One Week of Holiday Left

One week from today and I'll be back in the classroom. I opened the folder I brought with me of lesson plans for the first weerk back today. I got a couple of good ideas. 8th grade will have the project to try to make some useable object out of recycled materials and 7th grade will have to do the same thing. I suppose that is really only the same idea used 2 times. The 8th grade will have the twist that their recycled item must be sold to raise $ for a charity to make the world a better place. Now I need some ideas of what they could make. I think I will recommend making tiny wheelbarrows for carrying specialized items if students are stuck for ideas.
As I approach the end of my teaching/education services career (only 5 months to go) and the end of my life (hopefully at least 20 more)  I think occasionally about what will be my legacy. Currently I am reading 3 Cups of Tea. I am at the beginning of the book but I already have the feeling that Morgensen's generativity will be overwhelming. Is starting a school for kids who are eager to have the chance to learn a great act of sacrifice and kindness? It reads like it will definitetly be in 3 Cups of Tea.
The idea of the holiday of Christmas is unsettling for me in a few ways, There is the wonderful idea of a holiday that inspires acts of random kindness and sharing, but then there is the commercialsim of the celebration and even the idea of giving. I heard an ad something to the effect "let our car brand give you the gift of saving when you buy our brand nex model XLG."
I've got more to add to my Christmas ramble - but for now , to all a good night.

The Last Christmas Show

In an hour or so I'll start the intro to Rudolph on the keyboard and accompany my wife's third grade class as they sing about and act out Rudpolph's rise to glory among Santa's reindeer for what is probably my last participation in a school Christmas show.
As I think back to Christmas shows past not many come clearly to mind. One in Turkmenistan where our biggest space was the entrance foyer of the school. It was close to -15 and snow and freezing wind blew in to add a special winter chill to performances everytime a parent arrived late. The one that particularly stands out in my mind from 30 years ago was in a large auditorium in Guayaquil, Ecuador. A friend (also native to New Orleans) and I were playing jazzed up Christmas carols on piano, trumpet, and with another friend on clarinet in between children's acts. The crowd had a very hushed and shocked look on their faces as we launched into a jazzy version of "Silent Night". There was some concern that we might be offending the religious sentiments of the crowd. As we finished the song to no applause an earthquake rattled the building. We weren't sure if it was coincidence, the way a higher power might applaud, or a message from on high that "Silent Night" should not be jazzed-up. (I've jazzed it up a few times since and have not had a similar response, so I'm going with the coincidence theory.)

My Last Childlike Christmas Expectation

It's the last day of bimester exams. Tomorrow is what admin likes to call a 'regular school day' filled with excited kids and Christmas parties. Friday is a half-day made up of a 2 hour (hopefully) Talent/Christmas Show, and then a dash to the airport.
I feel like I am especially excited this year. It's not that the teaching has been hard or the kids have been especially challenging. I think it might be because this could be the last time I have the thrill of getting a nice long vacation for Christmas.  Next year when I am retired from teaching  what will I be anxiously waiting for this time of year - Santa to come? That sleigh took off years ago. There is the joy of the season, and I can definitely get into that, but that childlike joy of eagerly counting the days, hours, and minutes until the special expected moment suddenly happens will be gone.
I'm going to ride this excitement for all its worth. I woke at 2 a.m. today and couldn't get back to sleep. I checked the packing of my suitcase and searched the house for other stuff I might want to take back to the USA. Maybe I'll stay awake now until I get on the plane.

Wake with Pleasureable Anticipation & Desire to Get Things Done

Last night I was reading the Sebastian Faulks book A Week in December . A character was described as someone who was not  "waking with pleasureable anticipation and desire to get things done". I pondered if I was such a person. With a week left before Christmas holiday begins I'm waking with the pleasureable anticipation that at the end of the school day I can check off that I am a day closer to hopping on the flight to Miami. I have a list on my whiteboard of the things to get done before I leave. I have a keen desire to get them done and erased.
I don't think this is the type of pleasureable anticipation Faulks was suggesting. He was describing the somewhat sad case of a man without passion for his daily work and I am dreaming of the anticipation of escaping from my daily work for a holiday. I believe I am like most who as a vacation approaches summon delightful expectations of the days and daze of holiday freedom to do nothing more than lie in a hammock and read a book -even if you never get close to a hammock.
When I return will I have a pleasant anticipation to return to the classroom and get some teaching and learning done? I'm enjoying putting together January plans for lessons and experiments on matter and density for 6th grade, preparing 7th grade for a star-gazing activity at their annual sleep-over, and expanding 8th grade thinking on the fundamental forces and particles that make up the universe. My return plans are even influencing what type of book I might take to the hammock.

Water On, Electricity Off, Imminent Collision

Three days without water and today the electricity is supposed to go off. School treks on to bimester exams next week and then 2 weeks of holiday where we can all enjoy and forget.
Night before last I read an article "The Sky is Falling" by Gregg Easterbrook about near earth objects that pose potential risks of colliding with earth. Before reading this article I had just finished a book by Clive Cussler (sp?) which involved in the plot a comet colliding with earth 7,000 years ago. I had a look at the website Easterbrook mentions as showing where NASA keeps a list of near earth objects (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ ). It is a fascinating list.
I have to set up for 7th grade lab on magnetism and run to the toilet before power goes out in 15 minutes which will shut down the pump and end the lovely free flowing water that spurted from pipes this morning. More on our inevitable collision with some sizeable chunk of space rock in a later blog ... hopefully.

Shocking Optimism

Seventh grade had a test on electricity today. As always they could bring in a page of notes to use on the test, but they would only get a maximum of 80% on  the test if they used notes. Of 30 seventh graders, 7 used notes, and one of these still got 38% on the test. I realize that the information on electricity will play little to no part in the rest of their lives (except when they might have it in another science class), but just for the sake of your own ...( I don't know) ... peace of mind (?)  if you are going to make a page of notes, wouldn't you make the page so they answer the questions that you know are going to be on the test and so that you can read them.
There were another 7 students who didn't make notes and didn't bother to study. After the test while the class was working on the next study guide on magnetism, I called students up individually to have a look at their grades before next week's bimester exam. The school's grading program lets me put in grades and see how it will affect the final average. As I spoke with each of the seven who didn't study, I explained that the average I had for them didn't include the grade from the test on electricity that they had just taken. They all confessed that they didn't do well.  I asked them what they thought they had gotten on it. Some would ask me how much each question was worth and then with a thoughtful look on their face try to work out what they had scored. Others would just blurt out a percentage. Regardless of which approach they took they all thought 60%. The grades of the 7 ranged from 24-56%. When I asked what they wanted me to plug in for their probable bimester grade, they all wanted 90%.

Attitude vs Pedagogical Skill - Which is the Better Inspirer

Not too long ago I had an email from someone who was the director of a school where I worked in the early 90s..He had written and article on "Making Meaningful Moments in Kids' Lives". I emailed him asking for a copy. The premise of his article was that often the meaningful things teachers or administrators do are not the conscious pedagogical moves we make, but the caual and  'hidden curriculum' interactions we have with students. After thinking about this I added my idea that it is the attitude we bring to the classroom or school that is the greatest influence on how students learn to approach learning and life. The attitude effect is more significant than any content, no matter how skillfully we present it. (There is no debate that the proper marriage of the two is the art of teaching and the optimal desired approach.)
Now I'm reflecting on teachers I have known who had great attitudes, but had problems with management or organization. I can think of a few who struggled keeping a great attitude as they faced daily challenges of kids who were unruly and uncaring. This is causing me to rethink my view on attitude being a greater influence than pedagogical skill - but I'm going to be a little stubborn with this idea this afternoon. The teachers who have great attitude and weak skills still find a way to inspire some students who have come to class receptive to learning. With a poor attitude and great pedagogical skill you will manage a class well, but not be as effective at inspiring life changing learning.
On Thursdays I take a student who I individually teach for math the other 4 days of the week to the regular 8th grade math class. The math teacher just graduated (about 2 weeks ago) from engineering school. He is young and the students enjoy interacting with him, and he is genuinely positive about learning and what he is trying to teach. He had not had one day of pedagogical training nor a minute as a student teacher before he started here in August. Administration has not assigned him a mentor, nor (as far as I can tell) spent any time in assisting him in developing skills at management or planning. He has a great attitude, but it is being eroded by what he sees as the students' inability to cooperate with what he is trying to do. He has no alert for class attention before starting instruction, no clear behavioral expectations, no system of consequences that are consistently followed, no planning for students who finish assignments ahead of other students. Will he be inspiring and successful if his attitude is one that frequently erupts with comments about how the behavior and management problems are the fault of kids who "act like kindergarteners" - a phrase I have heard him use with the 8th graders in class.
Thursday I bought this topic up to him and offered to help.

Absent from the Faculty Christmas Party

Friday afternoon and I am blogging instead of going to the faculty Christmas party. I skipped last year, also. The organizers like to have it in a "nice" place in San Pedro which entails a 30 minute to eternity traffic battle into the city and an hour to eternity traffic battle out again. There was a little pressure to attend - which is nice that people want you there and aren't ambivalent to your not going. In the end if you don't want to go to a party, you shouldn't go just to please other people though - unless the other person is your spouse.

