My Science Autobiography

Hi! My name is Andrea Siefert and I am from West Chicago, Illinois. Originally I didn't think I had strong memories of my science experiences growing up but reflecting back has helped me to recall a lot of great memories of my science education. One of my favorite science memories is from elementary school when every year a science group would come in and do really cool experiments for all the grades. I remember that it was an anticipated day for all the students. One of the grades got to watch dry ice experiments. They put different things in the dry ice and we watched the changes. It froze a banana but when a balloon was put in it shrunk because the air condensed. Another grade talked about static electricity and did an experiment with tin plates and rabbit fur. One year in school we had a bug project which included catching, killing, pinning, and labeling bugs in a presentation. That was one of my worst science memories and I remember having to rely on my brothers and mom for a lot of the project. My mom was also very big into nature. In fifth grade one of the projects was making a leaf collection which was such an anticipated experience for my mom. She got to help four children make their projects and even ended up making one of her own one year because she loved it so much. We had to collect and label different leaves and put them together in a binder. I remember having to search forever through websites and books to find exactly what leaf I had found. Into high school I discovered my love for diving deeper into the main areas of science. Biology was my favorite because I had an awesome teacher who taught us a lot of things from genetics to ecosystems to cells. I loved learning about the world around me. Physics also helped me put a lot of things into perspective about how and why things work the way that they do. Informally my science exposure was based in nature. My siblings and I loved playing outside and collecting different plants and pretending they were food or medicine. My brothers also loved taunting me with bugs which I absolutely despised.  Looking back I didn't even realize how much my past science experiences influenced my love for teaching science.

Science is my favorite subject to teach. My philosophy on teaching science is to make room for it because it will be taught in my classroom and I won't let it be pushed aside. With the push for large blocks of core subjects, science and social studies frequently get very limited time during the week. In my PDS placement they only have a half hour every day to alternate science and social studies. Then we were told that that is also the time kids would be pulled out for intervention. Since most of this will be out of my control as a teacher I will have to integrate science into other subjects. Also science should be something very engaging for students. Science can be so boring if the work is based on a textbook. I believe science should be about letting the children have fun while actively exploring different things.

I believe my culture did have an impact on my learning of science. I am Christian and I attended a private Christian school from Kindergarten to 8th grade. I was only taught creationism growing up. I remember getting very limited information about other beliefs of how the world was created. We also got a skewed version of evolution. I don't think this had a lasting impact however because in my high school biology class we learned a lot about evolution and I was very open to learning and respecting different ideas.

I think that my background in education and learning science will only further my drive to make science a fun and necessary subject in my future classroom. I can be the person that gives my students something to look forward to like we did in grade school every year. Reflecting on my past science experiences I think I will want to teach as I was taught. I will want to give my students as many opportunities to explore and discover as I had as a child. I remember having ample time devoted to science and I think that background will help me push to get science recognized as a valued subject in my classroom.

Exceeds:
Every Thursday at Bent last semester I taught a science lesson in English for a mix of kids from all the second grade classes. My teacher didn't enjoy teaching science and was glad to turn the reigns over to me. I did many lessons but my favorite was a dinosaur lesson I did using artifacts from Milner Library. Milner has this great resource in the Teaching Materials Center called Educational Kits. Click the link to learn more about the Kits Milner has to offer. This is a great resource to take advantage of while you are a student. They have dozens of collections based on many history and science topics that you can check out from the library. I checked out the dinosaur exhibit and brought real fossils for the children to see. I also brought in resources for the children to do their own research on a specific dinosaur that they shared with the class. They were mesmerized by my materials and I was titled the "Cool New Science Teacher".