Tales from the science classroom

 4 days. Until spring break. Woot Woot!!!!! That is so nice. We don't have any plans for the break but it will be nice to have an entire 10 days off. Yes, I know, we just had a 5 day weekend but I need another, extended break.  I need to spend some time today working on biology. We are having a review and a test this week and I need to clean up the test and make sure that I have stuff ready for their notebooks and the review game. Shouldn't be too hard, just need to do it.  Otherwise that is about it. I have been phoning in the lessons lately because my heart just has not been in it. The weekends, all 3 days of them, are too short and honestly, I want this year to be over. I'm ready to start an almost completely normal year next year with students who haven't been out of school for damn near 2 years. I'm over it.  So that's it. That's all I have to say and my tree hasn't grown yet. bummer. And I have to go........ See ya!!

 Well, I didn't do anything over the 5 day break. Not that I'm unhappy about that. I took time to rest, relax, binge a show, and just generally not use my brain much. It was awesome. However, today I return to school and I have no idea what is happening. That's okay, it's not like it's the first time I've done this. And truthfully, I do know what is happening, I just didn't look at it over the 5 days. When I get to school, I will figure everything out. I'm not too worried.  I am going to start March Mammal Madness with my classes, both biology and chemistry. I do need to figure out how I want to set it up, but I have a few days. The information dropped yesterday but I think the tournament starts next week or the week after. So I have some time to play around with it.  In other news, I got absolutely nothing. Think I'll end early today. 

  For reference, we run on an A/B block schedule. Monday/Wednesday we have the same 4 classes and Tuesday/Thursday we have the same 4 classes. We have no school on Fridays. Normally, holidays will throw things off. For example, Monday is President's day and we would miss an A day. But we would go back on Tuesday and have the B day. Since I have the same subjects on A and B days, that means that the A day classes will be out of sync with the B day classes. I try hard to keep everyone on the same page, it just makes life easier for me. Well, this year they decided to add holidays on the day after a holiday so that we miss both A and B day. For example, Monday is President's Day so we have Monday and Tuesday off. That means with our normal Friday off, we have a 5 day weekend. Initially I wasn't a fan of this. 5 days is a long time. But I have come to the realization that it is kind of amazing. So we have a 5 days weekend coming up. Then, in 2 weeks is Spring Break. I like this

 While I did get enough done to get through the week, I really wanted to get more done. Oh well. That's life. I did kind of lose it on my kids yesterday for not turning something in on time. It counted towards their test and they didn't do it. Ugh!!! The only reason it bothers me so much is that it makes more work for me. I now have to come up with some way to handle this, unfortunately I can't fail half the class, and then grade that and that makes a burden on me. In many ways I wish I would just let them fail and be done with it. But in spite of the fact that I'm a meany and apparently scary, I just can't do that.  This Thursday we have an open house, which means a late night. I did Sadie Hawkins dance last Thursday, now open house this Thursday. Lots of late Thursday nights. The good news is that it is a long, long weekend - 5 days. Woot Woot!!!!  I will definitely get some planning and prepping done over that time.  I placed some orders last week and they all ca

 That is what today will be. I have a lot to do today and I want to get it done before Super Bowl tomorrow.  I've been working over the problem in the previous post, the anchor phenomenon for the next unit. I'm still not any closer to having one. That is definitely on my list today. The activity I talked about last post, counting candies, I think I will save for the summative task. They will have to put all their knowledge from the unit into figuring out what kind and how many candies are in the container I give them. I think that will be a great summative task so that leaves me hunting for an anchor phenomenon still. I guess it's going to be a lot of internet searching today.  I do want to get the next unit completely laid out so that I don't have to reinvent the wheel every single week. So I'm going to draw up a unit plan that lays out the day by day.  I also need to finish up the biology unit. Figure out how much longer we have and work in the Big Ideas for the u

 This is a buzz word lately especially in science. You start each unit with an anchor phenomenon and then as you go through the unit you try to explain what happened. It's a great idea. It's also a tiny bit difficult to incorporate into daily teaching, at least for me. I tend to lose track of it and forget to go back to it during the unit. So that is something I need to build into my lessons so that it becomes a natural thing.  For my next chemistry unit, counting things, I'm really having a hard time coming up with an anchor phenomenon for the unit. It's learning to count atoms and so I thought of having a jar filled with a candy and we try to figure out how to count it during the unit. But the very first activity we do will answer that question, so that doesn't seem like it will work. So I'm kind of stuck with this one and not sure what I'm going to do. I even thought about it right before falling asleep hoping that my subconscious would come up with somet

 If I spend a couple of hours on the weekend planning and a couple of hours on Monday getting things ready, life is good. I don't have to plan in super detail, unless I'm doing something special, I just have to have a concrete idea of what is happening.  Monday/Tuesday in biology we did an activity that I'm not sure about. We did a timeline of whale fossils, then had to 'guess' what the intermediate animal might have looked like. Then we did a DNA comparison to see who the whale is most closely related to. It's a good way to show really briefly how they piece together timelines for evolution and how they determine relatedness, but it's  a little boring. If I teach biology again next year, and that's a big if, I may revamp this whole thing.  Which leads to thoughts of next year. I probably won't be teaching biology next year. All these biology students will now be in chemistry and it looks like we have enough students for an AP chemistry class. So I m