The Confusion We Find under Rocks

A few weeks ago the 6th grade was studying earth cycles and I had an activity where they were to calculate how many hours and minutes from sunrise to sunset. What a mess I discovered when I kicked over that rock! Of the 19 kids in the class (after spending a couple of class periods on the activity with clock manipulatives in hand) I have only one person who is competent at it and about 5 who can calculate relatively simple ones (sunrise 6:15 am and sunset 7:30 pm). There are several who can not figure out how many minutes there are between 6:15 am and 7:00 am. I believe some are used to ignoring a concept they find difficult because they know the teacher will move on soon enough. They are happy to daydream the period away and take a bad grade or two. They are about to have a new experience. On Monday the chart will go up  which will show which kids that master the 'new' concepts. Those that don't master (90% on a test) will have these kinds of problems on every test from now on until they show mastery. 
Another rock I kicked over this week is metric conversion, and a rock I kicked over today is estimating mass. The kids were finding the mass of air in a balloon. I passed around a weight that had a mass of 250 grams. We  talked about how it would take 4 of those weights to make 1 kilogram. Then I asked them to predict what would be the mass of the air in a balloon. I had about 4 students guess something in the neighborhood of 5 grams or less, but the rest were well over 3 kilograms.

3 Weeks til Christmas Break & Half Way Through the Madness

First day back from Thanksgiving vacation and I was counting the days until the next vacation on the way to school this morning.
I passed out study guides for bimester exams today (as admin wished). The exams are in 2 weeks. The students looked at the study guides with a funny little expression of 'I know I will lose this before I ever think about looking at it again'. I'll go over it again at the end of next week when some of the students will start getting organized to review for the exam. I should start a scheduled review of some of the material and build on the information they know and what they find difficult based on ideas in my blog "Super Memo and the Question of What to Learn" (Oct. 26), but there is still a good bit to cover that is in the curriculum and on the exam (which has to be turned in this week). There is, also,  pressure to make the exams longer. The goal being to keep the kids occupied for the full 2 hours of the exam. The reality of course is it means there is more to forget and a greater probability they will forget more.
Three weeks til Christmas and half way through my last year of this madness which is considered 'education'.

Roatan & Review & Relaxation

I've just returned from a long Thanksgiving weekend trip to Roatan. A great bonus to overseas teaching is the often close proximity to wonderfully beautiful places to visit. I looked over the notes I made on the whiteboard on Thursday before I left for the flight. Vaguely ideas came floating back through the sparkling blue haze of  a weekend spent snorkelling over reefs, lazing on the beach, and reading while breezes gently rocked my hammock. Now I'm wondering how much review will I need to go through with the kids before my last Thursday plans make any connection to the concepts I'm hoping to build-on. Eighth grade is graphing data from an experiment we did, so I'll need to visually recreate the experiment and the collection of data. The 7th graders are presenting PowerPoints comparing two energy sources. I'll need to review the rubric for the presentation with an example in each category of the rubric. The 6th graders are completing a study guide on the atmosphere. They started posters of a scale drawing of the different layers of the atmosphere last week before the holiday. I can show them their scale drawings, and then we'll do a rousing thank-you to the troposphere. O.K., I'm all set for tomorrow. Now home for a nap and to get my energies back after the strains of vacationing.

The troposphere, chicken lips, & vomit

The 6th grade is studying the atmosphere. Today they started making a scale drawing of the layers of the atmosphere. I put a data table up on the board with the names of the atmospheric layers and how far above the earth each layer extends with a column to calculate how many centimeters they will draw the circle representing each layer if the scale is one kilometer equals one millimeter. We started with the troposphere as an example and they calculated that if the troposphere extended 20 kilometers (rounded to the nearest 10 and discounting that it is thinner at the poles which we have already discussed) above the earth on our scale drawing how far above the circle representing the earth would they draw the edge of the troposphere. Every team struggled to change 20 millimeters into 2 centimeters, but after that one they were quick to get the stratosphere's thickness of 50 kilometer  would be drawn as 5 centimeters. Before they started the drawing I wanted to impress upon them that the scale we were using for the earth was way off. I had them guess the diameter of the earth. The closest to the right answer got a point. The guess of 5 million kilometers won the point. One team asked me if a quadrillion was really a number before they guessed one quadrillion. No team could calculate how many centimeters the earth's real diameter of (rounded) 13,000 kilometers would be on our scale drawing. (I have 13 meter sticks ready to show them tomorrow.)
Before they started the drawing I wanted them to put the data table for the atmospheric layers, distances, and scale in their lab notebook. I had them start a team race to copy the information off the whiteboard. I asked if they would like me to sing them a song while they copied. They said, "yes." I began singing a silly little diddy called, "Chicken Lips". I had just finished the first chorus ( "Oh chicken lips and lizard hips and alligator eyes, monkey legs and buzzard eggs and salamander thighs, rabbit ears and camel rears and tasty toenail pies, stir them all together, it's mama's soup surprise") when one girl hopped up and ran to the sink and heaved her lunch. I've never had that reaction to my singing before. I'm not sure if it was my voice, the lyrics, or the loftiness of our discussion which caused the reaction - or most probably none of the above.

At the end so little really mattered

Before coming to school today to work on bimester exams I watched the movie "Evening". It is a good movie with a great cast. Vanessa Redgrave is dying and lamenting the mistakes in her life. Meryl Streep is an old friend of hers, who passes on the wisdom that when you get to the end  there is not a lot that really mattered. I'm stuffing questions on the exam to create something that will take kids about 2 hours to complete(in accordance with administrative wishes), but I can't say there is much I'm packing on these packets of paper that really matters.
This past week my girls' basketball team won their first game in the national tournament and then lost the next 2 to finish 3rd in our pool. We did not advance to the play-off round. As the players walked away from our last game (with a range of emotions from tears to cheerfully going off to chat with friends) I wondered if there had been anything that really mattered during the team's time together. One girl tried to get away from congratulating the other team's players after our final lost. Did my chat on being a good sport matter after I forced her to shake hands?
This past week I exchanged emails with an old friend and the former director of a school where I worked. He had written an article about the small things teachers and administrators do that end up (unknowingly to us at the time) making a significant impact on the lives of students and employees. He emailed me a copy. I'm trying to put some examples together, so if you happen to have any, add them as a comment to this blog.
This raises the need for a small addition to Meryle Streep's character's wisdom. At the end very little really mattered and often we aren't ever aware of the stuff that did matter.

Einstein, White Holes, & Stopping Time

I had a 7th grade student come in yesterday at recess to talk to me about relativity, black holes, worm holes, and white holes. I'd never heard of white holes before so he explained it a bit and then we googled it. The great ideas and theories (that I can only skim the surface of) he enjoyed spending the recess talking to me about.
Today at lunch we involved another student in his thoughts on traveling at the speed of light, distorting time, passing through worm holes, and coming out white holes in parallel universes. I was really impressed with how enthusiastic the new participant in our discussion was until he explained that he wanted to stop time on Dec. 17th right after Christmas Break started.

Evolving Drama of Middle School Girls' Basketball

The regional tournament is over. We lost our 2nd game in overtime 13-10 and our 3rd game 30-4. My 9 players are now down to 8. One of my attitude problems will be removed from the team today. In last night's game she was talking away after I asked for silence to go over the first quarter strategy with the starting 5. She has had a few warnings about this. I sent her to the bench. As the game began I asked her if she wanted to play. No response. I told her to let me know when she decided she wanted to play. Nothing the entire game. I checked with her twice more. Her teammates were begging her to play. We had 2 players foul out. One player got sent off bleeding, and it took us awhile to stop the bleeding and bandage the scrape. Everyone was playing their socks off. The team we were playing were good and we held them to 13-4 in the first half. They had destroyed the team that beat us 9-5 on Tuesday by a score of 60-0 on Wednesday.
Lots of good news along with the rather disappointing attitude of one of the players. The other attitude problem has come around and is willing to play anywhere I put her. A bit of irony popped up as now that the #1 attitude problem is gone, I need the former attitude problem to play guard like she originally wanted to. The player who has never seen a game of basketball and says she doesn't like sport got fired up in yesterday's game and was a motivated force to be reckoned with.
On the weird side two minutes before the game was to begin I had one player complaining to me that another player wouldn't put her hair in a ponytail like supposedly everyone in the team had agreed to do.
Although we lost all our games we have still qualified for the national tournament. Our first game is next Thursday. The telenovela I've been watching on tv is ending, but the real life drama of middle school baskeball is evolving around me.

Teamwork and Pride in a Good Defense

Last night my basketball team went down in defeat (9-5) to Freedom Academy. This has been my first sojourn into the world of middle school girl sport coaching. I am very proud of our defense.
On my team of 9 players I have 3 who play their hearts out, come to every practice, and will try anything you ask them. There are 4 who like being part of a team, and if there is nothing better to do, they will come to practice where they primarily like to shoot lay-ups, get water, and play full court 'run and gun'. Everything else is tolerated good naturedly. (One of these has told me she doesn't like sport and has never watched a game of basketball. She is on the team because her friends are.) Then there are the 2 who begrudgingly participate in drills while telling me what they want to do. If they are passed the ball in our end of the court they will heave it at the basket regardless of if someone is wide-open under the goal. I find my experience spoiled by the last 2. The thing that really got me last night was overhearing one of the 2 bad-mouthing one of her own players after the game. I had a word with her about being part of a team, but she wanted to argue that she was only saying that the player was missing easy shots. (With only 5 points scored we had a lot of players who missed easy shots. Have I mentioned how proud I was of the defense?)
Primarily I want them to have a fun experience, but I don't feel like I can ignore the negative and self-centered attitudes. They should develop some sense of teamwork and joy in being part of a team. They should be talking up how proud they are of their defense!
Tonight is another game.

