Tales from the science classroom

 Yesterday we had our quarterly staff meeting. I really can't complain about the fact that we go in on a Friday for 4 hours once a quarter. In all my other schools, it was Wednesday afternoon once a week. Granted the meetings were shorter, only an hour or so, but they were every freaking week. Ugh!!!!  So it is hard to complain about this. But 4 hours is a long time to sit anywhere. And yesterday we were in a teacher's classroom that had only desks. Ugh!! I brought my office chair down and pulled a desk in front of me. I'm too old and large to sit in one of those for 4 hours. Ugh!!! Anyway, that really isn't the topic of this post, though I wanted to comment on it. This post is about me having lost my mojo for teaching. I'm not sure if it's permanent or temporary or what, but it is real. It could just be that this past week was brutal because of the lack of planning on my part (see previous post). I'm definitely feeling better having a real plan for next wee

 I realized that a large part of my problem this week was that I didn't prepare fully enough. I need to know exactly what is happening each day in class and be ready for it and I wasn't. That is why I felt the way I did all week. It is absolutely worth it to spend time on the weekends prepping lesson plans for the coming week. I have time on Monday morning to physically prep everything, but I need to spend some time getting the lessons down on paper in some way so that I know what I'm doing. Worse thing ever is to not know what I'm doing.  Toward that end, I need a good system for keeping lesson plans. I was never really taught how to make lesson plans or a good way to keep them so I am organized. Over the summer I put together a Google doc with my lesson plans, but that doesn't seem to work really well. I need something, on paper, that I can quickly refer to during class (because I forget what the next thing is) and that I can make notes on and keep for the coming

 Yesterday. My 4A class. I let get to me before they even walked in the door. Yesterday was a day when I just wasn't feeling it. I was incredibly low energy. I wasn't hot on the lesson. And I just did not feel like battling them to participate. So I didn't. I gave in and showed a movie. I had a worksheet for them to fill out as we watched and offered a little bit of extra credit for the worksheet. It ended up working out well. There was one student though, who spent the entire movie on his phone and then tried to take another student's worksheet home to copy. Ummmm.....no. I told them I was only accepting the worksheets right now. After they leave the room there would be no credit for the worksheet. Ugh!!!  It actually worked out pretty okay though. It was an interesting video on bats and I even learned a few things. But for 45 minutes, I didn't have to really deal with them and that was a win. But I can't do this every class.  Over the weekend, I need to spend

 So now that I've had the weekend to cool down over that class, I don't feel quite as strongly as I did on Friday about them. I am going to make some changes but I don't think I'll be quite as brutal as I was planning on.  I am changing the seating chart some. I don't like where some of them are sitting and I need to move things around.  I will be collecting every single thing that they do and I'm going to give a 0/1/2 grade on it immediately. So if they finish it 2 points, if they don't finish it 1 points, and if they don't do it 0 points. Every single paper they get.  I also need to explain to them that while they did get a lot of papers for the last activity, they will see this information again and keeping them is in their best interest.  I am also going to institute and absolute zero tolerance for phones. I'm over the phones.  And finally, the clipboard idea is awesome, I like it a lot. Going to walk around with a clipboard with their names at t

 I have one class that is just driving me crazy and I need to vent and get it off my chest. They are mostly freshmen and having basically not been in school for the last 2 years act more like middle schoolers. Also, there are 30 of them in the room. There are a couple of large personalities that, for lack of a better word, are just annoying. One student must shout out stupid answers to every question. There are a couple that just talk all the time. And quite honestly there are some I just don't like. This makes this class extremely challenging for me. I even went so far as to ask admin to come in and observe to see if my feelings were coloring my reactions towards this class. I was afraid that they had pissed me off before and that was hanging over and making me not like them when, in fact, they may be just fine.  So I started this post with the intention of just trying to purge my feelings before the weekend begins. But as I typed that first paragraph, I had a bit of an epiphany.

 In the middle of our second week back from fall break and things are going well. One thing that I find is working for me is focusing solely on one task at a time. Sounds simple, but for so long multitasking has been the big buzz word. And honestly I think multitasking was something people came up with because they couldn't control their brains and focus on one thing. Anyway, my meditation practice has helped me to learn to focus and that has helped me immensely in so many ways. But I digress. I've taken to keeping a bullet journal for school. I kept trying to keep a planner with some structure, but nothing every really fit what I needed it to do. So I keep a bullet journal for my personal stuff. That has a little structure to it though, one page per day. And if I don't fill the page with things from the day, I post pictures which I just love. So I decided to keep a true bullet journal for school and I think I like it. At the beginning of the day I write the date at the top

  We just finished the first week back from fall break and I did jump into the storylines. We started the Africa unit and got through the first couple of lessons. Wow!!! Did the students struggle. It was not a hard activity, but they really, really struggled. It was interesting. But I think they got it. Next week we do a slightly harder activity so I'll see how that goes.  Otherwise, I liked it. Last week I also found a site for notebooks and I love it. I'm introducing some of the concepts, but this summer I'm going to structure the entire course to utilize the notebooks. I can't wait on that.  We survived the first week and I don't have a whole lot to say about it. We'll see how the rest goes. 

 And I could not be happier. Last week I didn't do much in my classes. We worked on projects and watched videos. I know, great teacher. But I was just completely drained and had nothing left in the tank. Nothing.  In a previous post I talked about finding the storylines curriculum for biology. Well, I found another, similar curriculum, Inquiry Hub, for both biology and chemistry. I've been looking them over and I really like them and am considering switching. I'm on the fence about the chemistry one because I do like the modeling curriculum and am not sure I really want to switch that up. But biology, definitely needs a kickstart and this just may be it. I plan to go through both the storylines and the Inquiry Hub curriculum for bio and see which one I like better.  Also a consideration is which one I can fit in the remainder of the year. I think I stick with the modeling for chem but will consider switching next year.  As for everything else, it's fine. I'm looking