Reflections on the program as a whole:

Reflections on the program as a whole:

Personally, I was extremely satisfied with my research experience. Although I know it was just a lucky coincidence that my group had a need that met my “expertise from a previous life”, it truly was gratifying to contribute to the group in an immediate and concrete way. I felt more like a post-doc than a grad student. (Maybe it was just my silly bloated ego getting fed, but I’m self aware enough to admit that it felt pretty good). I also want to point out that I didn’t just copy my grad student work. The field of Raman Spectroscopy has integrated new technologies and applications since my research days, so I was able to learn quite a bit of these advances. I hope that, if I am fortunate enough to participate in RET in the future, I would be able to continue the Raman Microscopy work in Professor Gu’s lab.

I feel I learned some valuable education theory in the professional development sessions. Unlike the high school teachers, formal education classes are not required for my profession, and therefore much of the vocabulary and even some of the concepts were new to me. This new knowledge will be very helpful in my interaction with colleagues and college administrators who have more formal backgrounds in education. I will also certainly be even more focused than before on developing more inquiry-based lessons. (My colleagues and I already integrate many hands-on and other activities in lieu of traditional lectures; we just didn’t call it “inquiry based learning”.)

It was a great pleasure to get to know the high school and middle school teachers. I think that having a better understanding of their working conditions, challenges, and successful strategies will help me to understand my own students’ prior experience. In general, I think that the interaction between us all can only help our ability to shepherd people through the entire 7-16 education process. Whether or not helping a more seamless laddering for our students through the system is an explicit goal of RET, it is certainly a valuable consequence of our participation.

Lastly, I’d like to comment on the quality of the people I met and worked with for these past 6 weeks. They are simply exceptional. I leave the program having a great deal of admiration and respect for the job the high school teachers are doing. I hope my son’s teachers in the future are as dedicated, compassionate, and most importantly, competent.

I hope we all stay in touch and use this forum as our own learning community, one in which best practices are shared and questions can be comfortably posed.

Have a productive and happy school year J
John

Week 6

Week 6

This week was very enjoyable. The making of my research poster was an interesting exercise. Since I wasn’t permitted to show, or even discuss, our actual data, I decided to make more of a “teaching poster” than a “research poster”. Of course I did report the actual type of work we did, but I dedicated much more board space to background information on wastewater treatment to prevent eutrophication of waterways, general techniques to remove phosphates from wastewater, and a section on “how the Raman effect works”. I wrote these sections in less technical language so that the students at Middlesex Community College may understand the content. I found this to be a little more challenging, and fun, than putting together a straight-forward research poster. I feel that I have an artifact that I can much more easily use to promote RET to colleagues at Middlesex, and REU to students in the future, than a more technical poster would allow. And I do plan on promoting both programs with great enthusiasm.

I also really enjoyed hearing the lesson plans from the group. Not only was I grateful for the feedback to my work, but I took away a number of good ideas that I can use to help teach chemistry (in the areas of solution conductivity, scale of subatomic particle size, and intermolecular forces in particular – I must buy one of those water molecule magnet kits!)

Week 5 Reflections

Week 5
For lack of a better phrase, it was crunch time this past week. With the poster session and lesson plan presentation on deck for week 6, I had to finish measuring all of the peak intensities in the Raman spectra, and at least begin the analysis of the combined intensity data. It’s hard to believe the project is winding down –the time is just flying by.
John