Atmosphere: a particular environment or surrounding influence.

Explore:

The atmosphere has always been one of the most difficult units for me to teach. I find it relatively difficult to understand, and not particularly exciting. Especially since moving to Alaska, I feel very disconnected from much of the locally-relevant atmosphere topics-especially this week, as I again struggled to find ways to relate to the material.

One of the things that helped me begin to relate to the material was reviewing other participants' blogs. Dave's blog had several interesting facts, and I especially enjoyed his explanation for the bubbles he often sees in ice over the permafrost. I also found the ideas Eric presented in his blog intriguing, and I was introduced to the tragedy of the commons, a social phenomena I had not heard of before.

Much of the information related to the atmosphere inspires negative emotions in me-global warming, pollution, and high levels of toxins collecting in the environment around the world. There is so much bad news about human impact on the natural world, and on humans ourselves, that it feels like an insurmountable challenge. Is there any good news out there about the atmosphere?!

Extend:

Unfortunately, my students and I have already completed most of the atmosphere curricula for this year, but I will briefly revisit weather with my students during January, and I am looking forward to incorporating this weather site that I found through a link on Alicia's blog. I plan to share many of the food-chain resources on Teacher's Domain with my colleagues in eighth grade, since they spend a lot of time on that topic in their Biology Unit. 

Evaluate

This module was helpful to me simply as a reminder of the importance of relevancy in my own lessons-if I don't find a hook to draw students in, they won't be motivated to learn the facts and background information they need to know.

Also, as the course progresses I find myself becoming less sure of myself and my blog posts, and this is impacting my ability to understand and intake the material as it is presented. This is a great example of how many of my students must feel when we get too focused on the test and their performance in class, instead of simply learning for the sake of acquiring knowledge and satisfying curiousity about the world in which we live-my real goal for them, and myself.