Tales from the science classroom

I have struggled with lesson planning my entire career. I know I talk about this a lot and I know to some it may seem rather trivial, but this is huge for me. I was never taught how to properly lesson plan in my teacher education program. I had to create a lesson plan. I was shown interesting things to do with lessons. But creating a system of teaching a topic, putting it in an orderly fashion, and creating daily plans for doing that was never taught to me. I'm the type of person who needs to be shown step by step and be able to ask questions. How is this done? What if this happens? How do I handle this? I never had that. I was taught all about educational theorists. I was taught to do action research. I spent a lot of time learning things that literally never cross my mind now. But the stuff I really needed; how to create lesson plans, how to plan a day, a week, a month, a school year, how to handle the massive amounts of paperwork that being a teacher generates; I was taught no

As I was preparing to type this, I was thinking about the people who are so confident in what they are doing. They get a planner and say they are going to use it this way and set it up that way and boom. They do it. I'm not sure if there is the struggle beforehand that I go through (see previous posts) But I am not that confident and generally waffle before deciding on something. I guess I just like to consider all options and look at all sides of something before just jumping in. Aw, well, that's me. Anyway, the point of this post is my school planner. This has been sitting here for almost 2 weeks and I have hardly touched it. I've been trying to decide how I want to lay it out and I think I figured it out. There are 7 columns in this planner and my initial thought was to label each one with a class; chemistry, biology, AP chem, and AP bio; and the remaining 3 columns with notes, to-do, copy, prep or some combination of those things. But the more I thought about it t

I'm stuck. And I'm not sure how to figure this out. I teach AP Biology. Last year was my first year and I just picked up someone's curriculum and taught it. Well, this summer I'm trying to be more mindful in my teaching and so I'm planning ahead. One of the projects is to create an AP Biology curriculum that is mine. The problem I'm running into is the sequence. Last year I taught macro to micro, so evolution first and then we worked our way down to cells, interactions, etc. That is definitely one way to go and lots of teachers do it that way. The other way to go, and what I thought I would do this year, is start with chemistry. Give them a basis for what is going on then move into what is happening with evolution and all that stuff. Now both ways are legitimate and teachers do it both ways, I just can't decide what is best for me. One one hand I feel that giving them the big picture and then explaining why it happens (evolution first) makes more sense be

I am a planner freak. I believe that it has to do with the fact that I always feel so unorganized and that by having a planner, I get some semblance of organization.  I have also found that being a teacher requires a level of organization I just do not possess naturally. Therefore, a planner is essential to my maintaining my sanity. Over the years, I have used a lot of different planners in a lot of different ways. I used Passion Planners for about 3 years. I used one for my personal planner and one for a school planner. The Passion Planner is great but very limited. I spent a lot of time each week altering the layout to fit my needs both at home and at school. Loved this planner, mainly the outside. But I used it an entire year and it worked well for me. I used a Purple Trail planner for both school and home.   I really liked this planner and it took much less altering than the Passion Planner did every week. But it still wasn't quite right. Also, these are large, ve