Motivation

I ran across this tonight and wondered if I could swap out the word motivation for discrimination.

Maxine Greene "Releasing The Imagination" page 189:
"A person does not fully see or live through the impacts of discrimination unless he or she has desires that discrimination (or poverty, or abandonment) prevents him or her from fulfilling."

In other words my thought was if a student sees no need for motivation then why would they have any. May be I as the teacher have to do something different to make sure there is a desire that provides motivation. May be all I have to do is create the desire and the rest will follow.

UDF SkyWalker V1.0

Click-drag green circle to pan around the whole image.

The Ultra Deep Field obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope is the deepest view into the sky by humankind to date. This image combines 800 frames with a total exposure time of 1 million seconds. The 10.000 galaxies that are visible have distances out to times where the universe was just 800 million years old, one seventeenth of its current age. For more info check the UDF press release at spacetelescope.org.

For a wider but less deep view visit the GEMS Skywalker.

via aip.de

Awesome Hubble Ultra Deep Field tool. Great for opening devotions.

Wetland Scavenger Hunt

Here is the lesson I did in Environmental Science this week. I liked it but I also thought I should put it out for comment, because it did not work exactly as planned. My thoughts in no particular order:

  • I also wish I had a better way of collecting pictures than twitpic.com. Here is a link to the pictures.
  • I had an absent student add the last eight items after the fact for his credit. I really liked some of his ideas.
  • I was happy that I had enough kids with cellphone plans that allowed picture messaging for free that I had students in pairs.
  • My eventual goal is to have students pick a park or place and have them put together these for the parks department so that anyone can go on the scavenger hunts. To do this I need to figure out a public place to post photos and a way of getting the directions to people via text messaging.

 

Wetland Scavenger Hunt

Find any of these things along the boardwalk through the wetland. Use your phone to take a picture to document your find. Send the picture to username.XXXX@twitpic.com with the subject being the category of the find and the text being your team name. First and unique finds will be worth two points each, other finds will be worth one. The best team will get five points of extra credit on this. Everyone else's score will be out of the best score minus five points.

 

Good Smelling
Bad Smelling
Makes a Quiet Sound
Makes a Loud Sound
Hairy (NOT human)
Animal sign (NOT human)
Webbed footed Bird
Claw footed Bird
An insect that floats
A flying insect
An amphibian
A wetland plant
Something rough
Something smooth
Signs of people
Something changing
reptiles
fungus
standing water
something out of the ordinary/rare
something you've never seen before.
something growing
something rotting/decomposing
some type of poop
Windmill

Lesson Based On

 http://dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/teacher/wetlandsheet.htm