Today I happened to stumble upon a quote by Elbert Hubbard (1854-1915), who more than 100 years ago commented on the industrialization of the American society. Hubbard said: “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary Man.” This resonated with what I  saw in […]

On March 9th, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and our department – Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy once again will co-host the Physics Olympics. It is a very special event that brings to UBC campus hundreds of grade 11-12 physics students, parents and teachers. This year we have a record number of participating teams […]

Today I received a very special e-mail from a very special woman – Susan Marie Frontczak. I would like to share it with you. Dear Marina Today I celebrated my birthday, and received many good wishes. Many encouraged me to celebrate and a good friend suggested that I “make it a day to remember.”  This preliminary […]

For the past three weeks I have been engaged in exploring different issues of mathematics and science teaching and learning with my teacher-candidates (pre-service mathematics and science teachers). Our group has 21 student-teachers. They chose a topic they wanted to research individually and then had to explore it in more depth and consequently present it […]

Being a science teacher is not a job, to me it is a way of life… A few days ago I experienced a very interesting phenomenon – an air inversion – when the temperature on the ground in cooler than the temperature in the mountain. As a result, you might have clouds in the city […]

Winter 2013 meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers is taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is always a wonderful event, but this year the list of speakers is just outstanding (AAPT WM 2013 program: http://www.aapt.org/Conferences/wm2013/ ). I am especially happy for the AAPT award winners this year. It is especially important to […]

While attending a STEM 2012 Conference in Beijing China I happened to attend a workshop about a Physclips project – it is a great resource for teaching physics created by our colleagues from the University of South Wales in Australia. I found it to be a great resources and I recommended it to my teacher-candidates… I […]

I am teaching a very interesting graduate course this term. In one of the meetings, my students suggested us to replace the readings I recommended them by the recent report by OECD: Top of the Class: High Performers in Science in PISA 2006.  This report was an excellent choice as it made us all think […]

I had a great opportunity to attend the BCAPT Fall 2012 Meeting together with more than 60 other physics teachers from all over BC. I just wanted to tell you how much impressed I was by the presentation of Dr. Bernd Stelzer from Simon Fraser University who spoke about the recent discoveries in the field […]