Thursday, October 12, 2006

I hate coming up with titles.

I watched the entire Volume II of that Pride and Prejudice movie I was watching last night. Sometimes you just get to a point in a story when you just don't want to put it down and go do something else, even though it'll be right there when you get back, y'know? I think I appreciate the story much more now; it had a lot to it, and where loose ends seemed to be left dangling throughout the film, it was neat 'cuz as the movie started getting closer to the end all those ends got tied up and the story became a whole rather than a few tales that were related only by the sisters involved...each thread got involved in the other and it all worked out rather nicely. So now I have an idea of what I was missing before, though I'm not going to start raving about it, either.

I was at practicum again today and taught part of 2 periods. My host teacher did a short demo and a short activity with the kids and then I did what I guess you'd call the lecture part (but I use a lot of questions and was having people use tuning forks and get up and be part of a physical demo, so it's not like I was talking at them all the time). We're starting the chapter on sound with these grade 11 physics classes. One of the classic demonstrations in this unit is to get an electric bell that's sealed inside a glass jar, ring it to show you can still hear it even though it's in the jar, then get a vacuum pump, suck all the air out of the jar, and then show that you can't hear the bell anymore (because sound waves, like all waves, need a medium to travel through, so if you've isolated your bell properly in the middle of the evacuated jar there's nothing, not even air, for the sound to travel through to get to the jar walls and then through the outside air to your eardrum). ACI's bell jar leaks, though, and the pump is really loud, so my host teacher recommended against using it...so I had the entire first row of each class plus one volunteer get up at the front of the class and I made a fake bell jar out of them. One person was the bell, four people were air molecules, and two people were the walls of the jar. When I "evacuated" the jar and the air people sat back at their seats, the "bell" couldn't vibrate the "jar walls" anymore. I think they liked it. That's not all I did, but that was the "funnest" part :). Overall the lesson went pretty well, I didn't go overtime (they had like 10-15 minutes left in which to do their homework), and my host teacher had a lot of good things to say about it, especially as it was my first lesson with her (I taught once in Mrs. Baillie's classes but not yet in these ones I have with Mrs. DeNoble). So I'm pleased.

I think I'm going to go watch 1/2 an hour of TV now before I start on my homework. Bye for now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh Oh, P&P, can I rave about it? Love that movie! The 5 hour BBC version of course. :D Don't feel bad Joy, I've watched the whole 5 hourse consecutively on more than one ocasion.