First: Standard Biology
Second: AP Biology
Third: Honors Biology
Fourth: Planning.
The first day was the lovely syllabus and intro day. W introduced herself and I introduced myself. In first when I started talking about Rural Retreat they were completely dumbfounded that my town had 3x less people than MP. I didn't do the "intro" to the AP class because I have "already met them". I am looking forward to next week doing a lab with them and starting to interact with those students. It was such a wonderful first day.
The second day in Standard/Honors we did a living vs non living lab to help introduce the characteristics of life. It was to help understand the differences between observations and inferences (assumptions), but is also was to have students come up with a definition and stick to it, for example if they believe move means to use your body to move like a human moves their arm then stick with it and put that dirt can't move with wind or water. Both classes really seemed to get into the this lab, they both go in "arguments" about what they believe and they stuck to what they believed it. It was very nice to start to get to know the students and their specifics.
The third day, Friday I got to do a lab demo after the notes on Characteristics of Life. The lab demo was Pasteur's experiment where he disproved spontaneous generation (where living things come from non living things). Both classes responded well to it and even W said they responded well to my instruction. After doing it with the standard babies and seeing the time length I decided that I needed to do some filling for the honors class and figured some more leading questions out for them. Well, ha! I didn't need any of that at all.. the honors kids took longer to grasp the concept. I have a feeling they are not wanting to expand out of the box yet, they are the students must make grade etc. It will take a bit but we are slowly seeing a difference in them, slowly seeing them open up some.
Out of the classroom every Wednesday we have a meeting of some sort: faculty, department, biology crew. In these meetings a topic that has been brought up a lot is a policy NC is taking on Pay for Performance. It is not if NC will adopt this policy its when. I am still learning about this, but pretty much what it is in a nutshell a teacher is paid on the growth and passing of EOC's that students have.
-more to come on this topic when I learn/understand more-
Monday we are giving a pretest and then Tuesday is my first lesson. Ecological relationships here I come.
The second day in Standard/Honors we did a living vs non living lab to help introduce the characteristics of life. It was to help understand the differences between observations and inferences (assumptions), but is also was to have students come up with a definition and stick to it, for example if they believe move means to use your body to move like a human moves their arm then stick with it and put that dirt can't move with wind or water. Both classes really seemed to get into the this lab, they both go in "arguments" about what they believe and they stuck to what they believed it. It was very nice to start to get to know the students and their specifics.
The third day, Friday I got to do a lab demo after the notes on Characteristics of Life. The lab demo was Pasteur's experiment where he disproved spontaneous generation (where living things come from non living things). Both classes responded well to it and even W said they responded well to my instruction. After doing it with the standard babies and seeing the time length I decided that I needed to do some filling for the honors class and figured some more leading questions out for them. Well, ha! I didn't need any of that at all.. the honors kids took longer to grasp the concept. I have a feeling they are not wanting to expand out of the box yet, they are the students must make grade etc. It will take a bit but we are slowly seeing a difference in them, slowly seeing them open up some.
Out of the classroom every Wednesday we have a meeting of some sort: faculty, department, biology crew. In these meetings a topic that has been brought up a lot is a policy NC is taking on Pay for Performance. It is not if NC will adopt this policy its when. I am still learning about this, but pretty much what it is in a nutshell a teacher is paid on the growth and passing of EOC's that students have.
-more to come on this topic when I learn/understand more-
Monday we are giving a pretest and then Tuesday is my first lesson. Ecological relationships here I come.
It sounds like you are doing great, Kristen. Congratulations.
ReplyDelete