First post, first day.

I have been thinking a lot over the past couple of weeks about how to go about teaching the courses I have been selected to teach this semester.  I need to be able to reach the students, and engage them in ways that will make them reflective of the learning they are doing.  To that end, I have been to a weeks' long session on literacy, and a very inspirational session of professional development today.  I have been reading (and reading and reading) other educators blogs, checking out links that my twitter friends have been posting and discussing things with friends and colleagues.  The end result is ... I still don't know how to do what I want have to do.  I am going to try some things that are perhaps WAAAAY out of my comfort zone.  I am intrigued by the idea of standards based grading and reporting.  I want to move to a truly inquiry based class setting as opposed to a more teacher directed setting.  In short, I want to do the best I can do for as many students as possible.  Easy right?  While I am sure it will be more work, I also hope it is more rewarding and enriching for the students.

On a separate vein...

I happened across this piece of text today while doing some reading.  Like many things on the internet, I came across it in an indirect way.  I was reading a bit about Stephen Hawking's latest comments extracted from his most recent publication regarding the formation of the universe.  That lead to his comments on extraterrestrial life which then led to all sorts of places as you can imagine.  The following is a piece taken from a website with credit to the author of the quote contained within.  I find the quote to be both thought provoking and simple at the same time, and I want to share it with you so you could reflect on it.

Seth Shostak points out that regardless of whether scientists send out a message to aliens or not, they probably are already aware of our presence:
We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them. Detecting this leakage radiation won't be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours. This makes it specious to suggest that we should ban deliberate messages on the grounds that they would be more powerful than our leaked signals. Only a society close to our level of development would be able to pick up an intentional broadcast while failing to notice TV and radar. And a society at our level is no threat.

That is everything I wanted to say right now.  My initial intent was to use this blog to keep my classes informed of what happened during the day, and perhaps to post homework or reading assignments here, but I can see already that I will most likely not use it that way.  I have another forum that I can use for that.  I am interested to see what this will develop into.  Thanks so much for reading this disjointed and rambling first ever blog post.

G. Levack