Reflection on "Misconceptions Die Hard"

       I was immediately enticed by this article. I immediately thought of myself, and things that I once perceived at real to only find out that I was completely wrong. As a college student, I still often find myself questioning my judgment and reverting to google. And then I think back to my post on thinking. Has our schools systems been teaching us to think in the wrong way all along? Have they been teaching us to think for ourselves at all? This article gave me the conclusion that we usually read a fact in a textbook and consider it the truth without formulating our own convictions for the truth.

      The experiment is a terrific way to expose the state of student's thinking. If they learned science from a book or they learned from doing and discovering on their own intuition. I did my own little experimentation after reading and asked my friend sitting next to me whether a crumpled aluminum paper weighs more than a flat one. She replied first with I don't know and then with the crumpled one. We then digressed into why one might think that way and we could both understand why its a common misunderstanding.

     As a teacher I stop and pause....what can I do to prevent these misconceptions from my students? how can I make them hands on learners who push boundaries of the gapes of a book? I hope to find that out over the course of this class, and this article gave me the motivation to not settle for average.

Solar System

What are your best understandings about?

1) How the phases of the moon occur?
The moon rotates in correspondence with the sun and the earth, but is in its own gravitational system. We see the moon at different perspectives due to its path while traveling.

2) What causes the seasons?
The seasons are caused by the movement of the earth around the hemisphere. I actually know very little about this and don't find myself credible enough to even guess :)

3) What causes a lunar eclipse?
A lunar eclipse occur when the sun and the moon cross paths when they are rotating the earth

Thinking About Thinking

What does it mean when someone knows how to think?

Thinking is a very complicated concept if you attempt to divulge into it. I did an activity yesterday in class where I had to find my name in a group of names in the class, but the tricky part is that the names were made up entirely of symbols.  Because I am a fluent reader I never have to break apart my reading strategies and decode words. The thinking I used to decode the symbols and translate to my name made me realize the complicated process that my students go through when they read. I believe when someone knows ho to think, they are able to explain their thought process.

How does a teacher teach a student how to think?

           

A teacher teaches a student how to think by breaking apart their thought process. A teacher does this by knowing the student to be able to advocate for themselves and how they process information. A teacher should challenge student’s conceptual thinking by having to explain their opinions and answers to problems in order to become fluent thinkers.

Have you ever been in a class where you really had think?

The classes that are the most difficult to me require the most thinking. When I was a business major I had to take microeconomics. This class stands out to me as the hardest class I have taken because I could not properly process and relate to the material. This subject was also foreign to me before college, so being exposed to the content for the first time ever proved to be difficult to master.