I couldn't believe it. I was in shock when I actually looked it up. This last year, I was making $30,000 less in Quebec than if I was working as a teacher in Alberta. I used to live in Alberta, and therefore I can't believe that I am worth so much less, just by living a few provinces down; and this doesn't even include the huge taxes that are taken off here in Quebec as opposed to Alberta.

Previously, I wrote a post about salaries in Canada and how they compare to test scores. Higher Teacher Salary = Better Education. In that post I was stunned at how correlated those two values were. But it seemed like the pay scale were somewhat comparable (plus or minus a 5 thousand dollars). But I was comparing statistics from 2001. Not now! Just a few years later and now there's a HUGE difference in the salaries.

Since it was not so easy for me to look up the most recent salary grids for all the provinces (a lot of clever internet searching, including emailing some schools for first hand information), I thought I would post all the provinces' teaching salary scales here (as a comparison), for future reference, for myself and anybody else that wants to know.

Just a few guidlines:

Judging from the comments from the article Teacher Pay Scale Across Canada, many people covet the schedule of a teacher and believe that they are paid too richly for simply reading textbooks. I think that teachers are not paid enough!

At the most abstract and philosophical, people get paid for value. How much would you pay me for a map to a long-lost gold nugget worth $1,000 that was buried in your backyard? Unless you have a logic deficiency, it would be some amount under $1,000. You might think it fair to split it 50/50 and offer me $500.

Hey! I have an MBA! I went to university for 6 years. Furthermore I invested 500 hours searching the old library archives to piece together the location of that lost nugget. My education entitles me to $50/hour, so for the 500 hours I'm going to need $25,000. You're lucky I'm not a lawyer at a big firm otherwise you'd be paying me $125,000 for that map.

I had many requests for a step by step instruction of making the "Hydraulic Crane".

Although this wasn't my construction (one of my brilliant students did this one for a project that I assigned), I can figure out the basics from what I saw.

Note: The following is only meant as a start for anyone that wants to try this project. However, everyone has their own twist to every assignment, every design. Use your imagination to make the crane better, and your own!

Materials:

• 30 mL syringes (x8)
• dialysis tubing (or any other kind of plastic tubing for connecting the syringes together)
• wood (for crane construction and for base)
• anchors (to hold the tubing in place)
• bottle with water (or any other weight to counter balance the crane arm)
• a scoop (any kind of shovel)
• Screws / Nails / Nuts / Bolts
• + Other miscellaneous materials.

Procedure

Growing up, children have a plethora of experiences that have to do with the concept of force. Even before they start talking and knowing the word “force” they have an intuitive understanding of the concept of push and pull. It doesn’t take long for a child to figure out that pushing their brother will result in him moving in the same direction. Babies realize from very early on that things fall down. (A common game among babies and parents is the “baby drops toy – parent picks up toy – repeat many times until parent loses patience”.) This environmental input of the force of gravity acting on an object, thus accelerating it towards the earth gets absorbed by the child’s awareness, and becomes second nature to the child. Most children will ask a parent about these phenomena. The parent then tries to explain these phenomena in terms of sophisticated words such as force, gravity, energy, power, and push / pull. The adult might go in depth or just quickly dismiss the inquiry, depending on the adult’s actual knowledge of the phenomenon, the parent’s interest in scientific principles, or even the time and place of the question. Based on these explanations, and the instances of hearing the words of force or gravity in context, children start to associate what force actually means in terms of their world around them.

Introduction
Some things are easier to learn than others. Piaget, one of the fathers of the constructivist movement, talked about two types of learning: assimilation and accommodation (Atherton, 2009). Assimilation and accommodation are the two complementary processes through which awareness of the outside world is internalized (Atherton, 2009).
In assimilation, the perceptions of the outside world are incorporated into the internal world model without changing the structure of that model, but potentially at the cost of "squeezing" the external perceptions to fit (Atherton, 2009). In accommodation, the internal world model has to accommodate itself to the evidence with which it is confronted and thus adapt to it, which can be a more difficult and painful process (Atherton, 2009). Accommodation has everything to do with conceptual change, and is the starting point of the many theories concerned with misconceptions.

At the beginning of December, I assigned my grade 8 students to build a machine / model using hydraulics or pneumatics. They are due this week, and some have already come in. So far I am extremely impressed.

At the end of the week, I'll take pictures of them all to show what projects they built, but so far there has been an excellent selection of machines. From the simple yet elegant dentist chair to a powerful crane to a digging machine, bridge, and a mechanical claw. I have all the projects displayed at the side of my classroom. Whenever other classes come by, they look, play around with the machines, and are all jelous that they weren't assigned this project. The students that didn't hand in the projects yet are all very inspired by the creations and some even have decided to scrap their original ideas/models to make better more complex designs.

An interesting observation:

My grade 11 students have an ultra secret facebook group dedicated for studying physics and chemistry (their sciences). I don't actually know what goes on in this group... I tried to become a member of their group, but they rejected me (hahahaha). But they have my website as a link, so I guess I'm supposed to be a useful link to their studies. So maybe in a way I can influence them even though I'm not a member of their silly little group... (HEHEHEHE)

Here is an awesome website they (and anybody else who wants to) can use to study physics (that is if they don't have enough physics with me during regular school hours). It has great notes, interactive stuff, simulations, practice questions with answers, and many many more practical applications. The best part of it: It's FREE for anyone to use. I hope my students will go and visit this site and use it on a regular basis: THE PHYSICS CLASSROOM.

Recently I went to the doctor for my son's yearly check-up. Our doctor is fantastic, and I am so lucky that I was fortunate enough to get him. Everytime we go, I learn something very interesting, this time was no exception.

The Doctor started asking standard medical questions: Was Jakub seriously ill this past year? Any ear infections? etc. Then he turned to his mental, social and physical development. And he asked me:

"Does Jakub know how to draw a person?"

I was impressed from the very moment I read about Knowledge Building in the Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006, pp. 97 - 115). As a science teacher, I see the enormous potential of this learning philosophy, and cannot wait to apply it to my existing teaching repertoire. In order to implement the principles of Knowledge Building, I must understand it fully and understand how to apply it. To this end, I am writing this thought paper with two articles on Knowledge Building as a backdrop. The first is “Learning to Work Creatively With Knowledge” by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (2003) and the second is “Student-Directed Assessment of Knowledge Building Using Electronic Portfolios” by Jan van Aalst and Carol K. K. Chan (2007). The first article serves as the theory portion of my understanding of Knowledge Building. The second article provides an example of Knowledge Building in practice and presents a possible way of implementing the innovative learning environment as well as assessing students in the collaborative Knowledge Building setting.