Melancholy on a Monday

I had an amazing weekend at Brown, and I can hardly believe it's over. I think I'm experiencing some form of withdrawal (but hopefully this is a sorrow as transient as April's brief showers).

At any rate, I'm missing my kids, and I'm excited to see them tomorrow! This is also the last week I have to teach my seniors. I'm really really not excited about that. Next Monday, I'll see them in the hallways and at graduation practice... but not in my classroom.

Drawbacks

Crazy kids stole my phone! (I don't think they were my kids, but I don't want to point any fingers. Suffice it to say my kids are really truly under control and know better.) Had to go buy a new one...

Lesson #347 of Teaching: Kids Respond to Incentives

Incentive: If you guys are well-behaved throughout the entire lesson, we'll go downstairs to the bake sale at the end of class, and I'll buy you each a cookie.

The Result: Impeccably behaved classes. Active participation. 90% engagement. (It's almost June, and I still can't get every kid.) And so almost all of my students now understand niches and the competitive exclusion principle.

And they love me, because I bought them cookies. Added bonus.

Quote(s) of the Day - May 26, 2010

During a lesson on ecology, upon explaining that producers convert sun energy into sugar...

Rooster: Wait, so are you saying that all food contains sugar?

Makes Barnyard Animal Sounds: Oh my god, he just said that waffles don't have sugar! Haha, he's so dumb!

