Tales from the science classroom

The month of July has pretty much been spent doing this. I've not accomplished a whole lot since my last post. I did get all my electronic files moved around and I'm sure I lost some in the translation, but that is life. The rest of the month was spent crafting. I made some very cool lab coats and a new messenger bag for carrying my stuff back and forth to school Here are my lab coats:  I took my old one and tie-dyed it, I love, love, love tie-dye and then I bought a new one and painted it. And my new messenger bag: Very excited about this. Very excited about it all. Hubby was gone for a week and returned yesterday. I did all this while he was gone. So needless to say, none of my prep got done. Since we have to return on Monday, I think I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the week/weekend. At least I have everything ready in my head. I know what I'm going to do for each class, so all I need to do is get everything ready. Ugh!!!  I guess I can d

I know, 2 posts in one day. Well, since the last post I've been working on school stuff and I've gotten to point where I can't move forward until I figure some things out. So I thought I would take some time, write it out (which always helps me think) and figure out the best way to do this. I have tons of electronic storage. I have Google drive - personal and school. I have Dropbox - which I recently cleaned out with the idea of using it for school. Evernote - which I recently cleaned out with the idea of using it for school. OneNote - which I don't really use. As you can see, I have a plethora of places to store files. And I store files in all of those places. So when I want a file, I can spend hours searching for where I stored it. That is always so much fun. So I'm trying to come up with a way to store the files that I want that won't drive me completely batsh*t crazy. Now the super simple answer would be the school Google Drive. I have unlimited storag

I must be getting close to returning to school because I had my first nightmare last night. It was really a nightmare, more like a dream where everything went wrong. It was the first day of school and I didn't have my schedule. Everyone else had theirs but I didn't have mine. I had nothing ready for my classes and I didn't know when I had classes so I didn't know when I could go make copies. Then a class came in and I didn't know them and they were disrespectful and gave me the wrong names and everything. It was annoying. I had a dream similar to this before I started teaching and it freaked me out. This one? Not so much. I've had enough experience now that these things don't frighten me, but it is a bummer to know I'm that close to returning. A frequent theme of this blog has been organization. It is something I struggle with everywhere, not just at school. It is also something I am determined to master if it kills me. So I realized the other day,

While I was investigating the points vs weight issue (see last post), I came across a program (for lack of a better word) from the University of Kansas called Strategic Instruction Model. In a nutshell, it is a method of presenting information to the student that allows them to track their own learning. There is a Course Organizer that outlines what the entire course will cover. Then there is a Unit Organizer which outlines what the unit will cover. Then there is a Lesson Organizer which outlines what the lesson will cover. These things help the students connect with things they've learned previously and understand how the things they learn in a class all fit together. I love this idea. I found the Unit Organizer first and thought is was genius. Here it is: This is an overview of the unit. It is given to the students either completely blank or only partially filled in. As a class, we will fill it in together. There are places for the last unit and the next unit so the student c

Something I've been noodling over the last few days is points vs weights for grades. I've always done weighted grades so how many points something was worth wasn't that important, the computer would calculate the weighted grade. But that can be confusing. I had a situation where a student was missing some assignments. She worked really hard to make some of them up and bring up her grade, but she left off one that was more heavily weighted than all the others. As a result, her grade didn't move much. Explaining that to her was difficult, to say the least. It was at that point I began to think about straight points.  If it was just straight points, the grading would be much, much clearer to the students.  And honestly, in all my graduate classes it's straight points and therefore so much easier to keep track of. So I've been playing around with that, but I'm running into a couple of roadblocks I'm having difficulty navigating. The primary roadblock is