Friday Funny

From xkcd

Nearly there

Tomorrow we break up for half term after an incredibly hectic 7 weeks. The term from september to christmas is always the hardest and this year is proving no different. Most of the teachers and students seem to be virtually sleep-walking through the day.

So, to those who are counting the hours, I have this to say:

It's raining!

Well, of course it is. It's October and that's what the weather does lately - rain. This rain, however, is slightly different because it's not in the usual place (outside) but is instead happening in lab 3.

We are on the ground floor of the science block, and directly above us is the chemistry department. They seem to have issues with the sink traps in one of their labs which become dislodged when the kids kick or rest their feet on them. If no one notices that the trap has become dislodged then every time water (or anything else) is poured down the sink it comes through the ceiling into the lab below.

3 times so far this term we've had this problem and it's getting beyond a joke. It's not so bad when it's just water. The clearing up is a nuisance, but not major. What worries me is that sooner or later it won't just be water and someone could get chemicals in their eyes. Alternatively the ceiling might collapse. Either way, not good.

We keep reporting the issue, but I'm not holding my breath that anything will happen.

What's our job again?

I've mentioned in the past the wide range of extra curricular activities that we do here in the physics department - trips, astronomy, solar car etc.
Just lately though, it's feeling like we're starting to forget that the main focus of our jobs is supposed to be the teaching of physics!

The solar car project is having a big launch event on saturday. We've got Cambridge University coming along with their car as well as potential sponsors including McLaren and Jaguar. It's a really big deal and if it goes well then the project will really take off. It's a lot of work though. My HoD has been running around like crazy for the last couple of weeks putting arrangements in place. Meanwhile the organisation of the 2 overseas trips that are happening before christmas has mainly fallen to me and I'm worrying that it's all going to go wrong.

Lesson planning is virtually non-existant right now and last minute requests are becoming the norm. It's as if they've all forgotten that lessons are happening because they are so caught up in other things. I really hope that once this weekend is out of the way we can get back on track, or I'll be heading for a nervous breakdown by new year.

Friday Funny

ISA time

Got a lovely big parcel yesterday with all the bits I need to start preparing this year's AS and A2 ISAs. Obviously I'm not allowed to talk about what the ISAs consist of, but they don't look to be nearly such a pain to set up as some we've had in the past, which makes me very happy.

I'll be trialling the experiments over the next few weeks and then I expect we'll start doing all the practice ones. At least this year we have no GCSE ISAs.
Hooray for iGCSE!

Girls and Physics

There's a story on the BBC website today about the disparity between the numbers of girls and boys studying physics at A-level.

My first reaction was 'that's not news!'. Anyone working in science education has known for years that biology classes tend to be girl-heavy, chemistry tends to be a 50/50 split and physics is almost always male dominated. We've made quite a lot of progress on this front at my current school. When I started here almost 5 years ago, we had a couple of girls in the A-level and IB sets. We currently have over 25 girls studying post-16 physics. In face one of our upper 6th IB sets is only girls.

So what's changed? I think what has made a huge difference is that we have a department staffed by physicists who are enthusiastic about the subject. We don't just teach the stuff you need to pass the exam, we have a whole range of extra-curricular activities, particularly the astronomy club and the solar car, which help students see that physics isn't just some dry science that you do in a lab, but is actually a hugely exciting subject which can take you in a variety of directions.

However, it's not just girls who seem more interested in physics. We have almost twice as many post-16 students of any sex than we did 5 years ago, and I think that's the important point. Surely we want everyone to consider the sciences as a career option, and we need to start by looking at the teachers.

Over the course of 11 years working in 3 different schools I have met at least 20 PGCE science teachers. How many do you think were physicists? Go on, take a guess.
3.
If we want students to be excited by physics we need the specialist, passionate teachers and there just aren't enough of them out there.