No News is News

As this school year winds down, it becomes more & more difficult to get things together for next year. Report cards demand attention, which means final exams need to be prepared, grades need to be computed. At the same time, students are being treated to numerous end-of-year activities, treats, field trips, and the like. Makes it difficult to maintain any semblance of organized instruction. Perhaps a good time to reflect on what went right or wrong with the current year and use that knowledge to prepare for next year.

A look at my preparations for next year betrays an ambitious attempt to be exceedingly organized. This derives from a realization this year that I never got a grip on the curriculum, never was clear about where I was going or how I was going to get there. Actually, I knew conceptually where I wanted to go, and I was clear in my mind about the content and the links from one content piece to another, but I had only a vague idea about the instructional part of it, how to get the students from where they were to where I wanted them to be. I was also over-optimistic about what the kids would be able to do themselves in terms of keeping a notebook, actively engaging in an activity, and so on. I relearned this year, after 3 years out of the classroom, how much our students demand structured instruction. They need tremendous help getting and keeping themselves organized. In order for me to provide that structure, I need to be doubly organized. Hence the planning and fretting about next year.

The Living Environment curriculum helps. It’s a rigorous program (especially for 8th graders). There’s lots of resources, including required labs, practice exams, review books, etc. There’s a good balance of pure content, broad conceptual understandings, process skills, and lab techniques. There’s a pre-determined final exam that will keep me focused, and it provides a great incentive for the kids – if they pass it they will enter 9th grade with one year of high school science and one of 5 required regents exams under their belts.

For next year I want to know ahead of time exactly what a notebook should look like – how it should be organized, how many sections they need, what to put in each section. That basically means I need a notebook of my own that will mirror theirs. I wish I could create a standardized lab report format for their lab notebooks, but so far I haven’t found any that are general enough for the wide variety of labs that we will do. Not all labs, for instance, are controlled experiments. I’ve seen too many lab report format samples force that structure onto labs that aren’t controlled experiments. A lot of labs involve building models or require simple observation of some phenomenon and inference about what’s going on, with little or no data per se, no real “problem question,” very little in the way of controlled variables. And don’t get me started on the misuses of the term hypothesis. So I may give up on the hope of finding a single lab report format and come up with 2-3 different formats and post them around the room for students to use as appropriate to each particular lab.

I also recently learned that I will have some help in the classroom in the form of a Columbia engineering student. He will work with me to plan some activities, about one every week, most likely involving the use of Vernier Probeware, which the Columbia program will provide. That’s exiting news, I’m just hoping we get some Co2 or Oxygen probes to do some photosynthesis/respiration labs. That would be way cool. I'm so looking forward to next year.