilst I believe that women should be able to breastfeed whenever and wherever they choose to, I don’t see why that message has to interfere with a literacy or maths lesson:
TEENAGERS may be taught in school that it is OK to breastfeed in public.
The Australian Breastfeeding Association wants future generations of mums and dads to view public breastfeeding as acceptable as seeing breasts on TV, in movies and in advertising.
Melbourne TV presenter Andi Lew is joining the awareness campaign, addressing a group of female students at Lalor Secondary College during an ABA presentation this week.
The ABA said research had shown exposure to breastfeeding at an early age positively influenced attitudes later in life.
“The evidence is accumulating that breastfeeding needs to be promoted in schools,” ABA spokeswoman Karen Ingram said yesterday.
“Despite every national and international health authority recommending exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a baby’s life, the latest research suggests that the mums and dads of the future don’t fully grasp the importance of breastfeeding.
Please stop taking the workload of teachers for granted by making them continually stop what they are doing in the name of yet another campaign? Our primary job is to teach literacy, numeracy and science, please let us leave the breastfeeding advice to parents and doctors?
“They are unlikely to breastfeed in public because they feel it’s embarrassing.
Tags:Andi Lew, Breastfeeding, Curriculum, Education, Lalor Secondary College, Literacy, Numeracy, Science, The Australian Breastfeeding Association
Posted in Teachers Stress | 3 Comments »
July 10, 2011
No matter how strongly teachers may feel on the subject of climate change, there is no place for scare tactics in a Primary classroom.
PRIMARY school children are being terrified by lessons claiming climate change will bring “death, injury and destruction” to the world unless they take action.
On the eve of Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s carbon tax package announcement, psychologists and scientists said the lessons were alarmist, created unneeded anxiety among school children and endangered their mental health.
Climate change as a “Doomsday scenario” is being taught in classrooms across Australia.
Resource material produced by the Gillard government for primary school teachers and students states climate change will cause “devastating disasters”.
Australian National University’s Centre for the Public Awareness of Science director Dr Sue Stocklmayer said climate change had been portrayed as “Doomsday scenarios with no way out”.
The fear campaign must stop. It is a manipulative and immature tactic by a desperate Government. Our job as educators is to empower and motivate not scare our students senseless.
I refuse to teach Government resource material that has the potential to frighten my students.
Tags:Australia, Carbon Tax, Climate, Climate Change, Education, Fear, Government, Julia Gillard, life, News, Parenting, Politics, Science, Teaching
Posted in Child Welfare | 3 Comments »
June 30, 2011
Feeling guilty about the amount of candy you allow your children to eat? Not anymore. If anything, you aren’t feeding them enough!
Or, at least that’s what the research seems to suggest ….
Indulging a sweet tooth might not be anyone’s idea of a good weight-loss strategy. But in jaw-dropping new research, scientists say they’ve found something even more likely to be associated with unwanted weight gain in children and adolescents than eating candy:
Not eating candy.
For the study, published in Food & Nutrition Research, researchers at Louisiana State University tracked the health of more than 11,000 youngsters between the ages of two and 18 from 1999 to 2004. They found that children who ate sweets were 22 percent less likely to be overweight or obese than kids who shunned sweets. Adolescents? Those who ate candy were 26 percent less likely to be overweight or obese than their non-candy-eating counterparts.
And that wasn’t the only surprising finding. Researchers also found that the blood of candy-eating kids had lower levels of C-reactive protein. That’s a marker of inflammation in the body and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and other chronic illnesses.
Who funds this research? Could somebody please do a study that links the watching of televised sport to greater physical health? I could do with some scientific evidence to persuade my wife that I’m not wasting my time
Tags:Adolescents, Candy, Childhood Obesity, Children, Diet, food, Food & Nutrition Research, Health, Louisiana State University, Nutrition, Obesity, Science, Weight-Loss
Posted in Childhood Obesity, Nutrition | 3 Comments »
December 21, 2010
Findings from a recent study in the journal ‘Pediatrics’, show that breast-feeding infants for at least six months appears to give kids’ an advantage in school.
This is not a new finding in itself. However, what was of particular interest, was that boys appeared to benefit the most.
The researchers, from the University of Western Australia in Perth, have followed 2,868 children since the early ’90s. The study showed that, at age 10, boys who were breast-fed for six months or longer scored higher in math, reading and spelling compared with boys who were breast-fed for less than six months. Girls who were breast-fed for at least six months showed a small improvement in reading. The researchers controlled for other factors that could influence school performance, such as family income and education and how often the child was read to.
There were two reasons given for the link between breast-fed babies and academic performance:
1. Breast milk is rich in long-chain, polyunsaturated fatty acids that are critical to brain development. It’s not clear why boys showed the largest gains from being breast-fed, but the authors explain that male babies are known to be more vulnerable in infancy than females. They speculate that breast-feeding “accelerates the rate of maturation in boys.
2. Boys may also benefit more from the mother-child relationship facilitated by breast-feeding. “A number of studies have revealed that male infants are more reliant than female infants on maternal attention and encouragement for the acquisition of cognitive and language skills,” the authors wrote.
Tags:Babies, Breast Feeding, Breastfeeding, Education, Health, life, News, Nutrition, Parenting, Pediatrics, Science
Posted in Child Development, Teaching boys | Leave a Comment »
November 4, 2010
It seems that Science is the most challenging subject for curriculum officials to agree on as they endeavour to complete the national curriculum. We teachers have been waiting for a while to find out what the completed national curriculum looks like, but at the moment all we have available to us is a rough draft.
The chairman of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Barry McGaw, said the curriculums for maths, English and history were ”essentially done and dusted” but more work lay ahead to achieve agreement on the science curriculum.
”Comparisons show Australia is in the top five countries in science by the time students are 15. But we’re in the bottom 10 to 20 out of nearly 60 nations in how much our kids like science, how important they think science is for their futures, and how important they think science is for the national future,” he said.
”So we’ve got students who are good at a subject but are not engaged with it and thus not likely to continue to engage with it.”
It sounds like ‘spin’ to me. I’ve heard that the draft science curriculum was panned for being too difficult for teachers to effectively implement. The national curriculum has been marred with bad publicity, and teachers are starting to get a bit edgy.
I just hope the final product is worth the wait.
Tags:Education, National Curriculum, News, Parenting, School, Science
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
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