Barnyard spent the rest of the period whistling, humming, and oinking.

~~~~~~~~~

Me: Extremely Obnoxious, stop talking to Master of Righteous Indignation.

Obnoxious: I SWEAR I was talking to Master of Righteous Indignation... So get out of my face, and stop saying my name.

Appreciate Your Teachers!

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Month (Wow, I had no idea we got a month of appreciation.), Bing is hosting a wonderful way for you to appreciate and remember your influential teachers: Tell a story about a teacher who played an important role in your life, and Bing will give you a $5 donation to use on Donors Choose, so that you can help other teachers.

Sounds amazing! Go do it! And tell your friends!

via GOOD

Notes From a Monday

Not so manic... Attendance was fairly decent in the morning and in the afternoon. However, half my class was out for testing 2nd period, so I had a grand total of 7 kids (out of 15). Fourth period was even worse -- 9 kids showed up, out of 24.

Some of my favorite moments:

-- Upon learning that we were starting our ecology unit, one of my students proclaimed, "Oh, I think that's the part I like!"

-- Insecure About Other People Being As Smart As He Is told me he would rather study for a multiple choice and essay-style final exam rather than do the project-style final I assigned. Not sure to what extent that is true and to what extent he is trying to show off to his classmates.

-- One of my most obnoxious students came to class on time, sat down quietly, and not only took notes but also was the only person to complete her homework during the 5 minutes left over at the end of class.

Manic Monday

School ends June 18th, so today is the start of the last four weeks of school. My students are checking out mentally. Many have already informed me that they have no intention of coming to school once it gets to be hot and sunny on a regular basis. They already have a bad track record of attending when it rains (which is sort of justifiable, since so many walk to school). Today is supposed to be rainy and 75 degrees.

So if we combine the factors of rain, high temperatures, end of the year, and Monday, I wonder what attendance will be like today....

Hopefully, high, because I am teaching exciting stuff today (and starting a new unit -- ecology! -- in biology). But attendance is a very sobering matter.

Weekday Warrior

So three of my smartest 10th graders stayed after class today to tell me how badly they want to go to schools like Brown and NYU, and could I help them come up with a step-by-step plan to get into those schools.

I was floored. Wow! My kids are going places!

Quote of the Day - May 19, 2010

On the availability of browsers on the School District laptops...

Yells At Me For Interrupting Her While She Is Gossiping: Wow, I can't believe we have to use Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer is sooooo much better.

Research Shows Merit Pay For Teachers Is a Terrible Idea

My good friend just wrote about merit pay for teachers here, inspiring me to muse on the topic as well.

A new report from the nonpartisan Economics Policy Institute (EPI) argues strongly against tying teacher pay to test scores, highlighting two major fallacies championed by the pro-merit pay camp:

1. Merit pay is widespread in the private sector. Well, no, it's not. It's really only prevalent in the sorts of fields, like finance, real estate, and sales, that helped to generate the global economic crisis.

2. Merit pay has positive consequences for workers. Again, this argument is erroneous. Negative consequences are the result in many, many cases where workers are trying to meet quotas -- think about cops trying to meet monthly quotas, or the case in which bus drivers in Santiago, Chile were paid according to how many passengers they picked up. What happened? A spike in bus crashes, as bus drivers sped around the city trying to increase their passenger load.

Esther Wojcicki, a California English teacher and the mother of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, writes on The Huffington Post that teachers do need incentives, but that these incentives are far different from what our policymakers (like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee) are focused on. Citing research by Daniel Pink, she writes that that teachers are far more motivated to work their hardest when they are "aligned with the purpose of the job," enjoy some "autonomy," and receive "support in gaining mastery" of their job."

The teachers I work with are incredibly purpose-driven. If anything, the types of strategies that get us down and drive us to apathy are exactly those our administrators employ in an effort to raise test scores -- stop teaching your content in a creative way and start teaching high-stakes testing strategies in a tedious, often scripted way. I already work pretty hard, but I would love more respect, more autonomy, and more support. I can imagine my classroom culture and students' capacity to learn would only improve. Maybe, in time, test scores would as well.

via GOOD

What Is Life?

I just read a really interesting essay by Carl Zimmer on how to define life, or whether a definition matters. The piece exposes the litany of definitions of life -- life must transform carbon dioxide, or contain membranes, or contain DNA, or it must evolve -- within the scientific community. It also exposes our curious current state of affairs, where we spend so much time arguing over issues, like stem cells and abortion and genetically modified foods, to which the meaning of life is crucial, yet we cannot actually agree on what life is.

Zimmer goes on to explain the platform of Carol Cleland, an astrobiological philosopher who argues a comprehensive definition of life is in fact unnecessary to our study of life. So much of the universe is yet undiscovered that we are limiting ourselves to arbitrary terms until we increase our sample size. In other words, we cannot purport to define life until we confront forms of life radically different from what we know here on Earth. Until then, we risk overlooking that which is life, perhaps bizarrely so, due to our possibly narrow constraints. This view commonly plays out with regard to viruses -- Scientists intensely debate whether or not viruses are living things, yet biologists continue to study viruses in their labs.

My favorite part of the essay discussed the origin of the debate on the meaning of life. It turns out that the instigator was not a biologist, but rather a physicist named Erwin Schrodinger. (Physics students around the world love and hate Schrodinger. At the same time). Schrodinger wondered how life seemed to violate the laws of physics: While everything else in the universe tends toward entropy, life is based on order, from ecosystems down to molecules. ...What a wonderful idea!

read The Meaning of Life

Blueberries Linked to ADHD

A new study, published in the prestigious Pediatrics journal, has found a link between attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the organophosphate pesticides commonly used on non-organic strawberries, blueberries, and celery. The researchers studied 1139 children between the ages of 8 and 15; nearly 10% of those children met the criteria for ADHD.

Pretty scary. And why blueberries, of all foods? :(

via Pediatrics (via The Independent)

Lock-Out!

Oh, the challenges of being a first-year teacher in an overcrowded urban school! Not only do I float from classroom to classroom, since I am too junior to have my own classroom, but I don't have a key to any of the classrooms I teach in. So I showed up to class today only to find out that it was locked. Nobody in the building seems to know how to open the door. So much for the test I was planning to give... I guess my kids are happy!

One More Unit

I have one more unit to plan (ecology), and that's it for the entire year! I feel so close to being free! So close to no longer being a first-year teacher!

I can't believe how quickly time has passed....

A Bakery of Blood Cells!

