The REAL World of Agnes Pflumm!

Am I the REAL Agnes Pflumm?

2009-03-26T13:50:00.004-04:00

These economic times are hitting us teachers and authors pretty hard. Schools don’t have monies for new curriculum or for professional development. Recently, I hired a fantastic publicist named Tyler Stilley of Alternative Marketing, LLC (http://www.alternativemarketingsite.com/index.html), to help me better get the word out about my work and what I am trying to do to improve the reading and science skills of our middle school students. Tyler created a very cool press kit for me, which you can now see on my website at http://www.agnespflumm.com/documents/agnespflumm_press_kit.pdf.

On the last page of the press kit are 15 questions which teachers and students frequently ask me. Just yesterday, I answered some of these FAQ’s during a videoconference with nearly 100 fifth graders and teachers from South Carolina’s Doby’s Mill Elementary School, where I am proud to be an honorary “dolphin”. The hands were still up well after an hour, when their next class was to begin. Teacher Angela McCall (who is phenomenal, by the way), asked if I might consider answering the remaining questions on my next blog.

“What a great idea!” I exclaimed. Every day I get letters from students like Aditi in Florida, who want to know stuff like Did that story of the electromagnetic crane happen to you? Aditi also wanted to know if I were the REAL Agnes Pflumm? Do I dare share my secrets with the world???? Hmmmm.

Well, okay, but nothing too personal (I LOVE pistachios! Oops, that slipped out.) Today’s FAQ will address whether the fictional character, Agnes Pflumm, is really my double, or alter ego. We both are slightly wacko science teachers, who love to sing, dance, write poetry, and rollerblade. We both love to walk on the beach, draw from nature, and write in our journals. We both talk to our pets. We both have bodies like Olive Oyl. That’s a lot of coincidences, isn’t it?

Wanted: A Quick Fix

2009-03-02T14:43:00.003-05:00

In August, 2005, I read a newspaper headline that caused me to gasp in horror.

ARIZONA HIGH SCHOOL SWAPS TEXTBOOKS FOR LAPTOPS

It’s true. In the article, written by Arthur Rotstein of the Associated Press, 340 students at Empire High School in Arizona were to start fall classes with no textbooks. Instead, the Vail Unified School District (is there really such a thing?) outside Tuscon became the state’s first all wireless-all-laptop high school. For one year at least, these students would only use electronic and online articles as school reading material.

DOESN’T THAT JUST SENT SHIVERS DOWN TO THE LAST DENDRITES IN YOUR METATARSALS? George Orwell would have had a field day with this. Were he alive now, he would surely write Animal Farm:The Virtual Edition.

In a related Associated Press article, it was reported that Calvin Baker, Superintendent of the Vail Unified School District, rationalized their decision to remove textbooks from classrooms by claiming that “the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.”

Instantly, bloggers everywhere reacted: “So now teachers will just get into the habit of clicking through their lessons each year. That would be SO MUCH BETTER!” quipped the Ignatius Press Blog.

Superintendent Baker was quick to counter: “At schools with laptops, students are more engaged than at non-laptop schools.”

Well, DUHHHHH. For a kid, arriving on the first day of school with a new laptop computer on your desk would be like having Christmas in August. Even better, the laptops at Empire High School were on loan. Hmmmm. No wonder this school district was so UNIFIED in participating in this experiment. Who doesn’t want a free lunch?

As a teacher and a writer, I was so troubled by this headline and its implications that I literally couldn’t sleep. What was going on? Would technology really make these teachers’ lessons more engaging or themselves better educators? Ah, there was the rub, I realized.

What if we teachers were to step back just a moment and take a hard look at our selves – sans computers, sans gadgets of any kind. Are we really good at what we do?

In his book, The Art of Teaching, written in 1950, Gilbert Highet (who taught at both Columbia University and at Oxford), notes that the qualities of a good teacher include:
• Knowing the subject
• Knowing the pupils
• Liking the pupils
• And possessing certain qualities like memory, will-power, kindness, discipline, and good communication skills.

Of course, we teachers would like a quick fix. We’re only human. As the most underpaid workers in our nation (for the hours we put into our jobs), we often grouse that we’re not “given enough” in order to do our jobs.

For the record, Death-by-Powerpoint is not the answer. College professors all over the country are boring students to death with this technology. Talk about dis-engaging your students with a laptop! I would like to personally challenge these professors to use their powerpoint lecture notes for out of class review, and get back to the human art of teaching!

