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Thoughts on Day 1!
As mentioned in class, I’ve always had a longing passion for teaching, something I have unfortunately not followed up on given a stronger passion for engineering. (oops)
I think my interest for teaching was mostly guided by my excitement when I see my students not just understanding the concept themselves, but understanding it in a manner such that they were able to impart it to their classmates and so on so forth. Education to me never struck to me as stopping at the student. It struck me as something that was limitless, boundless.
Coming into the class, although yes, I was a little disappointed in learning that we weren’t exactly creating a full fledged education series complete with a set of props and a weird hairdo / crossdressing (think Mrs. Doubtfire), being exposed to the idea that short videos such as those on YouTube, were a huge lot more effective in passing on ideas and ensuring their “longevity” in the minds of the “students” (loosely used, as it can be Anyone!)
As a kid, I Loved, and absolutely Loved watching a particular TV series produced in America and “hosted” by kids around my age, running around the house conduction experiments and craft projects that would be easily replicable in my own home (except those involving snow. I guess I can do them now…) It just felt so much easier to connect and learn when things were brought to such a relatable level. Eventually, growing up, with YouTube as such a huge influencer in today’s world, it was a matter of time before videos of the same nature were being utilized by everyone, and reaching a much larger target audience rather than just kids. The distinctive difference in feeling I have is that right now, I can choose what I want to watch though, and be able to pick up concepts a lot easier than having to sit through a 30 minutes program.
Blog Entry Day 2
I don’t like kids, I said it when class started, and that’s probably because to me, I feel so old around them (I like to believe I’m Peter Pan)
Bringing the 6th graders into class today definitely reminded me of that fact, but it also reminded me how young at heart I felt, how inquisitive I was at that age. (These were kids that were exposed to movies of not just their generation, but of their parent’s generation. Gosh.)
I felt that unfortunately, I spent too much time trying to understand the kids and their interests (I often started off by asking what they felt their favourite subjects were, how they felt about science in general, and what made them more / less interested in science), that I didn’t have enough time to run through my ideas with them. But with those that I had tried to briefly run through my initial concept on the 3 main theories of time travelling, it had felt a little too abstract for them to understand or fully appreciate them, even if I had tried to resort to hollywood’s examples to better relate to them (again, no idea why they watched movies from my parent’s generation and not my own, I mean I’m only twice their age!)
The session overall led me to initially believe that the entire topic of time travel might have been a little too edgy or abstract for the 12 year olds, and I had initially decided to head down an alternate path of pain (literally, I was considering writing on how we perceive pain and how painkiller work).
I then realised that it wasn’t because the topic was unrelatable, but it was more of me not having asked the right question. Changing the question and rescoping my theme a little, I decided to focus on “Can we actually time travel?” as some of the questions posed by the students were asking “How do We Time Travel” and “The History of Time Travel”, rather than my initial proposed “How does Travelling Back in Time Work, When you Change Thing etc”.
Which has thus led, to my day2script post.
Day 3
Being in front of the camera for the umpteenth time, I certainly don’t feel like I’m a stranger to it. And when I write, I’d usually write things a little too narratively too, so I’d never really had a problem writing scripts. While doing yesterday’s assignment, the words had come seamlessly to me. (Probably why my friends always call me the drama queen). (Probably why I like to speak with so much subtext too.)
What had not come so naturally to me though, was getting my point across. It brings to mind another incident during my teaching internship, where I had given an extremely detailed class on the foundations of kinematics, but had left the students walking away with many questions, but Not the one that I had hoped to inspire in them. Disappointed in myself, I set out to find out what was the best way to get the right questions out of them, and decided to have a set of materials with a lot more directed content, so as to better encourage and point the students in the right direction.
With today’s feedback session, I had realised that while my opening was witty, funny, and was generally enjoyed, it had left many of the class members confused as to what I was proceeding to say with my video, as it seemed that I had already painted time travel in a “nope, it’s not going to happen”, and then there was that foot-in-mouth moment where I called Stephen Hawkings lame (I kinda legitly did forget he was literally lame! I promise there was no ill intent!).
I guess when having my script revision; I ought to do what I had done with my previous material, which is to better direct audiences to ask the right question. Hmmm, the only question right now is, How?!
Day 4 Blog Post
I like to believe I’m a creative person. Putting that with my stubborn nature, at times I feel it hard to accept conflicting creative decisions from others around me. Storyboarding itself was a huge test to this trait of mine, and the fact that we had to come up with a story board as a group was a little challenging, as I tend to quickly arrive at my own ideas, and could stick to them quite hard before even hearing everyone’s input. So when it came down to storyboarding as a large group, it helped that we were looking through the script line by line, and that helped me “buffer” my thought process and not to see the entire set as a huge picture (which I tend to do an) do not focus on the details as times.
However I realised soon after that my little problem came back as we broke into smaller groups and that I had sped through the entire remaining of the script and had started to generate ideas within my head. This proved to be a problem as I soon imagined everyone else’s proposed ideas through the vision I’ve had for my own idea.
Drawing it out however seemed to slowly help me better picture everyone else’s ideas, which seems to be a core part of my graphic-heavy visualising process.
