THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF tUNA!

When I first saw this title for one of our speakers, I thought, Tuna? Yum! Magic with tuna? Uhhhh...
Sooo glad he didn't make a tuna can disappear before our very eyes and instead did something actually cool: he froze his index finger and smashed it with a hammer. 0.o BUT DON'T WORRY, FOLKS! It was just a hot dog. (I was sitting in the front row, and Dr. Mike just so happened to catch the appalled look on my face as he tested to see it his "finger" was frozen just right. Then, with a devil-may-care grin, he pounded the hammer on his frozen limb and pulverized the contents of his glove. He came over to me and said, "It's all right. You have nothing to worry about!" I was thinking to myself, Oh, sure, it's just a finger. Then, the rascal took of his glove and demonstrated his actual pointer and the impaled hot dog. OH... MY... GOSH.)
After his amazing display of sorcery, the Wizard of tUNA turned back into Dr. Mike, a guy in a lab coat. He said that he didn't know what values were in science, but I have a feeling he did. First, he described science as something objective to reality dealing with facts whose methods lead to truth. The works and foibles of humans, he joked, were scientists.
Scientists have epistemic values, or philosophy concerned with the origin of nature, methods and limits of knowledge. Scientists also have cultural values, each to his own. These impact what studies are pursued and set ethical guidelines. Both types of values emerge from science and are redistributed into culture/ society.
Dr. Mike taught us about Occam's Razor-if more than one explanation can equally well satisfy a set of observations, then scientists adopt the simplest explanation. For example, it was not a little elf that made the liquid in the bottle turn blue, but something much more simple: two chemicals mixing when the bottle was shaken.

• Scientists value simplicity (really? So... what about all those chemical formulas?)
• reliability
•  testability 
• accuracy 
• precision 
• generality 
• heuristic power (such as discovery and inventiveness) 
• novelty 
• controlled and unbiased observation
•  peer review
• confirmation of prediction
• repeatability and statistics 
• universalism 
• communism (GASP!), as in, sharing knowledge (oh, okay.)
• etc

What they do not value is error, fraud and pseudoscience.


SO ANYWAY, a quote 'fore parting:
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
-Albert Einstein

"There are three good reasons to be a teacher- June, July and August."

Unknown has the right idea there. Hahaha, just kidding. Donna Jacobs, dean of Education at UNA, assured us that, despite the misconception of the unavailability of teaching jobs, there are plenty opening up. ("Look to Alaska and Nevada!" she said with a huge smile.) She also said that teaching jobs offer a very good amount of pay... that is, however, dependent upon how long you teach or what degree from college you have when you teach.
Obviously there are certain criteria that must be met in order to be a teacher. (Duh, not EVERYONE can be a teacher!) Candidates must have speaking and writing skills (a no-brainer if you ask me); they must be interested in what they are teaching (I would make an extremely bad math teacher because... let's just say it's not my forté nor does it interest me as much as, say, YouTube); and they must be dedicated to their job (I had a teacher who never, EVER missed a day of school; how she did that, I have no clue).
During the process of becoming a teacher comes the dreaded (at least most of the time) student-teacher evaluations. I had some good student teachers in my time, but most of them... =/
During these wonderful or eternal weeks, the prospective teacher goes to a school, observes a teacher and eventually teaches parts of the class. The teacher being shadowed must report back to the student-teacher's administrators and rate them with different qualifications: exemplary/exceptional (YAY, you're ready to be a teacher!), good/proficient (pretty good, almost there), acceptable/basic (eh... not quite, but maybe someday) or unacceptable/deficient (go ahead and pick another career, pal).
Once you are a teacher, there are values to uphold, such as professionalism, integrity, and trustworthiness. Oh, it also helps to have a sense of humor (by the way, Dean Jacobs was absolutely hilarious) and be sarcastic every once in a while. Teachers must be caring, mature and responsible. "Don't distract students," Dean Jacobs told us, "aid them." Teachers must have goals, a good (if not WONDERFULLY FANTASTIC) resumé (having two languages on there helps =D), and pride in their work.