Isa Humble is my hero. One of them. She bakes the most delicious-looking cookies, and, even better, she blogs about it at Not So Humble Pie. Best of all, she is fond of baking biology themed cookies. Below, a petri dish and a cephalopod.

But now, she has teamed up with histology lecturer Joanne Masterer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to create a video explaining all the different cells that make up your bloodstream. It's delightfully delicious and dorky!




via Boing Boing

Bad Day

For some reason, yesterday was one of my worst days at school so far this year. I figured that since I had made it all the way to mid-May, it would be smooth sailing for the rest of the year, but I guess not.

In 4th period, my kids tried to put me in the middle of a dispute they were having with another teacher, and I exacerbated the situation rather than diffusing it early on. In my defense, I was really taken aback by the suddenness of their assault. On the other hand, I work every day with a bunch of crazy kids, and I should have my wits about me at all times. I guess I was caught between feeling the need to stand up for my colleague while also wanting to protect my kids, for whom I feel almost motherly sometimes.

6th period was typical. They entered the class like animals, miraculously became well-behaved during the lesson and repeatedly demonstrated their mastery of the material, and left class like animals. No surprises there.

But 7th period was the worst. First, I tried to separate Master of Righteous Indignation and his BFF. When the two of them sit together, they talk loudly and cause disruptions that affect not only their learning, but that of the rest of the class as well. Their attitudes also tend to explode when they are together, and today was no exception. They cursed at me as soon as I approached them during the Do Now, and they flat-out refused to move. I brought in an NTA (non-teaching assistant) to help out, and they gave her even worse treatment, calling her the N-word. When she abruptly disappeared, I realized that 40% of my class had joined together in a loud, profane, and physical classroom management crisis.

After 9 months of teacher, I should be better equipped to deal with this kind of thing. However, my frustration got the best of me, and I ended up getting into a screaming match with one of my students. In the middle of yelling, I realized what I was doing and became ashamed of myself, which lowered my confidence and competence even more. Everyone finally calmed down a bit and returned to their seats, at which point they promptly started talking too loudly for me to teach. So I stopped teaching. I flipped through the slides without explaining everything. I felt miserable, but defeated. This wasn't the way my classroom was supposed to be. My kids certainly weren't learning. Some of my kids may have felt that they were winning, but I (and my kids who had been sitting quietly and attentively the entire time) knew we were all losing.

The situation finally improved when the NTA returned with the scariest assistant principal. He gave my students a stern lecture about respect and its role in education, and he left with Master of Righteous Indignation and his BFF. When 7th period ended, I collapsed in gratitude for the end of my work week.

Quote of the Day - May 14, 2010

Me: Bright Kid With World's Biggest Attitude Problem, turn around, stop talking, put the phone away, and get back to work.

Bright Kid With World's Biggest Attitude Problem: Oh my god. Certain teachers don't understand that we're kids, and we only care about having fun.

Can't Stop Laughing at Verizon

This is about 3 years out of date, but I only just discovered it. And since it is one of the funniest things I have ever seen, I can't help posting it here...

Take that, Verizon!

via xkcd

Some Darwin Mix-Ups

A few gems from my evolution quiz:

Who was Charles Darwin, and what did he contribute to the study of evolution?

"Charles Darwin was a biological specimen."

What was the name of Darwin's controversial book?

"Organisms and Theyre Specs and Babies"

Sketch Is on a Roll

In Environmental Science, we are doing an activity that involves comparing the impact on the climate made by poor people as opposed to wealthier people....

Adorable But Slightly Sketchy Student: Yo, you so dumb, why would you buy a radio instead of a bicycle? If you only have $200 in lifetime savings, buy a f***ing bicycle so you can get to work and make more money.

Turquoise-Colored Glasses: I don't know... I just thought a radio would be fun. And then I have $50 left, so I can take the bus.

Sketch: Nooooo, you dumb as sh*t. It says here that taking the bus everyday costs $125, so your $50 doesn't mean anything. Get a bike! Transportation is so f***ing important compared to a radio. Get your priorities straight! And bikes are better for the environment anyway, so you're making climate change better by having a bike!

Sketchy Student Wins Again!

Adorable But Slightly Sketchy Student: Yo yo Miss, you promised we could watch movies every day for the rest of the year.

Me: I definitely never promised that.

Sketch: Oh sh*t, I was hoping if I said that, you'd believe me!

Mother's Day Shenaniganz

Cute When Distracted: I sent out a text to all my non-mother friends that said, "Happy Non-Mother's Day! Congratulations! You haven't gotten pregnant yet!"

A New Addition to the Smithsonian?

The AP US History teacher is taking his AP kids on a field trip to Washington, DC, in a few weeks. One student excitedly told me about the trip:

We're going to the Holocaust Museum and the Lincoln Memorial, and then we're going to the National Shops!

She's going to be sorely disappointed at finding out the National Mall is a large expanse of grass.

On Having a Neandertal as a Great-Great-Great-Grandmother

A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome

I am so excited to learn about this. I'm doing my best with my kids to get beyond the banal basics of natural selection and into the more interesting specifics of adaptive human evolution. We are slowly learning about various examples of selection pressures, and I'm delighted to see that my students are buying it! Most of them were initially resistant, but they are opening up to the science more than I think they realize.

That being said, I learned today yet another lesson about assuming too much of my students' prior knowledge. Excitedly, I stood before my 6th period class and said, "Hey! Did you guys know that we share about 4% of our DNA with Neandertals?!!" And I got blank stares. Not a single student had ever heard of a Neandertal. I did my best to explain, but the news was kind of lost on them. And so I lost a little of my ebullience.

On the Natural Selection of Rabbits

Me: So if these rabbits are picked off by predators from the land AND the air, what kind of rabbits will we probably see in the next generation?

Poorly Influenced by Boisterous But Lovable: Flying rabbits!

Interestingly enough, I got that same answer in all three of my biology classes. My kids have such wild imaginations!

On Whale Evolution

I asked my biology students to write essays on whale evolution.

This is how Bright Kid With World's Biggest Attitude Problem began his essay:

Back in the days I'm talking before people were alive (prehistoric times) there were whales.

Quote of the Day - May 5, 2010

During a lesson on natural selection...

Makes Barnyard Animal Noises begins to whistle softly while taking notes. I ignore him and continue teaching.

Five minutes later...

Makes Barnyard Animal Noises: Miss, do you hear a bird in here?

Quote of the Day - May 3, 2010

Me: Oh my god, Best Friend of Extremely Obnoxious, be quiet!!

Best Friend of Extremely Obnoxious: MISS, CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW YOUR BREATH SMELLS?

Me: Just be quiet. Please!

Best Friend: NO, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT HOW YOUR BREATH SMELLS. RIGHT NOW.

Me: We can talk about my breath after class. Let's get back to homologous structures.

Best Friend: MISS, I JUST WANT YOUR OPINION. WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN PEOPLE SAY YOU HAVE BAD BREATH?