OLD School

Next Tuesday, EJHS will be completing its first OLD school day.  OLD stands for Online Learning Day.  This was just approved by the school board and some teachers are scrambling to get plans together.

Basically, all EJHS juniors are taking the ACT on Tuesday.  To cut down on distraction noise, all other students get to stay home.  The catch is, though, that they will still have online assignments to complete for their classes.  If they complete the assignments, they are marked present.  If not, it is an unexcused absence.  Teachers will still be at EJHS.  We will have training in the morning and then be available in the afternoon for students to call or e-mail with questions regarding their assignments.

Depending on how this day goes, EJHS may petition to have this type of school day once every two weeks next year.  What do you all think?

I feel like students have the potential to be bogged down by busy work, which is not fair to them.  It is difficult to come up with independent assignments in every subject.  In addition, the teacher may have to re-teach everything anyway, since they cannot see how students are doing as they move along with the lesson.  I'll admit that I am not initially a huge fan of OLD school, but I am curious to see how it turns out!

Biology EOC

There has been a lot of talk at EJHS about the EOC at the end of the year for Biology.  Although I am not in a biology classroom, we are still looking at ways to prepare our kids for what they will eventually have to take.  The whole science department is having to look at the order of courses and decide where to teach background material.  Basically, they've decided that EOC prep needs to start the student's freshman year and progress until they take biology junior year.  There are a lot of chemistry concepts that students need to know (functional groups, hydrogen bonding, isotopes, etc) that are present on the test.  Its beginning to seem overwhelming to me to see what all these students will have to know well to be successful at the test.  I think it will be interesting to see the results at the end of the year.  In addition, I think that adding more EOC exams in the science classes, such as chemistry or physics, would be too much for students.  I do have high expectations for students and believe they can all learn the material, but I think that we are not helping students by overwhelming them with information that is nearly two semesters of content at a college level class.  I'm hoping that EJHS, and really all high schools, can learn to help students the best way possible with these new tests.

New Legislature?

So I was wondering, is there a way to get some kind of accountability for the reading level of students at an earlier age? By the time they get to high school, if they are reading at a low level, it becomes very difficult to teach them these abstract concepts. And, if they are expected to perform well on these standardized tests, which for a big part test their reading abilities, then how do we help them become better readers? There is so much emphasis placed on getting all of our content across that teaching reading is virtually out of the question. I believe the real area of improvement is somewhere between 1st and 3rd grade... That is where major hiccups occur in children getting stuck on certain reading levels and not being able to improve. So can there be some requirements placed on them based on reading at this level? Currently, teachers can recommend a student be held back, but if the parent isn't on board, it doesn't happen. What about making that mandatory, or at least some kind of enrollment in a reading program of sorts to get all students to a certain level before passing them along. I think this is the only way that anyone can honestly expect for high school teachers to get students to the level that the now mandated tests are asking them to be at.
Just some thoughts :)

Peace and Quiet at Last

On Friday, I laid down the law. In the ESL Bio class I'm teaching, the hispanic kids have been giving me some issues. So, at the beginning of class, I told them that we had a lot to get done, and that I expected all of them to stay in their assigned seats and be quiet while we were discussing class materials. This worked very well and the students were better behaved than I ever have seen them. As a result, we were able to get quite a bit done and they seemed to have a decent understanding of what we had covered that day.

Genetics

We started the genetics unit with the biology classes this past week, and I must say that I think things are going well with it. This is going to be a long unit, and very involved, but many of the concepts are some that the students have had in some capacity in the past. Judging by the first couple of classes, it seems as though most are recalling information well, and so I'm thankful to know that some kids are able to retain information acquired at a prior time. So now, in our instruction, we will be building on that and not starting from scratch. I think this is a blessing.

support group

Hey, I know this isn't what our "blog" is supposed to be.  But I just had the worst week ever.  I have really begun to doubt if this is what I want to do, or what I should be doing, or if it is going to do any good anyway.  Wednesday just absolutely tore me up to the point that I was ready to quit.  The "science teachers" are shutting me out, I don't feel like I will ever get a chance to teach.  But maybe I am not capable of it anyway.  The classes I did Monday and Tuesday were fine, but superficial.  The hardest part was on Wednesday when I had to "turn in" a suicidal child.  I felt that she wanted to talk to me because she trusted me but then I had to ( and I know it was the right thing to do) but I had to "betray" her trust and put her in the hot seat with the principal, and parents.  It broke my heart.  Right now I don't have it in me to care about lesson plans or websited or even praxis tests.  I just want to this girl out to play some basketball and let her talk about being sad and tell her that it is alright to feel that way.  That it will get better and she doesn't have to pretend to anyone that she feels alright if she doesn't.

Wow!

Today, the class I have been teaching took their unit test. The class did much better than they have been doing! I was very excited to see these results. Although the scores still aren't very high, it is definitely an improvement. Along with this, many of the students have shown more interest in their grades (possibly because the grades are going home this coming week). Because of this, I feel like I can actually reach those kids since they have some sort of buy in to what is happening. I hope we can keep this momentum up for the next unit; genetics is a long one and can get complicated!