Last night, my 6-year-old niece and I were outside in the country on a clear night, looking at the stars, telling stories. Here is what she had to say:

“Stars are bright because they visit the sun during the day, and burn bright throughout the night.”

“Stars like to be in certain places more than others. In some places you can only see three of four stars, but in other you can you see a hundreds, or a million and three.”

“Stars hide whenever you turn on a light. But when you turn off the light, the stars come back out to dance, like at a party. Let’s pretend we are stars. First, we’ll turn off the light and hide behind the car. And then we’ll, turn it on and dance in the street.”

“When you look at the stars from the edge of the yard, they are over there, but then when we move to the house, the stars move. This happens because stars move in circles. See.”

“That bright star is from aliens–aliens that like to hop. They don’t hop too high, just little hops. Aliens grow and play. ”

“The moon isn’t out here, because it’s probably at my house.”

“Why are they called stars? They don’t look like the stars. Like the ones I draw. They just look like points. This is how you make a star. Those stars look nothing like stars.”

“I heard cows jump over the moon, but I don’t believe it… I don’t believe it, because cows are lazy.”

A very thin hoop is placed at the top of a ramp. Will the hoop (start to) roll without slipping?

Without doing the experiment, what would you want to be able to measure to help you decide? Why would these measurements help? How would you go about measuring them?. Once you’ve measured these things, how will you use those measurements to help you decide.

Only 7 of the million things I am realizing this year:

#1: Organization. I need to become better organized. In past, when most of my job was mostly being a researcher or student with teaching just on the side, I could be pretty dis-organized about teaching and it had few consequences. Once teaching became most of my job, organization has become key, but I’m way behind the curve on this one.

#2: Teaching Colleagues: Teaching an inquiry course like the one I am trying to do with the future elementary school teachers requires a lot of time and mental effort, and it really benefits from having teaching collaborators.  In the past when I’ve taught this kind of course, I was either co-teaching it or had plenty of people around who had taught a similar course. This year, this course I have is a lot harder to teach by myself, without colleagues to talk about the student ideas’ I am hearing. I am finding myself much worse off because I can’t engage in nearly daily discussions about where we might go and what we could do next.

#3 Evaluator/Teacher: There is a bit of me that really likes the fact that I don’t write the exams for my physics course, and there a bit of me that hates it. I like it, because it clearly puts me in the role of teacher and not evaluator. It’s my job to help them learn.  It’s someone else job to write a test that tries to assess that learning. I don’t like it, because I don’t feel like the tests are a good measure of learning.

#4 For students, especially students from other countries and certain minorities, academic and social isolation can be a big problem. I don’t know what to do about it, but it is something I am more and more aware of being here.

#5: I was really, really lucky not to have to work and go to school at the same time during college years. This was in part due to scholarships and in part due to my parents. So many students I know here work full time. Sure, I wrestled full-time in college. But wrestling was something I loved and I did it by choice. If I stopped wrestling, I wasn’t going to evicted or starve. Oh wait, I did starve myself often due to wrestling.

#6: It is a struggle to find time and mental space for research. This is both because I am teaching more, and teaching new classes. But it is also a struggle with fewer colleagues around. I am very very thankful for colleagues who keep tabs on me: Those who ask me to be part of writing or reading groups. Those who offer to help getting a paper out the door. Those who ask if I want to work on writing a grant together. Those who invite me to give talks. Without those people, it would be easy to disappear.

#7: In teaching, a lot of things matter in the day-to-day management of a classroom. Sometimes it’s the big things. Sometimes it’s the little things. I’ve learned that even if you have a handle on at a lot of the important stuff, it is still easy for things to go bad and go bad quickly because one small thing. Having established some rapport with your students (as individuals and a class), especially, about who you are as a teacher and how you care about your students as learners, can go a long way toward not letting a slip become a fall.