Do you feel you have been called to teach? Do you wake up each morning, glad for the opportunity to change a life – or do you whine in the faculty room? Hmmm…

Are you a good communicator? Do your students sense in you a passion for learning? Are your lessons relevant, memorable, and applicable to new situations? Do you really like your students? Be honest!

In my third science education novel, Pond Scum and Agnes Pflumm, I endeavor to drive home the fact that in the real world, perfectly designed solutions do not exist. There are always risks vs. benefits to consider when trying to solve a problem of any kind. Effecting science literacy is no exception.

The recommended methodologies for improving content literacy are many. Today’s teachers are being asked to provide something called linguistic scaffolding to enhance student understanding of subject matter content.

Regardless of the jargon you use to describe the task, the same is true today as it has been forever. It’s that old horse-to-water saying with an educational twist:

YOU CANNOT TEACH ANYBODY ANYTHING HE DOESN’T WANT TO LEARN.

And you can never ever make me eat brussel sprouts. Stay tuned….

On Brussel Sprouts, Discontinuities, and "The Great Turn Off"

2009-02-23T21:57:00.001-05:00

NO WHINING ALLOWED. This declaration should be posted in every faculty room in our nation. Just think of all the potential energy wasted every time a complaint (rather than a possible solution) sproings from the lips of a disgruntled educator. Everyone knows we don’t get paid enough. We don’t have enough supplies. Our principal is too busy. We’re out of gas and steam.

In my first post, I alluded to what has been called by many educators “The Great Turn Off”, an observable, measurable phenomenon characterized by students in great numbers turning away from engaged learning in science at the secondary level and beyond. If you were a geologist, you might label this event an “unconformity” or a “discontinuity” - a time or place before or at which something was happening and after which it is not.

On another, but not unrelated, subject, I loathe brussel sprouts - always have. This detestable vegetable nearly kept me from going “trick or treating” one Halloween many years ago. Scarily but amiably costumed as Casper the Friendly Ghost, my eight year old self sat alone at the supper table, staring at a small mound of cold brussel sprouts. I would not be allowed to join my friends in the annual candy gorge until I ate every one of them. Our loyal schnuazer, Skipper, waited expectantly as always at my feet, but I knew he might betray me if I slipped him the slimy green globules. He, like me, would be sure to vomit them up. Whining was not an option in our German Lutheran household. I had to think, and fast!

Ever the problem solver (translate sneaky little kid), I came upon the only solution to this problem which might go undetected by my diligent, health conscious parents, who were now happily greeting the neighborhood goblins, clowns, and hoboes at our front door. One by one, the cold, nasty, nausea-inducing nuggets disappeared inside my underpants. Skipper was bereft. I was giddy.

“All done!” I shouted from the table.
“Did you feed them to the dog?” came the reply from the front door.
“No, mam!” I exclaimed, relieved to be able to tell the truth.
“Okay. Be back by 8:00, okay?”
“YIPPEEE!!” I was off with all the speed an underweight, malnourished eight-year-old could muster.

For the next two hours, I was free in the night, exuberantly flying with my cape through the neighborhood, while discretely unloading ten squished brussel sprouts along the way. I’ll never ever forget the feeling of the Great Brussel Sprout Discontinuity – a time before which I was not a freely flying human child and after which I was. Moreover, I had made an important scientific discovery – a methodology for defeating brussel sprouts and other deadly food products.

I grew up to become a science teacher who hated the way middle and secondary science was being taught in the 1980’s and 90’s. Linear, textbook-driven, left brained curricula stressing low levels of cognitive recall were leaving students with a bad taste in their mouths for science. “Hand’s On Science” soon hit the teaching scene, to be followed in turn by “Hands-On-Minds-On” protocols. The emphasis was now on actually doing science. Suddenly, already overworked, underpaid elementary and middle school teachers now had to order equipment and set up and break down labs in their nonexistent planning periods. Many of these teachers had little or no background in laboratory science. For them, teaching science became as loathsome as eating Brussel sprouts has always been for me. Moreover, the nearly exponential increase of science content knowledge being poured into textbooks left many teachers feeling woefully unprepared to teach this vital subject. Science was the new foreign language, and the “The Great Turn Off” has continued to this day.