What Have You Enjoyed Learning This Week

Saturday and I am about to start to work on the 2nd bimester exam after 2 hours of girls' basketball coaching. I was thinking this morning that there are only about 22 weeks of school left. I'm feeling a little sad about the approaching end. My wife and I were talking this morning about volunteering at a bi-lingual school in Ecuador when this school year and part 1 of retirement (Part 1 = Making Sure the Budget Works) are over
The internet news is full of the Republican victories in the elections and Center for Ed Reform is sending out messages of delight at the election of pro-charter and choice governors. My British wife asked what does it mean that the House is now one party and the Senate another. I answered, "It means that nothing really positive will be accomplished, but each party can now blame the other.Which is pretty much the way it was before"
On the school choice matter - as far as I can tell the choices still remain limited to academically-oriented, standardized-test-measured-for-meeting-standards" based education options. It becomes in many cases a matter of which school has finagled its admissions processes or testing procedures to create the illusion that the students are "achieving". When I say finagled, I also include private schools that have tuitions that ensure a student base from families that are academically and financially successful. As  a teacher myself I certainly don't want to dismiss the value of a good teacher, but there are a lot of us in all kinds of schools. We only have the students for something like 14% of the their waking hours and they retain at best 20% of what we imparted in a school year. That % dimimishes quickly as time passes.
I wonder when true choice will arrive. When I was director of a school in Togo, Africa, we had one day a week where for half the day all the students in grades K-9  were split into teams. The teams then went to different activities together. One time I was walking through the school as one team was making batiks with the art teacher, the French teacher was making crepes, local musicians were working with a team to make a band (drums, bass, guitar, singers), the PE teacher had a team working on a jump rope routine, the computer teacher had a team working on a website, and a teacher was working on drama skills and a play. I know there are magnet schools of choice out there, but when I read about how schools are given "stars" (like in Louisiana) for performance on standardized tests and if they don't measure up they lose their charter, I question the concept of school choice. When I was at the school in Africa, I longed for my own children to be participating in a school like I was running. (I was divorced and their mother had them in school in Florida.) That was always one of my goals when I was the administrator of a school. Make it a school I would want my own children to attend, and one of the most important things I would want for my own children is that they discover a delight in the learning process. Sadly the standardized testing emphasis doesn't measure how much a child has developed an enjoyment of learning.
Someday perhaps we'll evolve to a real situation of choice where a school can say this is our mission, " The child will develop a love of learning." The powers at the Department of Education powers will come to the school not with a box full of tests and answer sheets, but a question or two like the following: What have you enjoyed learning this week and why?  What are you looking forward to learning next week and why?
I am not so naive to believe that we can ignore basic skills, but a child who can write an articulate, thoughtful answer to the above questions possesses basic literacy and reasoning skills that indicate an sound education that was interested in developing a child who would find a productive place in society.

A Sucker for Cafeteria Food

I'm sitting here eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I prepared for my lunch after having already eaten the fish filet lunch complete with potatoes, rice, bread, and veggies prepared by the school cafeteria. Over the years I have found one of my great health challenges has been avoiding school lunches. It has been said that I have an uncanny knack for quickly making friends with the kitchen staff for the ulterior motives of gettting larger portions. What can I say? I'm a friendly person.
I'm going to wander home now, put my feet up, and dream about a nice plate full of Miss Martha's red beans complete with an extra sausage.

I Need My Head & Feet Examined

Back several weeks ago I saw the PE teacher (Profe) coaching both the boys and girls basketball teams, so during a foolish moment at a faculty party I volunteered to help. Last week he took me up on the offer and with the parting words, "We lost all our good players last year," put me in charge of the girls' team.  The boys' seem to have a chance at the national championship.
Yesterday we began working on our offense for the regional tournament that starts next Tuesday. I introduced the 'screen' to the girls. The concept is swishing around in their gray matter for the first time for most of them along with the thought that the coach does not know what he is doing. Their previous offense seems to have been to stand in one place and try to throw the ball over the heads of the opposition to someone (hopefully) on their own team. Half way through a lethargic practice where team members would run over to Profe who would send them back after telling them I was their coach now, I called a team meeting. I explained that Profe had asked me to take on coaching their team, but it would not hurt my feelings in the least if they felt they didn't need me. But if I stayed, practice and the team would be run my way. I sent them off to have a team meeting to decide with another reminder that giving me the axe would not hurt my feeling in the least. Their discussion went on for a little longer than I would have expected, but they came back with the decision that they wanted me as coach.
Last night I woke up at 1 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep until 4 with annoying thoughts of what players would be best where and how to take advantage of what skills the team has and on and on and on. Also I needed to give myself a good foot massage after 2 hours of running up and down a cement basketball court.

Ziplining, Cutting up Bugs, & My Bucket List

This past weekend I ziplined over a waterfall. Since the movie "The Bucket List" I have looked at experiences as either something to be included on my unwritten 'bucket list' or not worth the bother. The ziplining experience was on the edge, but the occasion presented itself and the price was right (300 lempira = about $15). Everything was going fairly well for the first few runs even though I soaked my bottom zipping over a rapid and came up a little short and had to haul myself along the line on one of the runs. I was about to launch myself on the next to last run over a very impressive waterfall when the guide gives me a bit of an "oops" look and tells me to hold on while he reties the harness. Obviously all worked out well as I'm writing this and you are reading it.
My wife was taking someone to the airport today and I took her 3rd grade class while she was gone. The 3rd graders had brought me a giant caterpillar last week which promptly proceeded to spin a bit of a cocoon and go into its pupa stage when I put it in the aquarium. I decided to do a lesson on insects while they were with me. I had a few wasps that had died on the window sill and my compost heap is always full of larvae. I gave each team a wasp and a larvae. They cut the wasp into 3 body parts and separated a wing, leg, and antennae onto a microscope slide and had a look. The teams used the website http://bugguide.net/ to try to identify the insect. They then watched the 'worm' larvae crawl around a bit and tried to guess what it was. At the end as they were leaving one of the 3rd graders looked at me and said, "That was cool!"
That wasn't on my bucket list, but I think I will try to get another, "That was cool!" out of a third grader.

My Hard Earned Gift

Yesterday was parent conference day. The parent of an 8th grader said her child told her that I had a "don" - Spanish for a gift. According to the 8th grader my 'don' is that I don't have to raise my voice to get the class's silent attention. It was very nice for the mom to tell me this and I remain very flattered. If it is a gift, it is not a natural gift. I remember raising my voice often to get attention when I started teaching 5th grade self-contained 35 years ago . Over the intervening years I've used raised voice, clapping, lights off, group chants, various verbal cues, names on the board, ... and have evolved into 3 rules when I need the class's attention for whole group instruction: 1) seated at your place, 2) raise your hand and wait until called on to speak, and 3) pay attention. Anyone breaking a rule loses points for their team until they are incompliance with the rules. I give the following verbal cue very softly, "Instruction Rules, 3-2-1-0" and at 0 I am at my point board ready to take points off anyone not in compliance. The team member who has the job of being 'language and safety monitor' can save the team from losing points if they have a finger to their lips and are gently touching the arm of anyone not in compliance with instruction rules; otherwise, I just start marking off team points until I have silent attention. I am flattered that it is seen as a gift, but it is a gift that took me years to earn.

Calculating Daylight Hours & Be Careful What You Model

Yesterday 6th graders had their double lab period. They were moving through 5 stations. One of the stations was to calculate the length of day when given time of sunrise and sunset. At first there were some language issues. Apparently in Spanish a day (dia) is always 24 hours long. Once we clarified the concept of calculating the hours of daylight I thought we were set. I gave an example. If the sun rises at 6a.m. and sets at 6 p.m., how long was the day? Each team easily got the answer - 12 hours, and away we went rotating through the stations with enough time for about 10 minutes at each station. I'm walking around and checking each group's activity at the first rotation and notice the daylight hour calculating group have 10 hours of daylight when the sun rises at 5 a.m. and sets at 5 p.m. It hits me. They are adding the 2 numbers. I look at the problem sunrises at 4 a.m. and sets at 3 p.m.. Their answer is 7 hours of daylight. I ask them to imagine a clock. (The one in the classroom fell of the wall at the beginning of the year.) I ask them how many hours from 4 a.m. to 12 noon. They can't do it. They are thinking with digital minds and the minute hand sweeping around and moving the hour hand 8 times until it reaches 12 and then 3 more times until 3 p.m. is not making sense. It was the same with every group except for one 6th grader instinctively got it. He is not the brightest and doesn't always pay the best attention, but he is a little older and more mature than the other. Is it a concept that needs a mind that has fully achieved concrete operations?
Anyway, I'm borrowing the manipulative clocks from my wife who teaches 3rd grade and I'll have another go at the concept on Friday.
Today is Parent Conference Day!

SuperMemo & the Question of What to Learn

This weekend I read an article by Gary Wolf in the book The Best American Science Writing 2009. The article was about how we remember things and Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of the computer program SuperMemo. Wolf takes us back to memory research of the late 1800s when clinical psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus drew the first learning curve and discovered the spacing effect. The spacing effect is the theory that key to remembering anything is spacing the repetition and presentation of the material to be learned at just the right time intervals. Over the intervening 130 years many psychologists have done research that support the theory of proper spacing. They discovered the optimal time to repeat material is right before it will be forgotten. For a while this seemed like a relatively useless discovery since identifying just when something is going to be forgotten was close to impossible, but apparently Wozniak’s program (SuperMemo) can do this.


The article discusses in a few paragraphs how clinical psychologists (proud of this discovery of spacing effect) were very disappointed that it was never applied in education. They must have never looked at a textbook series that repeats material every year. But then the material would have already been forgotten by the new school year, so I guess the textbook companies weren’t applying spacing effect properly.

