Why is the sky blue?
It seems a pretty simple question and no doubt at least once in your teaching career you will be asked it, but do you know the answer? One of the fundamental parts of being a teachers is knowing the subject area well enough to be able to teach it confidently and answer any questions students may ask. Knowing only the exact content for a unit is rarely enough to teach it effectively. As a teacher you want your students to be engaged and thinking critically about the content. One of the best ways of knowing this is happening is when they are asking questions. However if a teacher is responding “I don’t know” or “I’ll look it up for you” it’s not going to encourage the type of questioning that teachers want to hear. In 2013 Elizabeth Leader-Janssen and Joan Rankin-Erickson were studying teachers content knowledge in English and in their literature review stated “These studies suggest that inservice teachers lack the knowledge in understanding specific features of language (e.g., phonemes and consonant blends), and the impact of this lack of declarative knowledge of language structure is critical when teachers are teaching the early skills of phonemic awareness and decoding.” I think that the same can be said for other subjects, for HPE teachers the problem is even greater it is highly likely that they will have to teach sports that they have never played before, yet they need to be seen as experts by the students.
The issue is that teachers are already busy enough, with all the other responsibilities expected of them. Expecting them to take on more study and become experts is tough. It is fine for teachers who are already experts in their field like a chemistry teacher who studied chemistry at university. But PE teachers are often asked to teach science or maths and need to ‘catch up’ on the content knowledge they are lacking as well as mark assessment ,write lesson plans ,coach sport teams ,organise sport carnivals. Currently the only way to learn content is to search around themselves and depending on their skill and the topic it could take hours to get a decent grasp of the concept. Chewing up valuable time in a teachers day.
So why is the sky blue?
Find out why and tell me
1 Where you found it and 2 how long it took you.
August 24, 2015 at 2:34 am
This is a great way to look at a real problem pre-service teachers will be faced with, learning the extra content is probably real for any teacher having to teach cross-curricular subjects. This is especially true in younger grades, where they like extra trivial information about why scientific principles relate to their personal lives. I have taken up the challenge of finding why the sky is blue and have found: The sky is blue because blue light waves travel faster are shorter than red light waves and therefore is scattered more than other colours because it travels in shorter and smaller waves. I found it from the spaceplace.nasa and it took less than 1 minute!
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August 24, 2015 at 2:46 am
A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight.
From: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html
This was done quite easily and fast as i did have the resources on hand and already using a computer.
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