As I am writing my last blog post this summer, I have noticed a number of new posts online on the “stop-homework-before-it-stops-us” movement. The movement, or at least the way I understood it, aims to abolish homework in our schools as it has very low value (if not a negative value) in the eyes of […]

When I watched this video (in Hebrew), I knew that I had to make sure that my students – future physics teachers can watch it as well. This motivated me to contact an Israeli physics teacher – Dr. Ilya Mazin and ask him if it would be OK for me to translate it into English. […]

For most of us, new year resolutions are associated with the “unrealistically” high expectations and activities we will fail to keep up with by the third week of January. Lose 20 lbs by the end of the first week of January, cook from scratch each and every meal and only eat healthy, wake up at […]

Yesterday we celebrated the 151st birthday of Canada. OK, maybe not everybody, but I certainly did. In my personal or professional life, I do not feel as an immigrant to Canada, because I have been a part of Canada and Canada has been a part of me since the first moment I stepped onto the […]

A few days ago my husband and I happen to visit a very interesting place – an old school room at a museum in a small town of Salmon Arm in British Columbia –  R. J. Haney Heritage Village and Museum in Salmon Arm, BC  (http://www.salmonarmmuseum.org/). When walking around this classroom I tried to imagine how […]

This summer I was asked to teach an Inquiry course in our STEM Teacher Education Program. The course is the last inquiry course that teacher-candidates take after they have completed their school practicum. As a result, they come to this course with much richer and more interesting experiences as compared to their previous, pre-practicum courses. […]

English is obviously not my first language, so I pay extra attention to proverbs and special expressions. English has many of them and the more fluent you are, the more comfortable you feel when you hear or use them. One of them is “you can’t have your cake and eat it too“, which means you […]

  We held our 40th UBC Physics Olympics today: http://physoly.phas.ubc.ca/ . It was an extraordinary event. We had 6 very successful heats that the students were very excited about. We also had a record number of teams and students: 73 teams and 721 students. We had teams from all over BC and we had teams […]

This winter I helped to organize a professional development day for BC physics educators. We gathered at Capilano University and spent a day discussing how we teach physics, how students learn physics, and how we can use technology to engage students with physics in a meaningful way. To learn more about the event visit BC […]

Dear friends, I hope you can help me distribute this information in British Columbia and outside of it. We are starting our new online Master’s of Education program in science education. Anybody around the world who registered and was admitted into the program (we will have fewer than 20 teachers in our first cohort) will […]