I’m not familiar with the computer program, so I won’t try to explain how it works. The author writes about the regimen and discipline that Wozniak follows in setting goals and prioritizing what he wants to learn, so his computer presents the material to be learned at his optimal learning moment. I’ve spent a bit of time this weekend thinking of what I want to learn and what are the key bits of knowledge that I should impart to my middle school students this year. I fear some to them might need repetition at less than 24 hour intervals. I only see them for 45 minutes 5 days a week, so I might already be fighting a losing battle. Maybe I could talk to some of the other teachers to see if I could pop into their classes just to shout out a few things I want to remind the kids of before they go home or out to P.E. I’m still pondering what those shout-out bits might be.

I haven’t come up with anything about which I’m particularly interested in organizing my own learning. I’m relatively happy with my random approach to what happens to stick in my memory. I did set up 3 lists of ten Spanish verbs to explore my spacing effect. One list I’m going to study every day, one every 2 days, and one every 3 days. Amazingly I remembered 7 out of 10 of my one day list the next day. I think when I began studying the second list, though, it caused me to forget the 1st list. When I started thinking that I was forgetting the 1st list and tried to recall some of it, I feel like I forgot the 2nd list. Tomorrow I start on my 3 day list.

In the words of Edward Spencer (I think that is his name) , “What knowledge is of most worth?”

Possibly not the Spanish verb for mixed-up – triscar?

The Small Things That Make Your Week

The seventh grade was doing a lab on heat conduction today. I had a data table on the board and asked them to come up with the experimental question that would be the basis for creation of a data table like the one on the board. Four out of four teams came up with the spot-on, 100% correct question. They had gone the other way (question to data table) several times before, but never from data table to question.
What a wonderful feeling when something seems to have gotten through!!!
On the other side of the coin the principal informed me yesterday afternoon that he was sorry for the misunderstanding, but the 4 sixth graders whom I had been instructed to tutor every lunch period this week because they failed the bimester exam were not going to have to retake the exam. I felt a little sorry for the 6th graders, so I asked if they could take it anyway if they wanted. I was told they could retake, but it had to be this morning, so report cards could go out today. They all voluntarily came in and took the exam retake. Unfortunately none of them improved their score. To the good, I lost a little weight this week not having a lunch period.

The Rumblings of Richard & SACS Committees

Yesterday (Wednesday) is usually my busy day (6 classes), but yesterday I had the added activity of students doing make-up work at morning recess, 6th graders reviewing for the retake of their bimester exam at lunch, and a faculty meeting after school.
The 6th graders are studying weather. Early in the week we looked at the weather channels radar of the Caribbean and watched the movement of the depression that has now turned into tropical storm Richard. They are writing a position paper on the which was the worst hurricane ever. Although most of them have no direct memory of Mitch, they have heard the stories. We looked at the Weather Channel's website information on where hurricanes start this time of year and almost proudly identified the Western Caribbean (right off the coast of Honduras) as the place where a good number of  hurricanes spring to the wind speeds that entitle them to a proper name. I pointed out that we might be watching the birth of another Mitch as the depression wandered off toward Cuba. Today it has looped around and the western side of the projected path has it coming over us with 90 mph winds on Saturday. Maybe the 6th graders will have Richard to compare with Mitch by next week.
The faculty meeting had a few agenda items, but the major part was the introduction of the SACS committees that we will be placed on in the coming days. Our school is up for 5 year review next year. I worked on a SACS committee at a school in New Orleans a couple years back and then moved on before the review committee showed up. I think the most unpleasant part were the belabored meetings about  getting some answer to a focus question just right for the review committee instead of briefly giving a direct data supported answer to the question.
I'm going to try to relate this SACS committee idea to waiting for a hurricane to either come your way or go to someone else now. I'm not really coming up with much. They are both out there - rumbling around and either going to be a flood of devastation or a light breeze with a shower or 2 - but best to be prepared.
I'm not sure if I like that. I'll read it over and might come back to edit that analogy.

Talking to a Whiteboard

Today we returned to school after a long weekend in celebration of "Dia de la Raza" (Columbus Day). )I celebrated the arrival of Columbus and the subsequent Spanish colonial conquest of the area by visiting nearby Mayan ruins. ) A handful of  7th graders had their PowerPoints on an endangered species to present. Of the 5 presentations today, 4 turned their back to the audience and struggled to read (for what seemed like the first time) the mostly cut and pasted text - often in a dark font on a dark background.
They had a rubric explaining that they were being graded on: eye contact with audience, making a good intro/middle/conclusion to their presentation, having readable font colors, showing enthusiasm and awareness of their audience, ... . I had modelled what I would be looking for. A student did a  practice presentation and the class graded that student on the model. Then performance day comes and it's 45 minute class period of tedium. You would think a 7th grader would not want to seem so unprepared in front of peers, but perhaps it is less ego threatening to not try and fail than the risk of trying and failing. Or perhaps it is as simple as they just didn't care and couldn't be bothered to take the time to read and organize their presentation.

National Academic Achievement, Happiness, & Alcohol Consumption

After my last posting which suggested a relationship between nations that rate high on the Global Peace Index and also rank high on student acheivement on reading, math, and science tests, I had a comment from someone suggesting I check out the National Happiness Index. I did and found that of the top 16 ranked countries for performance on the science part of the national academic tests 8 showed up in the top 16 on the "National Happiness Index".
Iceland was the #1 happiest place. I have a friend staying with us who had been living in Iceland for the past couple of years. He told stories of how the Icelandic people really like to drink, so I checked the ranking of nations based on their per capita consumption of alcohol. Of the top 16 countries on the science test 12 rank in the top 16 for per capita alcohol consumption. The other 4 countries (Canada, Japan, New Zealand, & Sweden) all finished within the top 26 nations ranked on per capita alcohol consumption with 7 liters or more consumed per person per year.
I'm not quite sure what this says about education or academic achievement, but it is certainly something to put in your shot glass and sip on.

1 Bimester Down & Here's to Kinder, Gentler Education

All tests are graded, recorded, and ready to pass back. All that's left is some recuperation (that is what they call it here) of a few students who scored below 70% on the exam. The principal was talking to me about how the recuperation would go. I suggested I pull out some of the questions I considered most valuable in terms of the concept behind them and ones the kids seemed to have more trouble with. I whittled that exam down by two thirds of its content in a matter of minutes. And at a quick glance I don't think there is a lot I  am tossing away that would be of much service to the kids in the future if they had it stored in their cerebral cortex.
I read the following on the Center for Education Reform Newswire today:
"A TROPHY FOR EVERYONE. For every action, a reaction. For every yin, a yang. For every Waiting for Superman, a Race to Nowhere. Are our kids facing too much pressure in schools today? The producers of Race to Nowhere sure think so. Too much competition? Too much achievement-based focus? But what does the rest of the world think? If we were a foreign government, we might push this movie into every theater in the US with the hope that the message would stick and we could keep gobbling up formerly American jobs by the millions. The data certainly doesn't bear out the premise of the "film". If anything, the US is far from putting its best foot forward. The powers behind the documentary are scared, and they should be, but not because our kids risk a life of too much pressure. They should be scared because jobs are hemorrhaging to India and China and we are on the verge of a becoming a second-rate country when our kids can barely beat Latvia in science. In the real world, not everyone gets a trophy."
I haven't seen either movie and generally I am a big supporter of Jeanne Allen and the Center for Education Reform, but I think they have grabbed the wrong end of the bloody job hemorrhaging stick. If we could get some guarantees from several million Americans that they are willing to work for the same pay and conditions that the Indians and Chinese are working for, I think we would see a real turn around in the loss of jobs.
I just looked through several of the world rankings of countries for various things on http://www.photius.com/ (country rankings). I didn't see India or China ahead of us in many academic areas. China does far surpass everyone in GDP (gross domestic product), but they have over 4 times our population. India has about 3 times our population and our GDP is 1.5 times theirs. There was an interesting ranking of counties' Global Peace Index. Countries are ranked based on several (I counted 23) criteria - everything from perceived criminality in society to deaths from conflict outside the country. If you compare the list of the top performing 'academic' countries with the top countries in the Global Peace Index, they are very similar. Maybe there is something to a kinder, gentler education system.

I Am an Exam Grading Machine

I gave 50 exams yesterday and have graded them all and entered the grades in the computer grading system. At no other time do I realize quite what a task oriented person I am  than at exam grading time. I got them all lined up at about 11:30 a.m. with the keys ready and food by my side and away I went - grading all of one page at a time and then turning them all to the next page. There were a couple of interruptions to sort out grades on an inegrated project I'm doing with the social studies teacher, to help the music teacher adjust his computer grading system to include the exam weighting, to help a practicing teacher who is presenting a lesson to my sixth grade tomorrow, and to clean the chocolate brownie I had for dessert off a few exams. At quarter to four they were all done and entered and I was on my way to the golf course. I'm only givign 23 exams today so it should be a piece of cake - and I will be much more careful with my chocolate brownie.
When I was a professor of science education at a university in London I would have a huge student exam to check. The exam was monitored by an outside inspector and the scoring was vital for the level of degree the student received, so they took around 30 minutes each to mark. I would take a stack of about 10 with me on a walk. I would have a route of nice parks I would follow. I'd start at the first park and sit there until I finished 4. Then I would move to another park and do 4 more. Then move to another park for the last 2 and that would be my quota for the day. The system worked very well until I had a rainy day. Then it was the torture of sitting home and trudging through them as the drizzle came down. The students who got marked on a rainy day proably had a lsight disadvantage over those who were marked in the parks.

Yippee It's Friday & a Fiesta at the Boss's Casa

All the kids have just been sent home with their handfull of study guides for bimester tests next week. The principal is hosting a wine and cheese event for staff this afternoon. Only four more PowerPoint projects to grade this weekend before the bimester exam grading starts next week. Yippee! Some time to work on my golf game this weekend.

