Tales from the science classroom

 One of the things that I do with school planning that absolutely drives me crazy is switch things up. I will be going along, things will be going okay, and suddenly I will find something and boom, I'll switch my whole curriculum up. I hate that because I want to find one thing and stick with it so that I can get good at delivering it. The greatest teachers have a curriculum that they follow and they just switch little things to keep things new.  Having said that, I started using the modeling curriculum for biology because I do really like the chemistry curriculum. The problem is that I haven't taken the biology course and I'm having trouble making it cohesive for the students. I'm not a fan of the way things are done, the activities included or the order things are done in. For example, we are in the 2nd unit and have touched on things that haven't been explained yet. So they are having to take things on face value rather than understanding them. Not how I think th...

 The start of this school year has actually gone pretty well. There were some bumps in the road but things are smoothing out.  1st bump:  I have not taught freshmen in 3 or 4 years. They are different. They are far more like middle schoolers than they are like upper classmen. It took me a few weeks to figure that out but I think I've got it now and things are getting better.  2nd bump: Covid. We had a lot of students out in the first few weeks for quarantine or waiting on tests or whatever and it had developed into a huge problem on how to handle assignments for them. I have worked it out, it's not perfect, but it's working.  3rd bump and the reason for this post: My teacher planner is not working. I bought a bullet journal over the summer because I don't like most of the teacher planner layouts. I'm on a block schedule and they just don't really work for me. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted in a planner and I thought I had a pretty good design...