ABOUT ME
I hope to share a little bit of my love for science and math with my students, teach them how to think critically in these disciplines and in their daily lives, and to help them better themselves in any way possible. It is my hope to find myself in a district that values students as much as the content that is taught to them. To me it is relationships that are among the most important facet of being a good teacher.
Outside of the classroom I find myself frequently still involved in the school where I coach football, and have done so at multiple different levels, from freshman assistant, to JV assistant, to freshman head coach, to a varsity assistant coach. I also coached middle school boys basketball while I was student teaching, which was a unique way for me to connect with students at a time in their lives I wouldn't normally be able to see, giving me insight to where my students at the high school level come from. I have also coached track and field, and worked extensively with pole vault, a group that has its own special, slightly crazy, side that I adore. To me coaching is a way to develop a deeper connection with students to help them develop beyond the classroom to a more well rounded person.
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I am also an avid sports fan, particularly Michigan State sports. My wife and I are season ticket holders for MSU football, though we do not get to go to as many games as we would like now that we live an hour away. We usually try to go to about one Michigan State basketball game a year as well. I also really enjoy music and theater. When I was in high school I used to be in some production every year, in addition to being in the school band and choir. Now that I am an adult I still miss performing and would love to get involved in community theater. In the mean time I enjoy going to a couple of liver performances each year.
I also love the outdoors and agriculture. I grew up on a pig farm in southern Michigan, where my parents still raise about 6,000 pigs a year. I still draw on these experiences with my students and tell them "Mr. Balowski was a weird farm kid stories." In the fall I like to drive back to my parent's farm to bow hunt for whitetail deer, and occasionally go out in muzzle loader season. I also have found memories of my dad and I going to Canada on a bear hunt to an archery only camp. It is an experience I would love to replicate, but one that is usually interrupted by teaching and coaching every year. Finally,in the summer you can either find me up north kayaking down the Platte River to Lake Michigan while attempting to fish, or fishing for catfish waist deep in the Grand River at the base of a dam.
MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
In my science or math classroom, while the technical content is important, it is merely a starting point for developing students' abilities; my students will not only learn scientific facts, but they will also learn how to think scientifically, this is what my vision of student learning would be. To see what this may look like in practice, compare two different units on the ideal gas laws.
In the traditional approach, where the entire goal of each lesson is simply conveying content with almost blind disregard for the thought process behind each idea, students would probably learn each of the different component laws (i.e. Boyle's Law, Charles's Law, Gay-Lussac's Law, etc.) through lecture, then be given some practice calculations to complete. Each of the laws would likely take about one class day to cover. At the end, students would be presented with the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT). Then, students would go through more sample calculations and perhaps a lab to confirm these findings.
In my preferred approach, we would likely start off the week with a lab and/or a set of computer simulations that the students could work through in groups or individually. Students would be expected to keep their own data table to keep track of the effects of varying temperature, pressure, and volume, along with observing the effect of adding more gas to a vessel. This experience would likely take one to two class days. At the end of the lab experience, we would work through analyzing the data to elicit the patterns present. The next day might involve synthesizing all of these observations into a rough form of the Ideal Gas Law and then comparing our cumulative result to the actual Ideal Gas Law. A final day could be spent identifying real life applications of these phenomena, such as why a basketball doesn't bounce as high in the cold, how expanding gases burn in a car engine, why the temperature drops when spraying an aerosol can, why we vent a Tupperware container in a microwave, etc. The homework for the weekend would include some of the example calculations that were done in the traditional approach, combined with some fun application problems to further students' learning.
In both of these cases, the content covered is the same. In both cases, students learn about the Ideal Gas Law and its components. In both cases, coverage of the Ideal Gas Law takes about one week. However, in the second case, the students are expected to take more ownership of their own education and do much more thinking on their own. By participating directly in the generation of these concepts, the knowledge gained will likely stay with the students for a much longer time. Students will become more adept at finding solutions to more and more complex problems on their own, while also learning how real scientists think and discover new things.
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TEACHING THROUGH SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
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I fully believe that, with the proper support, students can find answers to questions on their own, develop experiments to test hypotheses, and even develop and pursue some of their own scientific questions as a result of their classroom activities. As a result, I will sometimes encourage the students to discover some of the ideas on their own, with very calculated additional clues from me if needed. These same ideas still hold true in mathematics as connecting the content to the real world helps to give the students a better understanding of the content, and helps them to buy in to learning the content as well.
STUDENT RELATIONSHIPS
Finally I think the most important part of my philosophy as a teacher is the importance of relationships with students. One of my least favorite pieces of advice I hear given is "don't smile until Christmas" line. To me students need to see the human element of their teachers. Students need to know that you care about them, and this doesn't mean you treat them as a friend. I have pulled students aside to have really tough conversations with them. I have temporarily removed students from my classroom, while being sure to talk to them about why. I have students that between school and coaching I see them more waking hours of the day than their parents do. They need to know that there are warm caring people who want the best for them, whether that means lifting them up or giving them a harsh truth. At the end of the day our goal is to make better people who can learn for the rest of their lives and that requires a human connection.