Honest Reponse & Things Sometime Just Work-Out

I have a student who has an IEP for math. I teach her alone everyday except one day a week we go into her regular pre-Algebra class. She follows along and gives me a signal if there is something she doesn't understand, and I write it down.We talk about it later. Part of her IEP is that she is mainstreamed full-time by the 4th quarter.
The regular math teacher is a new teacher. He allows the kids to shout out answers and questions and an atmosphere somewhere between student control and chaos develops. The new teacher and I usually talk about how my student is doing and if she is following along. I am comfortable with those conversations. Today he asked if I had any suggestions about his teaching. I was the director of elementary science education in a university for 3 years. Each semester I had a load of student teachers to supervise and had no problem giving them feedback to the point of occasionally having to say, "You have got to change this, now!" I was uncomfortable with my colleagues question, though. I asked him a question about what he covered before the test and let his question fade away.
I suppose I will address this with him later. I don't want him worrying that I am thinking he is a bad teacher everytime I am sitting in his room.
Earlier in this blog I wrote an article about adolescent insolence. The student who stimulated that article started being left at school 30-45 minutes early each day. My wife and I are usually the first faculty to arrive. The maintenance folks talked to me about how early this kid was being left and that they couldn't do their jobs and watch him. I spoke with the kid and said I would have to speak with the principal, but if it was o.k. with the principal, he could come and wait in my room until it was time for students to arrive at school. This has turned him around. He is helpful in the morning and much more cooperative in class. His whole class seems to have improved. Sometimes there is great opportunity lurking behind what at first seems an unpleasant responsibility and things will just work-out. Maybe such an opportunity will pop-up with the new math teacher.

Fear of Power

Monday I posted an email from a teacher friend. She was afraid of repercussions, so I took it down.
Yesterday we had a teacher meeting where we were handed an evaluation sheet to fill-out on our principals. Soon I will be asking these folks for a letter of reference. (I'm not sure why as this is my last year teaching, but just nice to have in the career file especially since mine was severely destroyed during Katrina.) Will I be honest? They certainly have their good qualities, but there are some big holes. They hire first year teachers and throw them in a classroom with no support. One (assistant principal) is hardly ever visible (unless you go to her office or the teacher's lounge). When she was in charge of the school last year, because the regular principal was recovering from a gun shot, she was rarely in the school even 15 minutes before school started. When she arrived it seemed she began to think, "What do I need to do today." Communication and planning were terrible. (But that was last year, right?) Neither one leads team meetings or necessarily demonstrates a presence as a strong instructional leader.
The good points are they are generally supportive and responsive and the principal is one of the best I've ever worked for at recognizing and praising teacher efforts.
So to be honest or not? Ummmh?
At the meeting yesterday they had the list of teachers who had had perfect attendance for August and September. This includes being on time. My wife and I were pretty sure we were here on time every day in August, but we weren't on the list. The school has a fingerprint check-in system. We had been told that if we came in on Saturdays we should fingerprint in. It turned out that the secretary had read the machine print-out and registered us as coming in late on a Saturday. We almost lost our $7 bonus for August perfect attendance because we didn't show up to work on time on our day off.
I finished reading Zeitoun last night. It is a story about Katrina and abuse of power. To me it is clear that it is very hard to trust people who have power over you.

Searching for Superman Amid Clanging, Rattling, & Smell of Hot Tar

I had an email on Monday from a friend you teaches in a public school in the USA. It was an intersting account of the struggles she is currently facing which (I'm sure) is typical of what 10s of thousands of teachers are facing across the country. Currently she is teaching in a room while roof repair goes on overhead and hot roofing tar bubbles outside her windows. Her 120 students span a range of abilities and attitudes towards learning and many of the more troubled are often not in school. Her performance will ultimartely be measured by how these kids do on some standardized test.
Today in the middle of a review lesson for the bimester exams that the school requires me to give  the guidance counselor walks in to take out the 3 lowest performing kids in the class for their MAPS test. The assistant principal had asked if this was o.k. at the end of last week and I said, "NO!!! These are the kids who really need this." Anyway away they went. I wished them good luck on their bimester exam and told them I was available recesses and after school to go over what they were going to miss. Maybe I can send them to the guidance counselor to do their required remediation after they fail their first attempt at the bimester exam - but somehow I think she'll be involved with pulling other weak students out of class for more standardized testing.

In 2006 the Center for Education Reform awarded my wife and I an award for our efforts with the school where we were working during and after Hurricane Katrina. Even if they hadn't given us an award and flown us to Washington to receive it I think we would support the organization. I certainly believe in their philosophy of educational choice within the separation of church and state requirements of the Constitution. a good organization and I am on their email list. I've had a few of their emails touting the video "Searching for Superman". I've heard it is a documentary about 5 families searching for the right school for their kids. Without knowing much more about the film than that I wonder how much variance there are in school choices. The school I was at in New Orleans had a language immersion progam and kids went into a classroom where they theoretically heard either French or Spanish all day starting in kindergarten, but we still had to measure our success based on how well the kids did on standardized state achievement tests. There was no credit given to the fact that the kids could have taken the tests in 2 languages.
Hopefully someday there will be a "Superman" who will stand-up and say "Hey. Leave these kids alone! We are not giving any standardized tests. Our measure of success is based on how well the students perform on objectives related to the  mission and goals of our school."

A Mountain of Marking Amid a Sea of Education Experts

Hooray it's Friday!! Seven weeks down and only 29 weeks as a teacher left.
Sixth grade has just packed up and left with the assignment to work on a postion paper due Monday on if they think viruses are alive or not. I am packing up thirty 7th grade lab notebooks with 3 weeks of labs to grade and 23 eighth grade lesson plans on a disease they will be teaching about to check at home this weekend. If I can get in a groove, I'll grade one piece of work every 5-6 minutes. That is about 6 hours of marking to do this weekend. Oh yeah, I still have a bimester exam to make for a student I teach math. Marking is certainly an understood part of being a teacher and I believe it is important to turn work around quickly and let kids see that you took time to check if they followed rubrics and applied themselves to an assignment. But I will definitely be happy when it is all behind me.
When I think about the effort I am about to put into my profession this weekend and the rhetoric that flows from non-educators (politicians and special interests) and semi-educators (bureaucrats and adminisrators) about what makes a good teacher or good education, I become very discouraged. After all this marking, returning it Monday, and reviewing the objectives of the assignments, I know the cognitive connections for many of the middle schoolers about what they have intellectually gained from these academic exercises will be minimal and for some nada. Hard to compete with the world of tv, peers, movies, emailing and texting, personal image and popularity, teen-magazines, Justin Bieber, sport, ...
Those who often speak the loudest and longest and most emphatically about what education needs, I feel, are those most in need of a good dose of weekend marking followed by a week in front of a class trying to get across one significant concept. The 'education nation' needs a vaccine against taking themselves too seriously and a shot to cure testing mania.
Fortunately I have not been given (yet) the bizarre set of self-assessment activities that have fallen on the elementary teachers in the school. My wife (3rd grade teacher) has a booklet with questions on the "atmosphere" in her classroom to answer this week. Apparently there are different areas of self-assessment she will be going through as the year progresses.

The Best Anticipatory Sets Involve the Digestive System

Next week the 8th graders will be teaching their own lesson on a disease. The only thing I've asked them to turn in is a lesson plan (following Hunter's Model for an effective lesson) and a test (unguided practice). The parts they are struggling with most are how to do a good anticipatory set and the idea that they don't have to turn in a PowerPoint. The only things I want are 2 pieces of paper - 1 with the lesson plan and 1 with the test. The rubric has how I'm going to grade the presentation of the lesson. Yesterday I talked about "old school" before computers and projectors and photcopiers and smart boards. I even forgot that when I started there weren't even whiteboards. I remember when I got my first computer in a classroom (Apple II E). We had to put it on the other side of the room from the chalkboard because the chalk dust was bad for it.

Today the Eighth grade did a chicken leg dissection . (The procedure with pictures and questions was easy to find on the internet.) This was my introduction to the muscular and skeletal systems. The students quickly got the idea that they were involved in the anticipatory set of the lesson . After they idenitifed that meat was muscle, I had them chop off some muscle and throw it in a skillet where I had some garlic and bell pepper starting to sizzle. At the end of the class they could have a piece if they wanted. I then asked how many points would I get for my anticipatory set according to the criteria of the rubric. Ten points (the most you can get) is an oral and visual way related to the system of the human body that gets students involved and interested in the lesson plus something that has all the students actively show they are involved.
I got a unanimous 10 from all the students - even if they didn't eat the chicken.

The Guarantees of a Wealth of Professional Development & Testing

Yesterday after school we had a faculty meeting for about an hour to hear about all the "wonderful" professional development opportunities and testing we will have this year.
Back in January and February (I imagine) some admin and Board folks got together and started mucking around with their favorite areas in need of educational improvement and now 7 months later we have this tangle of activities guaranteed to spend the approved budget, crush morale, and waste time.
In January someone with  a vested interest will try to pull some invalid and unreliable result out of the mangle of initiatives and testing to justify the call for more money in a certain area as time to approve the next budget rolls around.

Hurricanes & Lesson Plans

I just finished sending off my lesson plans for next week and posted them on Edline (school internet page where parents and students can see). There is a tropcial storm (Matthew) supposed to strengthen a bit and pass over us Saturday at 8 a.m. I'm having a hard time settling now. Although the winds aren't supposed to be too strong when it passes over the local river is already close to flood stage and the river at the town 20 miles away is already flooding.
The 7th grade language arts/social studies teacher and I are doing an integrated project. Fridays we meet for a period to touch base and plan the next week. I was a bit fidgety during our planning and began telling Katrina stories. I told the evacuation story and then how my wife and I found our pre-Katrina agenda from 2005 a year after Katrina. When we read what we had planned for the weeks following Aug. 29th, 2005, we laughed. All the professional development, curriculum, facilities, fund raising, communication, ... plans and efforts were washed away and never thought about again until we found the agenda in the bottom of a box a year later. It doesn't take a hurricane to send your life in another direction, but for me they'll always be a reminder that today's plans can become less that tomorrow's memories.