Dr. James Trefil posits powerful solutions in his book Why Science?, to which I referred in my February 20th posting. Instead of the overemphasis on doing science, he argues that more time should be spent helping students to achieve science literacy. I argued as well that we need to develop methods for helping students decode the language of science as READERS. Newspapers and age appropriate science journals need to be in every classroom, with weekly science news “broadcasts” being given by students. (I’ll post a blog on this topic later.) Literature with standards-based science content (a shameless plug for the Agnes Pflumm novels, www.agnespflumm.com ) should be featured in every middle and secondary school media center. With time, a culture of science literacy can evolve at each level of our educational system, and the Great Middle School Science Discontinuity will be no more. Brussel sprouts, I fear, will still be served in school cafeterias.

Why Are We Science ILLiterate?

2009-02-20T08:01:00.002-05:00

This past weekend, I read Dr. James Trefil’s elucidating book, Why Science? With insight born of decades of research and writing on the importance of science literacy in a culture driven by science and technology, Dr. Trefil offers all nonscientists the opportunity to understand the “Universal Principles” of science. He defines science literacy as “the matrix of knowledge needed to understand enough about the physical universe to deal with issues that come across our horizon, in the news or elsewhere.” Dr. Trefil himself is a pioneer in the development of integrated science for nonmajors undergraduate courses like “Great Ideas in Science,” which he teaches at George Mason University in Washington, DC.

“But why has Dr. Trefil had to write this book in the first place?” I asked myself. Where and when did we as a nation become science illiterate? Thank goodness, I thought, that most American colleges have the foresight to require science courses for graduation, or we’d be in a worse fix! But back to my question…. the answer to which most of us in science education already know. The event horizon of the black hole to science illiteracy can most likely be found at the middle school level of our education system.

Like Dr. Trefil’s wife (who is also a middle school teacher), I have devoted my career toward motivating these precious, often vulnerable human beings to aspire to high levels of achievement in their lives. What I know to be true after spending nearly 30 years in the classroom is that true achievement in school and beyond centers on an individual’s ability to read and comprehend the written word. When a student is a poor reader already, he or she will have great difficulty understanding the language of science and mathematics, which by middle school, is starting to get just hard enough to shy away from.

The seeds of a negative attitude toward science, once sown, develop into quite hardy obstacles to future learning. Since students do not like to fail, their future avoidance of higher levels of science and mathematics beyond middle school is not difficult to understand. Our present culture’s overemphasis on test scores rather than the achievement of true literacy perpetuates this fear of failure in science and a culture of science illiteracy. Hence the dire need for courses like Dr. Trefil’s “Great Ideas in Science.”

To test my theory that there is a direct correlation between a student’s reading comprehension ability and his or her ability to understand (and ultimately do) science, I began many years ago comparing the standardized reading comprehension and science achievement test scores of my new 6th grade students. Not surprisingly, in nearly every case, those students who scored poorly on reading comprehension also scored abysmally on science achievement tests. NAEP statistics for 8th graders nationwide bore this out as well.

In my classes, I present science as what it is – a human activity. In other words, it’s not always glamorous or pretty. The first thing that students learn from me is that messing up is a real part of science. (Some of the coolest things have been discovered by accident!) Ironically, my first science education novel, Agnes Pflumm and the Stonecreek Science Fair, arose out of my own childhood fear of not doing a “good enough” science fair project. I’m ashamed to confess I let my father do my project for me. Never again. I made all my own mistakes after that. In college, I failed to discover the identity of the unknown chemical in my college quantitative analysis class (but I got to sit at the console of a nuclear magnetic spectrophotometer!) I got an 67% error in my first chemistry lab. I can’t do math in my head. But I blew organic chemistry out of the water. I stayed up until midnight playing with plastic models of isomers. I’m a nut about genetics and plate tectonics. Okay, I’m a geek. I LOVE science and reading! I can’t get enough of either. I almost need to add a wing to my house to hold all the science books I own. READING SCIENCE IS WHERE IT’S AT!

In a talk I gave last year at the Ohio Council of the International Reading Association entitled “Science: A Reason to Read”, I shared that up until recently, math and science educators have been left out of literacy education altogether. Teachers are now being asked to incorporate more reading in their science classes; but how do you motivate a student to want to read in science? The answer is you begin in middle school, before the fear really sets in and the battle is lost. Science textbooks are important, but kids need instruction on how to decode the marvelous language within them. They need to seek out science books from the library. They need to have their sense of wonder and imagination fueled in the way only science can. For my small part, I have begun the Agnes Pflumm Science Through Reading Initiative (named after the science teacher in my novels who hated science fairs but who LOVED science and reading). Won’t you join me in this discussion of why we have become science illiterate and what we might do about it? Begin your own crusade today. It’s never too late.