Dog Days

After stepping in dog crap yesterday during my evening jog across the George Washington Bridge*, I thought this an apt title for how I'm feeling right now about regents biology in grade 8.

I'm playing content catch-up. Rushing through body systems with the dreaded lecture-textbook-quiz drill that I so despise, but seeing little alternative at this late stage of the game. I will definitely need to work on pace & sequence and all that next year.

If you have to lecture...

I'm using a lot of power-point presentations, which I find infinitely preferable to writing on the chalkboard and having students flip through the book for pictures. For some reason, students seem more engaged - most likely because I don't have to divert my attention from the class while writing on the board, so I can monitor them almost constantly. More importantly, the pictures often precede the text, so I can engage them with the pictures, ask them to make predictions or recall information based on prior knowledge, and introduce the text as we go along - again, without turning my back or giving them the excuse that they are waiting for me to get out of the way so they can write the notes (with all the opportunity there to lose focus). Ms. Frizzle had a post recently defending the use of powerpoint presentations - I didn't know there was even a controversy. I prefer not to lecture, but if one must, then powerpoint is the way to go with this age group.

What about the time it takes to prepare a powerpoint presentation? I cheat. A lot of powerpoints can be found on the web, and I just edit them for my own purposes. For that reason, I won't be posting my presentations, at least for now. But I do use a lot from Mr. Kolakowski's website - he's a regents LE teacher in upstate NY.

On the other side, we are still working on exit projects, for which I give them our Monday double periods. I will post separately on this subject later. I also have to get the remaining required state labs in, but I'm in no rush on that. I will post my thoughts on those labs as we do them.

*I was transitioning from bright sunlight to dark shadows and couldn't see the stuff, even looking back after I realized what that squishy feeling was under my left foot. I'm always hyper-vigilant about dog crap in this stinking neighborhood and it still found my foot. Do I sound a little (pet-) peeved? I am.

NYC DOE - Grow UP!

I just googled "excretory system" at school on the Department of Education server, and got this familiar message:

Access Denied

The requested document, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=excretory system&btnG=Google Search, will not be shown.

Reason: DDR score = 139. This page will not be displayed because it contains prohibited words or it has exceeded its tolerance of questionable words.

I've seen this a lot when trying to navigate to a particular site or page of a site - a lot of legitimate science content is off limits using the DOE filters - , but this is a first. I can't wait to get home and see what google returned about the excretory system that is so offensive they can't even show the search results!

Later that day...

So here are the results of my search:

Excretory System
... Excretory System Functions Invertebrate Excretory Organs Vertebrates ...
The Human Excretory System Kidney Function Hormone Control of Water and ...
www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/ farabee/BIOBK/BioBookEXCRET.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

Pathfinders for Kids: The Excretory System - The Garbage Collector
This pathfinder is a guide to help kids find information about the excretory system.
infozone.imcpl.org/kids_kidny.htm - 11k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretion
... You would probably figure out a system of searching and removing. That would
be an excretory system. Your body does the same thing every day. ...
sln.fi.edu/biosci/systems/excretion.html - 8k - Cached - Similar pages

Human Excretory System
... Its numerous functions make it "part" of the circulatory, digestive, and
excretory systems. ... There you have it, the Human Excretory System. ...
www.borg.com/~lubehawk/hexcrsys.htm - 53k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretory System
... Some diseases and disorders of the excretory system include:. Nephritis is an
inflammation of the glomeruli, due to a number of possible causes, ...
biology.clc.uc.edu/courses/bio105/kidney.htm - 26k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretory System
EXCRETORY SYSTEM. OVERVIEW :. On this page you will learn about the Excretory
System, which removes the unwanted materials from our body. ...
library.thinkquest.org/ 10348/find/content/excretory.html - 6k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretory System
The job of the excretory system is to remove various produced by the body.
The removal is known as excreation. It is important for the body to remove these ...
www.stclement.pvt.k12.il.us/ StudentWeb/science/excretionc/excsyst.htm - 2k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretory System
Chapter 42 - Excretory System. Function of the Excretory System. The excretory
system functions in ridding the body of nitrogenous (nitrogen-containing, ...
faculty.clintoncc.suny.edu/.../files/Bio%20102/ Bio%20102%20lectures/Excretory%20System/excretor.htm - 21k - Cached - Similar pages

Excretory System
... Endocrine System Circulatory System Lymphatic and Immune System Digestive
System Excretory System Muscle and Skeletal System Respiratory and Skin System ...
www.scientia.org/cadonline/Biology/excretory/home.ASP - 3k - Cached - Similar pages

The Excretory System
... Nitrogen Wastes ..The Human Excretory System ..Water and Salt Balance . ...
Excretory System Functions ..Hormone Control of Water and Salt . ...
www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/Sciences/LifeScience/ GeneralBiology/Physiology/ExcretorySystem/mainpage.htm - 5k - Cached - Similar pages

OK? So where are the questionable or objectionable words? The only questionable word I see is the misspelling of excretion - excreation in the 7th entry.