Bring the Answers to the Test & Get 80% - not as easy as it sounds

I let the students bring in one page of notes handwritten (front and back) to each test. If they bring the notes the most they can get is 80%. Usually about 3 or 4 students bring the notes. The notes they write from a study guide that is exactly like the test except I will change the order of the questions, so they can't just memorize a list of answers with no relation to the question. They can copy down every question with every right answer and bring it to the test, though.
I just finished grading 2 tests where the students took the time to make a page, front and back, of notes and brought it in to the test. The 7th grader was taking a multiple choice test. The study guide was multiple choice, but I changed the order of the questions from the study guide. The student missed 7 out of 16. The 6 grade test had 20 fill in the blank questions. The 6th grader, with a page of notes front and back with all the answers, missed 16 out of 20.
It is a little mind boggling how that happens.

45 Minutes to Write 2 Sentences

Yesterday the 6th graders were writing the conclusions to the experiment: Does the amount of soil affect the growth of a plant?
I use a 5 part (at least one sentence in each part) conclusion format. This evolved from a much abbreviated form of the parts to a chapter in my dissertation. The parts are: 1. answer the experimental question, 2. state if the data did or did not support the hypothesis, 3. write about the data that supports your answer, 4. write about any confounding variables or ways you could have made the experiment better, and 5. give a new related experimental question.
I have the 6th graders right after lunch, so the 45 minute period is down to 40 minutes by the time they are seated and lab notebooks passed out. I award team points for the first teams seated, so they are getting better and hurrying along the slower members of their teams.
The first thing they had to do is figure out how much each plant grew. They had to subtract the final height from the starting height. This skill created a bit of a math challenge for a few - especially since they had not had negative numbers and some of their data indicated the plants had shrunk. Once all teams had  worked out all the plant heights they struggled to make sense of the data. No team had data that supported the hypothesis that more soil would cause the plants to grow taller. The hypotheses were not that 'sophisticated', though. Most of the hypotheses were 'the amount of soil will affect plant growth'. They eventually worked out that the amount of soil did affect plant growth as an answer to their experimental question. Then they had to pick which sentence fit their hypothesis: 1. The data did support the hypothesis; or, the data did not support the hypothesis. I imagine a few will have written both sentences in their lab notebook.
As they put their final periods on the second sentence the bell rang. Forty-five minutes were up, and only 2 sentences. "The amount of soil does affect the growth of a plant. The data did support the hypothesis."
But - 1 skill (calculating differences in measurements on a data table) and 2 concepts (analyzing data to write an appropraite answer to an experimental question and comparing data with a hypothesis). During a graduate course somewhere in my past I learned that on average a skill takes 45 minutes to teach and a concept 30 minutes.
I think I rushed the 6th graders yesterday, but it was just an introduction. We will have plenty of conclusions to write before the year is out.

Fireflies, Memories, & Contributions

Today I'm back to work with kids after an extra long weekend for Honduran Independence & Honduran Teacher's Day. WooHoo for independence and teachers. I went to the island of Utila for the holiday. Certainly one of the great advantages of working overseas has been the ease to get to nice places on vacations.


Yesterday (Sunday) I went into school to work on bimester exams. As I worked out Erickson questions for the 8th grade I began to wrestle with my own stage of conflict (generativity vs stagnation). I’m looking at 35 years in this business and I’m writing these questions to fill up a 2 hour test. I’ll spend half a week in review. Another week will be spent in giving the different tests. The kids will soon forget the stuff (if they take the time to study in the first place) and off we go again in the cycle for another 9 weeks. Beyond filling a government reqirement there doesn’t seem to be any point. How much of my life has been spent like this? Has there been a real difference in the life of any student or have I been a well paid baby-sitter for 35 years?

I feel the kids should see the questions in some form before the exam, and I think there should be 120 questions – 1 per minute. I’m not sure why I have made these assumptions. They just seem right to me. I’m about 35 questions short in each grade level. I don’t want to throw 35 bits of info at them in the next 2 weeks on top of what I already have planned. Maybe I’ll pick 4 relevant BrainPop movies on topics we have covered this term and let the students know the BrainPop quizzes will be on the test and let them watch them on their own. Anyway, I have 2 weeks to work out the missing 35 questions and the rest of the school year to work out the generativity vs stagnation conflict.

I live on a golf course and as I was walking home tonight from the pitch and putt game I play a few times a week it had turned dark and the fireflies had come out. Their twinkling green lights brought back memories of other firefly moments in the past 35 years. Once on a trip into the Amazon headwaters in Ecuador, the kids in the village where I was staying smeared their faces with firefly fluid and danced around the campfire as I played the harmonica. Another magical twinkling moment was when my wife and I took a trip to Benin our room completely filled with fireflies.

It has been a career that has brought me a lot of great memories. Hopefully it has made a contribution.

Adolescent Insolence

I spent 7th grade today going through the rubrics for 2 upcoming assignments. It was a bit tedious (as I expected) and I'm not sure why I didn't stop. I suppose I trudged my way through for the half dozen kids who want to do well on the assignments, because it was in my plans, and beause we have a long break coming up and I didn't feel there was much point in starting anything new. I have 2 classes of 7th graders. Last year both classes had some students who made the classes a rather difficult mix of immaturity, lack of motivation, and unbridled peer group concerns. This year one class is delightful and the other - well, they are in some cases just a year older.
During the "just a year older" group I called on one student who seemed to not be paying attention to repeat what I said. He is clever and repeated close to word for word what I said. I then said something else and he decided to repeat that also to the delight of some of his classmates. I stood silent for a couple of seconds as the class looked expectantly at me to see what would happen next. I then went on with the lesson as if nothing had happened.
Before writing this I searched for some clue to the causes of adolescent insolence. I didn't spend a whole lot of time in the search, but what was popping-up were entertainment sites which praised actors' abilities to play "adolescent insolence". I thought to myself, 'Yeah, this is a common type in teen movies', but what came first - adolescent insolence or "Rebel Without a Cause"? Of course the insolence came first, but did the movies make it the chosen behavior of a teenage hero? Or is it just a natural response from a certain type of individual trying to save face? I need more research - unless someone has the answers.

Sometimes You Want to Cry

If you read my previous post you're aware that on Wednesday I had a lab where 6th graders looked at protists and yeast cells. On Friday we were checking a study guide with questions about cells. One of the questions was, "About 350 years ago Anton van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to do what?"
We check the questions through a game I call "CHALLENGE !!" A team calls on a member of another team to give their answer to a specific question. If the person gets it right their team gets 2 points. If they miss it the team that called on them can CHALLENGE !! (A proper challenge involves the entire team on the count of 3 firmly and decisively in unison pulling down their right fist and saying CHALLENGE!! ) If a team challenges a wrong answer and gives the right answer they get 2 points for the challenge and 2 for the right answer. Teams that agree with a right answer get 1 point. (Challenging a right answer will lose your team 2 points.)
Anyway, the person called on gave the right answer to the van Leeuwenhoek question - "He was the first peron to see a single celled organism."
I then asked the class how many of them had ever seen a single celled organism. I know we didn't have science on Thursday and from Wednesday to Friday is a long time. And granted on Wednesday 3 of the 5 teams had a hard time finding any protists, but they all saw plenty of yeast cells.
Out of a class of 19 how many hands would you guess went up? .... 2.....
Sometimes it makes you just want to cry.

Best Laid Plans of Humans, Protists, and Viruses

I had a lab today where the 6th graders were looking for protists in this soup of decaying leaves, dirt, and water  that had been "brewing" since Sunday. Each day I added a little flour and pulled out a dropper of the liquid and observed a slide full of swirling little single celled monsters. This morning at 7 I set up a slide and at least 30 unicellular bumper cars careened in front of the lens. I decided to put the beaker outside and let it heat up a bit. At 10:30 I brought the beaker inside and separated the "protists soup" into four beakers for each student team. By 11 a.m. the 6th graders were dropping their own drops of the "soup" onto a slide and NOTHING!! Where had the little monters gone? We struggled to find a few paramecium stragglers and each kid at least said they saw one. I'm not sure anyone believed me when I swore that just 4 hours earlier one drop of the liquid would have had 20-40 protists dashing and darting all over the slide.

Great question today from an 8th grader after I explained why viruses were not considered alive by many scientists. She asked, "So what's their purpose?" I countered, "What's our purpose?" The whole class started thinking. It was close to the end of the class. I started telling them about how some scientists theorize that the evolution of our cell types evolved from an archae cell that was invaded by a virus. The hope or belief of some cosmic purpose to each organism for some reason thrills me.

Facebook Fracas

Today a group of 8th grader girls came to me for a "very secret" conversation. They told me that an 8th grade boy had written on Facebook that he wanted to die. We had been over Erickson's stages last week and discussed the teenage conflict of "Identity vs Role Diffusion". I had talked about how role diffusion in extreme situations had led to teenage suicides. We talked about ways to develop healthy identity and what to do if you were depressed and began to develop suicidal thoughts. The class is very upbeat and there is not really anyone who I would describe as morbid or seemingly suicidal.
I told the concerned girls that I would talk to the boy. After a chat with the guidance counselor about what I would say and what she wanted me to ask, I spoke with the 8th grader.
He was surprised and said he never put anything like that on Facebook and that he hadn't been on FB for several days. I asked if he had had such thoughts. He (with no hesitation) said no.
Now what? I checked with one of the girls and she said she had defintiely seen it.

