Content Literacy

Each department at EJHS has been participating in LDC: Literacy Design Collaborative.  This initiative encourages teachers to incorporate writing into their classes, something that isn't as common in science classes. Our writing module is on colligative properties and is titled "Driving Salty" (apparently 'salty' is a current slang term for angry or dumb).  Students will be looking at how salt helps drivers on the roads.

Today's class gave students time to read their articles and take notes using a reading guide.  It was strange to find myself talking about supporting details, thesis statements, etc.  I was worried that students may complain the whole class about having an assignment like this, but they seemed fairly receptive!

"Senior-itis"

Because I am at a middle school, many of the eighth graders have already started looking beyond this year to high school, much like Seniors who have already been accepted into college.  The weather is lovely, the hormones are raging, the class trip to New York is being planned... few are focused on the mundane details like homework.  Most the kids leaving MMSK will be going to a public high school for the first time.  They have applied, interviewed, and tested into various magnet programs.  Some are going to Lexington Catholic, a few are staying in a Montessori program.  They think their performance now does not affect their future.  Unfortunately that is not true.  Because MMSK does not depend on standardized testing, every decision that a student makes can be reflected in the subjective final evaluations.  No one will be denied entry into a school or magnet program, but their future teachers will "hear about" their current behavior. 

More importantly, it significantly detracts from the school environment when half the population is thinking about next year.  A true Montessori system is built around classes of three age groups. (Upper Elementary is 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.) The middle school is really missing the ninth graders.  I wish the schools were divided as such.  Then high school would only have 10th, 11th, and 12th. I think that would be advantageous as well. 

Lab

Today, in anatomy, I had the students do a lab to measure their lung capacity. But, there where times in the first class where we had some technical difficulties; some of the equipment wasn't working and some just needed to be adjusted. A lot of this could have been avoided it I would have did a run-through of the lab before-hand and checked all the equipment. I figured since I had done this lab just a year or so ago in another class, it wouldn't be that hard to teach it now. But, there are more reasons to run through a lab before class than just to get familiar with it yourself. It was a good learning experience for me!

Real "Old" School

I used the term Old School with my students today, but it was not related to the Online Learning Day we had last week.

During first block this morning, the bulb in the projector for the Smart Board burned out.  I wouldn't say I rely on the Smart Board, but when you have everything planned to present a certain way and that way is no longer available, things become somewhat complicated.

We had to go "old school."  We used the white board to work problems that students needed to see for their notes.  Unfortunately, the white board is not in an ideal location for class.  It is off to the side, since it is rarely used.  Students seemed to adapt fairly well, but we still have some back-tracking to do tomorrow from a bit of lost time when we were trying to figure out the projector issue.

By 4th block, we had a temporary projector up and running to use the documents we had originally prepared for the lesson.  All in all, not a huge problem, but it did make me think about how important it is to be prepared and flexible.

Depending on content of the lesson, this switch could have been more difficult to make.  I'll be keeping this in mind as I plan future lessons and try to think of alternative plans I could potentially use!

New Student

It must be very difficult to switch schools in the middle of the semester. I had a new student in my general bio class yesterday. He is from New York, so this is a completely different school district and environment. However, while I was talking to him, I found out that he had already learned much of the information that we had been covering. He seems very bright and I hope he will be able to keep up with the material and do well for the rest of the semester.

Planning Anatomy

Recently, I have been planning my unit for Anatomy. I will be teaching respiration for the next couple weeks. This has been very interesting for me because I have never taken an anatomy class. It is eye opening to see the amount of preparation it takes for a unit such as this, especially when there is little to no preexisting content knowledge.

Alas!...

Many of our students have bad home lives. One of mine in particular, I'll call her Martha, has been thru a lot. I have no idea what the situation is with her, but in the past few months, she has been suspended several times, and her grades are obviously hurting because of that (least of her worries, obviously). For this unit though, she has been there everyday, and has been engaged in learning. Remarkably, she is nailing this stuff! Every problem I throw at her, she gets it! She has surpassed everyone else in the class (when it comes to this unit). So I'm feeling really good about this. Then, this afternoon, we got an email saying that Martha was suspended again and will be out for 2 days. I don't know what this is for, but I'm just sad for her. She has so much potential, but there are so many issues that get in the way. I can't imagine how she feels, and I want to be able to help her overcome these obstacles. It's amazing how easy it is to let yourself become invested in these kids' lives.

OLD School Results

Well, the results are in...

And I think that is students had to complete homework to be marked present on a daily basis, homework scores would improve exponentially!

In my 3 classes of roughly 60 students total, I only had 2 students who didn't do the work.  TWO!  I was very impressed.

I think that students enjoyed being able to take ownership of their learning and do work at home.  I'm curious to see if other teachers had the same successes!

ACT Testing

Today was ACT testing. The 11th grade students were testing from 8:25 to 12:00. Many of our students in first block were out, so no class was taught. Mrs. Owens decided to let the 3rd and 4th block students use that time as a study hall since most of the students were exhausted, or checked out for the day.

Career Fair

Saturday, I attended the FCPS Career Fair. I was disappointed in this career fair. None of the schools knew what they would need (except for physics teachers Tommy!) I didn't understand why the schools had this career fair if they told everyone "I don't know." It was very frustrating and discouraging

No Snow Day!

Monday, March 5th, School is IN SESSION! Yep, it's true.  MMSK policy is that if local schools are out then students will not be counted absent and it is entirely up to the parents if they come to school or not.  We had 32 students today.  The prinicipal brought donuts for everyone, the "Baking Micro-economy" group made hot chocolate for everyone after we played outside in the snow...I mean "worked" outside.  We did a quick rotation through math, support and writing classes.  Then Baking class made chicken soup for everyone for lunch.  In the afternoon we primarily focused on review and some students got caught up on various assignments...
All in all, it was just an abbreviated day in terms of learning.  As a parent, I appreciate that the students had a safe and productive day that did not require a parent staying home from work.

Job Fair

The job fair this morning was pretty uneventful. The common response of most of the principals there was "we don't know what we have yet, but check with us in about a month or so". Because of this, I was able to move through them all pretty quickly. I suppose it is more advantageous for those employers to have a pool of potential employees to look to when they find out exactly what they need, but it sure makes us feel uneasy! I would prefer them to be begging for me to apply, but that's just me ;) In all seriousness, I'm not worried about it, but it was a much different experience than what I expected.

CHETL

We had a professional development conference this past week regarding CHETL (Characteristics of Highly Effective Teaching and Learning) this past week. I thought this was somewhat helpful in that we learned various things regarding implementing more rigorous coursework and engaging the students in more inquiry based activities. However, after the meeting was over, I found out that the other teachers had seen the exact same presentation just a few weeks earlier at a conference they attended. I would imagine that the administration would make sure that teachers aren't getting the same information disguised under different names (that can waste money). That was just surprising to me. When choosing PD, do administrators require all personnel to go to certain ones, and are some just option/are there ones to choose from? Because these two in question were both required for the teachers and just seemed redundant.

Finishing up the Cats

In anatomy, we just finished up with the test on the cat dissections. I think it was a good experience for me. This was my first time helping lead something like this, and I feel more confident in doing something like this in the future. Through-out, there were never really any problems with students not wanting to dissect the cats or anything like that, but all of them were aware of this component of the class before taking it. I suppose if someone is completely against dissections, then they just wouldn't sign up for the class. To my knowledge, this hasn't been a problem in the past, but there is discussion going on about having a separate anatomy class with a virtual dissection instead of the traditional one. I'm interested to see if there is a lot of turn out for this type of set-up.