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I have decided to start blogging about my experiences, observations, questions, successes and failures in teaching science. I hope to exchange ideas with educators and thinkers that may find themselves on the same wavelength of thought.  I have also been told by my lead teacher that by committing to sharing ideas through this forum that I can move forward in my own professional development and hopefully achieve the ultimate goal of doing better for my own students.  In my classroom, I see and embrace the second law of thermodynamics in action everyday.  The tendency of my class is towards complexity (not chaos!) just like the topics my students are learning about, and that is a wonderful thing, which is why I will call this blog Positive Entropy Classroom.

The question that drives me, in teaching and blogging, is this: how do we teach science in an age where humans are the dominate force on the planet?   As both a student and a teacher, the most compelling issues have always been the diverse ways that people interact with the natural world.  You could put that in fewer words by just saying ‘the environment’, but that is too simple.  All of the natural sciences explain different phenomena of nature, and the nexus of human life and those phenomena is the theme I am talking about. I am teaching, and living, in a time in geologic history that is called the anthropocene era– or the age of man.  Since we are living in an era named after us, I am beginning to wonder if we need to teach science differently to reflect the powerful role humans are playing on this planet.  Global environmental change is one of the most pressing and urgent issues facing our planet today, so this theme can be easily woven and is accessible to student.  I believe that weaving this thread in the science education of students will help in student learning, engagement, and empowerment, and I am in the process of finding out if that is true.

This blog is part of my effort to create discussion around my questions and share experiences in validating or rejecting this hypothesis.  Teaching these themes of human-nature interactions within the tradition science disciplines of chemistry and biology is complex.  This is why I view the state of my classroom as high entropy, and high complexity, as a positive.  I hope that my + Entropy Classroom just might help prepare my students for the next generation of scientific problems.  I look forward to sharing this experiment in the best way to teach science in the anthropocene era.