1st day of physics

Once again, Twitter has proved itself to be an incredibly useful tool, from a teacher's perspective.  It's ability to provide unique opportunities for developing professional learning communities never ceases to amaze.  I'll provide a short description one example below.

taken from Google Images

For the 3rd year in row, I'm teaching physics.  The first day of school is 2 days away and, as usual, I never feel prepared for anything--let alone the 1st day.  In order to alleviate some of my stress, some of my family members tend to say things like, "you could teach the first week with your eyes closed."  This infers the typical you've done this before idea so it really shouldn't be that big of a deal.  So, I started thinking about what I had actually done before--starting with Day 1.

Day 1: Go over that syllabus!!!!!!

So there I was trying to get every little detail right about the 1st week of school and just when I thought I was at least good enough for the 1st day, I come across a tweet that went something like this:

"The first day of school is the PERFECT time for doing math/science. Don't worry about the syllabus" 

That wasn't the word for word quote of the tweet, but the it's close enough to get my point across.  My whole educational life as a student and a teacher has always started a year off by reading the syllabus.  I never really thought about what it accomplished; you just did it.  Anyways, this tweet really stuck with me and I came along a great 1st day physics activity from Frank Noschese's blog.  The activity revolves around the idea of students generating enough data so that they can reasonably predict the height they should drop a ball from so that it achieves a height set by me after its first bounce.  I won't go into the details of it--check out Frank's blog and read his summary of it for yourself! 

The point of this post was to reflect on how Twitter helped me discover a fun 1st day activity instead of reading the syllabus AND how it allowed me to grasp a better understanding of the activity by communicating with Frank.  I've inserted a bit of the conversation below and it just really hits me that none of this would've ever happened without the social medium that is Twitter.

conversation taken directly from Ben Meacham's Twitter account

How cool is that though????  As a young teacher, I continuously struggle to make science more exciting for the kids.  This isn't because I want to be the cool teacher or anything--it's because I find science insanely exciting and I want to transfer that feeling to them!  If I start the first day of school off by reading a simple syllabus, what sort of first impression do my new physics students have of science?  I'm not saying it's a bad idea to go over the syllabus or anything.  I just thought that it was a great way to shake things up at the beginning of year.  

This was another really cool experience I had using Twitter and I'm very grateful for experienced teachers like Frank who care enough to help out younger teachers like myself.  Communication within this profession has changed so much and it's about time more and more teachers start taking advantages of the opportunities out there!