Nothing New under the Sun

I had a professor in my Masters program who used to like to take every "new buzz word" and trace the origin of the concept behind the "buzz word" back to the ancient Greeks. Recently my son (who is in a graduate program in engineering) sent me an email about some tests he took which required dimensional analysis. He suggested I look into it for some science problems.
I have a good bit more research to do, but it seemed to be the basic strategy was to identify the "unit of measurement" that is relevant for the answer and then use various appropriate thinking skills strategies to get a valid answer in the relevant unit of measurement.
I Googled "Pythagoras and dimensional analysis" and got 54,400 results.
Our school has bought into a literacy program. Over lunch I was discussing with my wife her introduction to the program. (Fortunately as the science teacher I am exempt from the literacy prorgram). She explained a little about it and her concerns about the strategy being developed by a psychologist who doesn't understand whole group classroom dynamics. The program has buzz words like "visualizing" in the strategies.
I just Googled "literacy and ancient Greece". The first thing that popped up was about the high level of literacy in ancient Greece based on "writing". There is a buzz word for you. Have the kids write!!
Of course that is hard tedious work to check the writing, correct it, have them rewrite fixing the corrections, and then you need to check it again. Much more fun to read a story and hold up neatly laminated cards that encourage "visualizing".
Thank goodness I am the science teacher and don't have to deal with literacy. I do have a sink full of test tubes to wash and a mountain of lab notebooks to grade, though.
Happy Friday! Three weeks down and 33 to go!!

Back to School Night - Tonight

We get a good turn-out for this event; although, the 5 pm kick-off time is a bit of a joke.

I have 20 minutes scheduled for each of my 3 grade levels. By the time the parents get in the room and stop chatting with each other I have about 10 minutes. I have an agenda on a PowerPoint: Course of Study, Communication, Rules & Procedures, Grading, Philosophy of Course, & Other. I then let the parents decide how they want to spend the 10 minutes. Last year they mostly wanted "Other" - Where do I come from, and why do the kids call me "Dr. C"?
Today the 8th graders used microscopes to look at 7 mosquitoes that bit me yesterday (and didn't live to lay their eggs) to see if they were the dengue virus carrying species. I've left the microscopes out with the mosquito slides on them. That should cut my presentation down to 5 minutes.

You´d Think I Would Know By Now

Today the 6th graders were going to do a plant experiment - How does the amount of soil affect the growth of a plant?
I had 2 periods for the lab and I started out with them weighing the empty plant pots.
I soon found out none of them had ever used a triple beam balance before. Two periods and a part of their lunch period later the last team finished weighing the mass of the pots with soil.

Not only were they struggling with the mechanics of the balance, but many had trouble adding the amounts from the 3 balancing beams (100 + 40 + 7.5 = ??)

Is it too late for me to get good at skill analysis?

Integrity vs Despair

Today I introduced the 8th grade to Erickson's theory of psychosocial development. After going through the 8 stages we were going to play a "charades" game where 2 people from a team were to try to wordlessly act out the conflict and their team was to try and guess the stage. We ran out of time for charades.

This blog is in some ways my attempt to struggle through resolving  the stage of "generativity vs stagnation" and move me toward finding "integrity"  in my life. I can easily paint the broad brush stroke of a 35 year career teaching children as a life with a giving focus.  In that big picture there are the impressionistic dots of meaningless  tests, forcing kids (who much rather be at recess) to pay attention to some bit of "knowledge" they won't recall after they leave the room, worthless assignments, work for work sake, teaching for the vacations, choices to teach kids of priviledge in private schools, ...
How many dark dots paint a picture of despair? How many bright dots paint integrity?
Today I've had 23 eighth grader dots thoughtfully considering the subconscious factors that might be driving the decisions they make about who they become - and 16 seventh grader dots silently willing me to set them free from a PowerPoint on their Linnaeus classification, so they can go to recess.
Net result - 7 brightly colored integrity dots in the picture of my life? Somehow I don't think it is going to end up working that way.

Blog Day

It seems today is some kind of blog day. That leaves me a bit wordless.

Katrina Remembered - Is It Time to Look for New Opportunities?

Five years ago today my wife and I were in south Florida after driving 15 hours through the night to escape Katrina. We arrived at our vacation cottage and turned on the tv to hear that "New Orleans had dodged the bullet."  We shrugged and went to sleep figuring we would take a 6 hour nap and drive back to New Orleans when we woke up. But when we woke up our world and our attitudes about life began to change forever.
A month later I snuck back into New Orleans to inspect the 2 flooded sites that had been the International School of Louisiana and with a marvelous group of parents and staff prepared to plead with the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to let us reopen. Why the pleading was necessary I will never understand. Such is politics, I suppose.

Today (as we do pretty much every Sunday) my wife and I wrote in our "book" our most memorable sensations of the previous week. Then we made a list of the 5 Katrina caused opportunities that we embraced and found pleasure in.
Here is the list:
1. The best educational experience of our lives being part of ISL as it sprang back to life in trailers alongside a New Orleans' airport runway.
2. Learning to love trailer living.
3. Tearing our flooded house down to the basics and putting it back just how we like it.
4. Acquaintances who became great friends.
5. Evolving an attitude of fragile strength in which tears will quickly and shamelessly flow everytime we hear Bruce Sprinsteen's "My City in Ruins", but knowing we can endure endless Katrinas and continue to look for opportunities in the challenges.

A picture of a bridge over the river in the  Honduran town where we now work was in the San Pedro Sula Sunday paper today. The area is in "Red Alert" for possible flooding. I walked to the bridge in the picture and stood looking at the water rising against the sheet metal barriers protecting the banks. There were about 50 of us discussing if the water was rising or falling and how much rain was expected in the next week. It was a weirdly Katrina-like moment. Like when you would be standing in line at the grocery store after the storm,and you and the person next to you would start telling your evacuation stories as if you had known each other all your lives. Then along came a guy pushing a cart of cotton candy up the bridge - an opportunist in the face of the approaching challenges.

When does the right answer = learning?

We're doing this DNA extraction lab today. I have 2 groups of 7th graders, so I am doing the same lab as yesterday and think I have learned a couple of things about how to make it better. We're extracting DNA from bananas, papaya seeds, liver, and candle wax (hopefuly not finding any DNA in the candle wax). The first step is to blend up the stuff with a healthy pinch of salt added to about 200 mL of  cold water. Then the strained "goop" has some (about 30 mL) of liquid detergent (I tried both liquid dishwashing detergent and liquid laundry detergent and it didn't seem to make a difference) added to it, swirl it around, and let it sit for about 10 minutes.
Yesterday I blended up all the "goop" and the kids added the detergent, but they could not wait the 10 minutes. They were on to the next steps (adding a pinch of meat tenderizer and slowly layering isopropyl alcohol on top) immediately.
Today I thought I had it figured out. I blended up 3 mixtures of goop (banana, papaya, and wax) and in front of the class added the liquid detergent. I then asked them (each team having to come up with the right answer) , "What is the only substance (goop) you are going to add liquid detergent to?" They all answered the liver. I then asked "How long will you wait after you add the detergent to the liver?" They all told me 10 minutes. Then I blended the liver and put them to work sorting their test tubes and going through the steps.
Of the 4 teams of 4 in the class, how many teams would you guess added detergent to all 4 goop mixtures? 2!
How does that happen?

I Made a 7th Grader Cry Today

It has been a couple of days since I blogged as I've tried to get on top of marking the "Greatest Mystery" position papers. I was hoping there would be some great middle school thinking on the mysteries of the brain, universe, life, & consciousness - but (although many were much better written than last year) the thinking was largely adolescent attempts to complete the assignment with minimal effort. Most seemed to have learned how to write to a rubric, though.

7th grade was doing a DNA extraction lab today and one kid kept swinging between 2 lab tables with test tubes rolling around on top of the lab table as he swung. I warned him to stop and that if he broke the test tubes he would be responsible for their replacement. (The careless unenforceable threat as I have no idea where to get these test tubes in Honduras.) About 20 minutes later he is dancing around between the tables and one of their test tubes falls and breaks. It was not clearly his fault - but HE had been warned. I lost it a bit, called him by name, and said, "Stop dancing around like a monkey". I took 20 points of his team. (20 points = 5 minutes during the free recess). The kid begins to cry and starts to work on an assignment due next week. At the end of the class I speak with the team and let them know if they replace the test tube they will get the points back and that I know it wasn't all the fault of the kid who was dancing around. The team accepts the consequences (realizing they will not be able to find the test tube) and everyone leaves a little sadder but (hopefully) wiser. I'm feeling a little guilty about making the kid cry and saying that about "dancing like a monkey".
At the end of lunch period I'm talking with the teacher in the classroom next to me. We are planning an integrated soc. studies/science lesson on an idea I read this summer about all species's survivals now depend not on natural selection, but on man. She is the homeroom teacher for the 'boy who dances like a monkey'. As we're talking the bell rings for the start of class and sure enough the boy who dances like a monkey is wandering around the class, not getting his books ready for his next classes, and ... he is called to the teacher's desk and she asks, "Where were you during lunch recess?" He had arranged to come to discuss an assignment with her and had forgotten. It was all enough to make me cry.

Millipedes and Boa Constrictors

I spent part of the weekend trying to fix the aquarium so my millipedes will stop dying. Internet research reported that they were very easy to take care of, didn't carry any known bateria or viruses that were harmful to man, and unless you ate one or got some of the mild toxin they might emit in a cut or your eye, they would not harm you. Sounded like the perfect science lab pet. I'm beginning to question my research as I am having a heck of a time keeping them alive. Hopefully none of the students catch something from the creatures.

