Category: pondering

This might be the most powerful message I have ever come across, or maybe I just heard it at the right time, but Timothy Snyder’s “Don’t obey in advance” resonates with me so much.

About a year ago, I started writing a teaching portfolio to apply for LTH’s “pedagogical academy”, which, when successful, comes with the title of “excellent teaching practitioner” (ETP). During the process, I took teaching portfolio writing courses both at UiB and at LTH, both with a focus on writing portfolios specifically for the application to […]

So, for anyone coming to this blog post because of the nice stratification you see at the bottom of the latte in the picture above — do you know the process causing the layers is very similar to the one that caused the awesome fingers and rings in my tea the other day? You should […]

Some of you have noticed that during January and February, I did not write a single blog post. The reason for that is that I was sick. Sick enough to not even want to take pictures of water for a while, and then still sick enough to take the pictures, but to only upload them […]

On finding my role in my new job. As many of you know, I’ve changed jobs a couple of months ago, and I am now in a position where I advise university teachers on their teaching while also trying to do research on how to improve students’ learning. And sometimes I feel like I am […]

Adventures in Teaching and Oceanography has been around for a full 6 months today! Adventures in Teaching and Oceanography has been around for a full 6 months today! Can you believe this? On the one hand it feels like I have had this blog for a very long time, because writing this blog is not […]

Is there an equation of state for hypersaline water at very cold temperatures? A friend of mine is looking to calculate changes in density of a hypersaline Antarctic lake from summer to winter. Apparently, this lake is about 10 times saltier than the ocean and often cools down to -17C at the bottom. My own spontaneous […]

Happy Valentine’s day! The rose is red, the violet’s blue, The honey’s sweet, and so are you. […] I originally wrote this post to announce me starting my new job. I didn’t post it then, because it was quite a big transition and in the end I wasn’t prepared to deal with it in public. I […]

On how it always helps to speak the same mother tongue as your teacher. As you might have realized from previous discussion on the topic of oceanography and language (part 1, 2, and 3), I have been thinking a lot about how me teaching in a foreign language to both me and most of my […]

How less than 25% of the tested students give consistent answers to these problems. This is already the third blog post talking about the paper “Identifying and addressing student difficulties with hydrostatic pressure” by Loverude, Heron and Kautz (the first two posts here and here). But I am still a bit in shock by what […]

 A bit more reflection on cartesian divers. When I wrote the two previous posts, I had known cartesian divers for a very long time in many contexts, for example as something that is routinely used in primary school teaching. While I was aware that developing a correct physical description of such a diver is challenging, […]

What level of proficiency do you need to communicate about science? This post is not strictly about oceanography, but I started thinking about it in the context of a class I taught recently, where I was teaching in a foreign language to me and most of the students. After one of the classes, a student […]

How to make lectures in a foreign language less scary for the students. The class that I have until recently taught in Bergen, GEOF130, is taken by students in oceanography and meteorology in the second year of their Bachelor at the university. It is the first course they take at the Geophysical Institute – their […]

The first student cruise I ever taught while being taught by one of the greatest teachers myself. As you might have noticed from the last four or so blog posts, I really enjoy teaching student cruises and I think they are a super important part of the oceanography education. So let me tell you about […]

About teaching in a language that is a foreign language for both your students and yourself. Most of my teaching so far has happened in English to mainly non-native English speakers with the occasional native speaker thrown in. One thing that I realized recently was that concepts that are definitely not common knowledge at home […]

When students have read blog posts of mine before doing experiments in class, it takes away a lot of the exploration. Since I was planning to blog about the CMM31 course, I had told students that I often blogged about my teaching and asked for their consent to share their images and details from our […]