As I mentioned in an earlier post I've been struggling with sequencing and pace pretty much from the beginning. This being an "accelerated" class for 8th graders in some ways complicates things, since I know that my students don't have the background knowledge that would be expected in a 9th grader, but from what I've heard from other high school teachers, large numbers of 9th graders aren't exactly prepared either. So I would likely be running into many of the same issues in another setting.
This past week I tried to cover 6 weeks of grade 8 chemistry in one week. A lot of lectures, discussions, visualizations, but not much in the way of activities. I figure we will continue using the vocabulary in studying cell processes over the next few weeks and indeed throughout the rest of the course, so a crash course was in order. I hope that with repeated exposure to the concepts in the context of cell biology, ecology, and human biology it will begin to make sense at some point.
As an example, we just set up an experiment looking at osmosis in chicken eggs. It's an old activity involving vinegar to dissolve the shell, then soaking in distilled water or corn syrup and observing changes in the mass of the egg as water diffuses into or out of the shell respectively (here's a good write up of the experiment in PDF from Power to Learn - there are lots of versions online so I won't attempt to recreate another one here). This is a rich activity. We discussed what an egg is (review from previous lessons where we talked about sperm & egg - sexual reproduction), special features of the chicken egg, organic compounds found in eggs (proteins, lipids, carbs, nucleic acids). Next we will consider the chemical reactions that dissolved the shell in vinegar and the diffusion of water molecules across the semi-permeable membrane. Along the way we will have to review or learn from scratch simple solution chemistry - solute, solvent, concentration, etc. On top of all that, we will perform the activity as a controlled experiment and discuss variables, controls, construct tables & graphs, analyze data.
A former colleague who is now a principal argues that living environment teachers should try to teach a few topics and teach them well. If students pass the exam with a 65 then that's sufficient. (Addendum: The curriculum is simply too broad to hope that you can meaningfully cover every topic that might appear on the test). I'm OK with the idea of teaching fewer formal topics and teaching them well - in fact, if the units are as rich as the egg unit, then the students may come out understanding significantly more, but the 65 doesn't sit with me. Especially with my 8th graders, where I'm afraid if they don't do better than that the schools may find a way to reject their middle school regents course and require them to take it all over again in high school. I hope I am teaching at least as well as they can expect to be taught in a high school - otherwise what's the point?
I really like teaching this curriculum. I'm enjoying the noticeable maturation of my grade 8 students, all the more obvious since I'm teaching a 7th grade class at the same time and can really see the difference! I don't think I can ever go back to 6th grade and 7th grade is barely tolerable. It remains to be seen whether I move up another grade next year or find a school that can give me a full grade 8 regents program. I almost definitely will not be at my current school. See next post for one example of why.
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