My favorite 'beastie loose in the classroom' story goes back to when I was science specialist at a school in Caracas (1992-96) . The maintenance crew was always bringing me creatures they found - scorpions, tarantulas, snakes, .... Once they brought in this half-meter long snake which I thought was a constrictor except the snake's pupils were slit and the head was slightly triangular. This was pre-Google days, so getting a definite identification on the snake was taking awhile. Maintenance was assuring me it was a constrictor, and the snake was not aggressive.
 I had been working with another teacher on a project where students were designing and building cages for snakes. I put the snake in what I considered the best designed cage. It had a very heavy lid and a series of sliding doors and ramps for putting in food and water and removing soiled matter from the bottom of the cage, so you never had to put your hand in the cage.
When I came in the morning after receiving the snake, it was gone. I didn't calculate the strength of the snake to just lift the lid off the cage. I went and told the principal, and we cancelled science classes while I tore the lab apart. No sign of the snake. I figured it must have escaped under a door onto a balcony and then back to the jungle that came down the side of a mountain behind the school.
About a week later I was setting station activities in the lab. I had an old (even then) Apple II-E computer that had some science games on it. I pulled the cover off the computer and there coiled on the keyboard was the snake. My heart stopped and I did not need an extra cup of coffee that morning. I scooped the snake up in a net I kept handy and set it free on the mountainside behind the school.
I've since read that a pupil with a vertical slit is a sign of a venomous snake, but that snakes have no eyelids, so in order to protect their eyes from bright light, and when they're sleeping, all snakes' pupils contract to slits. Also certain constrictors heads are definitely triangular shaped with a vertically slit eye.

Don't Worry - Only 35 Weeks to Go - Be Happy

It is Friday afternoon at the end of the first week - only 35 weeks to go!

We got an email from our principal yesterday to send in our personal and professional goals. I promptly sent mine back. My personal goal was to: Not have a personal goal, but to be happy and contented with myself. Then it hit me that that was a goal, so DAMN!! I already messed that up, but send button had been hit.

By the end of the day we had another email saying 'put our personal and professional goals on the attached form', so I was able to adjust my personal goal - while remaining happy and contented. The form had columns: goal/s, strategy, resources, assessment strategy, date of completion.
I based new wording for my personal goal on Bobby McFerrin's tune, "Don't Worry, Be Happy". I started to put my strategy would be to imagine administrative bureaucracy and cock-ups were water and I was a duck's back, but opted for something a little less controversial. Resources were listed as an occasional SalvaVida (local Honduran beer).

I have 4 student computers in my classroom. They have a special username for students, but for a week now I have not been able to get the password so students can use them. The tech coordinator (who comes 25 miles from San Pedro) was in my classroom to look at the computers. He then looked at me and said I would need to go to the internet site and fill in a work request for him to give me the password. Time for this duck to take his back home and pull a couple of resources out of the refrigerator.

The Incomprehensibility of How We Comprehend

Yesterday I had a fantastic day. I even got shivers a couple of times when I felt that cosmic connection between a meaningful concept and student understanding. The meaningful concept was related to Einstein's quote, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Students were staring in wonder as they tried to reflect on how the 2 kg mass of water and cells they call a brain could make sense of everything from ideas about the Big Bang to their feelings about Justin Bieber.

Today 8th graders tried to figure out what affects the rate of swing of a pendulum. I gave them 4 variables to test: length of string, mass on end of string, height you drop the mass from, and if you give the mass a push or not. They made a hypothesis and away they went. No help. They had to come up with a data table that would present a valid organization of data from which to draw a conclusion. They struggled, but a few worked it out. .
Next week we look at cognitive development and Piaget. They will use some of Piaget's tasks  (conservation of mass, number, and volume) to test  pre-school kids' levels of cognitive development. I'll relate the pre-schoolers' inability to understand the seemingly obvious and simple conservation tasks (You can find loads of examples on You Tube.) with their struggles to work out how to organize an experiment on what affects the rate of swing of a pendulum, a Piaget test for formal operations. Many will gain a nice understanding that their brain and how they think is changing and that they possibly don't understand everything quite yet.

It all started with the big BANG!

The 7th grade started their position paper on what is the greatest scientific mystery (Big Bang, life, or consciousness) by listening to and reading the lyrics to the song from the tv show The Big Bang Theory. At the beginning of class I told them we were going to learn a song about the Big Bang, and I got a few eye rolls from the kids who are too cool for school, but nothing like a catchy tune to bring an adolescent around.

They had a copy of the lyrics. I crossed out the word "asses" before I photocopied, but it was on the You Tube video much to their giggling delight. After hearing the song the teams were to go through the lyrics and circle words they didn't know the meaning of. Then we played a game where teams took turns calling on a person in another team and asking them if they had a word from the lyrics circled. If the  person called on had the word circled, they got a point for their team. If they didn't have it circled but knew the meaning, they got 2 points for their team. If they didn't have it circled and didn't know the meaning, the team calling on them got the point. I'm always amazed at the words second language speakers of English know ("pangae") and the ones they don't ("dawn"). A few have told me the secret to their science vocabulary is the Discovery Channel. After a few rounds of the game, we went over the vocabulary they didn't know. It was a good time with a nice beat. You gotta love those Bare Naked Ladies.

First Day Down, and about 179 to go

First day of class is done and about 179 left - assuming no coup, flood, swine flu or earthquake days like we have had in the past couple of years. It was my usual first day covering class rules, notebook rules, and team roles. I throw out a few points for attention, neatness, and teamwork to get 'point fever' started.

At the end of last year I had the students write a letter to the incoming class to let them know what to expect. I read a few of them to the classes today. Below is one of my favorite. The student (7th grader now) who wrote it said it was o.k. to put it up.

"I hope you have a good year with Dr.C, but always do your homework. If not you will have to do a 250 word essay. If you study a lot, you will have no problem. An interesting class is the Big Bang Theory and creation of the universe. I recommend you do not make Dr.C mad because he is really mad. I hope you like how Dr.C teaches his science class. He is not as scary as he looks. He is really cool .... well sometimes. The extra recess is very helpful because it makes you want to get more points for your team."

Les Bon Temps Roule!!

We made the 25 mile hot and dusty trek through San Pedro traffic to the whole faculty beginning of school fiesta. It turned out to be a 45 minute wait in a food line to get 5 tacos and an iced tea while Latin HipHop blared at a level which made it necessary to shout at those next to you. WooHoo!
Today I'm putting finishing touches on my Big Bang vs Life vs Consciousness PowerPoint and wondering if I can make it work as my curriculum for the whole year. There is a lot of meat in this PowerPoint taco.
I tried to find a way to upload on the blog, but beyond my technology savvy. If you want a copy, send me an email address. Monday the kids start. Les bon temps roule!

Finally No Butterflies

It's Friday morning and kids come back on Monday. The class is basically ready. I need to put a set of textbooks with each lab table. I'm working on a PowerPoint to go with Tuesday's lesson - 6th and 7th grades are writing a position paper on what is the greatest scientific mystery. They get to choose between the Big Bang, life, and consciousness. (We quickly get into how faith and science do not relate.If you beleive in God, S/He gave you a brain, so use it!) 8th grade is picking a mystery of the brain from 10 that were featured in a recent issue of Discover magazine. At noon we are encouraged to set off on the 25 mile trek into san Pedro for the whole school beginning of year fiesta.
I remember 3 years ago when I was starting here I was apprehensive and nervous about going back into the classroom, and I hadn't ever left classroom teaching. The weekend before school was to start I was 'faffing' around the classroom trying to sort everything just so. Now I know the kids. The 6th graders will be new, but they are rumored to be a nice group. I suppose it has always been management that has been the concern and I have never had much of a management problem. When I worked at a public school in Immokalee, Florida, there would be large classes of low income kids (2 years the class size hit 50 for a couple of weeks before the Board approved splitting the class), but most mainstreamed 5th graders were manageable even if they weren't motivated to participate in academics.
My main strategy is peer pressure. Most of the day the kids spend in teams and earn points for various things they do. The only way they lose points is to break a classroom rule (see Blog #1 for my rules). One member of the team has the role to correct team members breaking rules and can save the team the lost points by self-correcting their team. Points can have many uses. The one I use now is buying a free recess. But I digress ...
Or maybe I don't. I've used this system for years and I don't really have management problems. Occasionally I have a kid who will not respond to peer pressure. I move them out of their team and if they are disruptive for attention I ignore them and take off points from their "individual" team of 1 person. If they don't respond to this, it is time for a parent conference and it escalates from there. Occasionally you find the kid who is disruptive for power. Most of these you can negotiate with and 9 times out of 10 they will be motivated to be the leader of a  team and for their team to have the most points.
If I have had this figured out for a long time now, why have I always felt butterflies before school starts? Is it possibly an unconscious nervousness about the impact I am about to have on these kids and in some way the future of the world?
Occasionally when I read about governments holding schools and teachers accountable for the success of students (usually based on test scores), I reply with the fact that schools have kids on average 17% of their waking time. (You can do the math figuring average child is in school 7 hours a day 180 days a year and sleeps 8 hours a night.) Why are we held responsible when parents and society in general have responsibility for kids 83% of their waking time?  But I definitely digess here ...
Maybe I am more relaxed because as the science teacher I have each student only 45 minutes a day 5 days a week. That is a little less than 2% of their waking time. I can't do too much damage to the world in that time and maybe I'll trigger a spark of inspiration and along the way make learning fun for a little while.