Happy New Year!
As 2018 is coming to a close, I kept thinking what made it interesting and exciting for me. While family for me always comes first, my work comes a very close second… Making a very rough estimate, I have spent at least 2200 hours working last year… This is a huge amount of time and it is about a quarter of the hours we have in a year. Considering that I am a person who loves to sleep (I can easily sleep 10 hours a day if I am allowed…, so maybe I was a koala in my previous life), this is a huge chunk of time. So loving what I do at work is hugely important for me. And luckily this was a very exciting year for me. I would like to list a few of the most exciting work-related events and activities that made 2018 a very special year for me:
- Supporting graduate students who have graduated this year: one Ph.D, one M.A. and 3 M.Ed. students. I wish all of them continuing success.
- Supporting my science and physics Teacher-Candidates most of whom have found STEM teaching positions and many of whom have received teaching awards in our Faculty. Huge congratulations to them.
- Organizing a very successful STEM outreach event in the Faculty of Education in November, 2018 Family Math and Science Day 2018 . More than 100 volunteers helped us to make it all happen.
- Attending a very successful STEM 2018 conference in Brisbane Australia in November 2018 and getting ready to organize the 2020 STEM conference at UBC.
- Publishing my paper in October of 2018 in Frontiers in Education: STEM education journal – I have been its Associate Editor and I am happy to see journal’s growth.
- Continuing a tradition – organization of a 40th UBC Physics Olympics with more than 70 participating teams from all over BC in March 0f 2018.
- Collaborating with my very inspirations colleagues – Professors Dragana Martinovic and Yifat Ben David Kolikant to organize of a very successful conference on teacher education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in February 2018 – Teachers and Teaching in the Era of Change.
- Publishing of two papers in the summer of 2018 in a peer-reviewed international journal LUMAT journal with my graduate student: https://www.lumat.fi/index.php/lumat/article/view/292 and https://www.lumat.fi/index.php/lumat/article/view/293 .
- The publication of a special Physics in Canada Outreach issue (Volume 73) in February of 2018 that I co-edited with my colleague Dr. Sarah Johnson.
- The publication of the second edition of our introductory Physics textbook: https://www.amazon.ca/Physics-Scientists-Engineers-Robert-Hawkes/dp/0176587195
- Helping to launch our first fully online M.Ed. in science education program.
- Receiving a TLEF grant with my husband Valery Milner to produce slow motion physics videos that we will be using in teaching introductory physics and working with future teachers.
- Publishing a paper in The Physics Teacher on using Collaborative Learning Annotation System in teacher education.
- Publishing new videos on our database of educational videos: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mmilner/outreach/math-science-education-for-all/.
- Continuing to learn foreign languages – German and Spanish – I see it as a big part of who I am. I want to keep learning about science, science teaching and teaching and learning in General. Learning foreign languages helps me becoming a better science teacher as it helps me to remember what it means not to know.
So this was an exciting year and I enjoyed learning new things with my students and collaborators. I wish them all a very successful new year. And enjoy this wonderful physics video by one of the people who inspires me.