I realize there are ways around the word "excretion" and had no trouble with "kidneys" for example, but really, the DOE security settings are a joke.

And don't even get me started on the restriction on accessing the sports websites or even an article on sports from the NY Times. Some of the girls in my class sit around (before or after school starts) drooling over the Gotti boys and the DOE security system has no problem with that. But let someone try to read a sports page and whoa, hold on there, sorry, DOE don't allow sports over our internet servers!. I can't think of any legitimate use of celebrity gossip crap, but there's no restriction on it. I can think of plenty of uses for sports - statistics, secondary research, social studies connections, etc., but kids can't access any sports info on the DOE servers. Gimme a break.

Exit Projects in Full Swing

The dilemma, of course, is that my primary focus this year is getting my students to pass the regents exam, and as I've stated ad nauseam before, I'm a little nervous about it, having no prior experience in teaching the curriculum and little or no support from the state of New York (as in the New York State Regents Living Environment Exam).(1) On the other hand, grade 8 students are supposed to also complete an 'exit project" which I have likewise discussed in earlier posts. To guide students properly through a year-long exit project is just a bit more than I can handle, so we are doing pared down projects that are really just getting started and are due on May 6th, at least as far as the students are concerned. In reality, I want all their research and data collection completed by May 6th, and if we take a little longer to get everything written up properly and presented, then maybe closer to May 20th for the final due date.

Most students are doing fairly simple projects - a good number of the old stand-by germination experiments, plant growth experiments, etc. Some students are taking my advice and reworking some of the experiments we already did in class (gelatin-detergent lab, e.g.), others are sticking with their secondary research projects on genetic diseases. What I expect from my regents classes is a solid experimental design, an extensive set of data, and a thorough understanding of the biology concepts to explain the data. I am giving them Mondays during class to work on projects as we continue with some pretty old-school lessons on human biology the rest of the week. Any other time they need will have to be after school. I will be collecting their experimental design diagrams later this week and post some specific examples, discussing how my expectations are different from what I've seen in similar other projects. Such as:

One group is investigating how salt affects plant growth. A pretty standard middle school science fair project, not very imaginative, not that exciting. Mostly this is done with a control group, a group that gets maybe a 5% salt solution, and a third group that gets a 10% salt solution, e.g. The 10% usually dies or doesn't grow at all, the 5% maybe lives but looks pretty sickly, and the control group does just fine. End of experiment. At this level, however, that would be a starting point. Now the challenge will be to go back and re-do the experiment with concentrations of salt between 0 - 5%, challenge them to find ANY concentration of salt that does not negatively affect plant growth. There are of course other directions the investigation could lead, such as looking for plants that are more resistant to salt, for example, but under the circumstances we will stay with the salt concentrations. Students will then have to discuss the physiological effect of salt on the plants. Why does salt harm the plants, maybe describe the role of salt in our own bodies, etc. You get the idea.

(1)References to curriculum matters here and here.

UPDATE

I neglected to mention that a sizeable chunk of the regents exams is related to understanding experimental design and the scientific process, so I realize that having students work on these projects is not taking away time that we need to prepare for the exam, it IS preparing for an important part of the exam. I am still struggling on the whole with how to integrate content & process over the long haul - I can do it in short bursts of activity, but putting it all together for a coherent year-long sequence of instruction is not easy.

Dissection

Sheep Hearts. Our first real dissection of the year. We have boxes of these things in the supply room, left over from the Insights Human Body Systems kits that are supposed to be used in grade 6. For whatever reason, the sheep hearts lie there unused, many teachers will either do a dissection as a demo, or avoid it alltogether, so we have a surplus.

I didn't take any pictures but there are a few on the internet that I will link here in case you wind up here:

Sheep Heart - Labeled

I used a simple checklist for students to document their work and they had to sketch their observations as well. I got the worksheet off the web, but I've lost the link - I'll search for it later and post as an update.

The kids love this stuff, for the most part, but I wish the dissections could be richer. I would like for them to be able to measure something, make comparisons, but I could neither find nor think of any angle.

Update

I accidentally hit the publish button before I was finished, it being now a Saturday night and I'm composing this post during time-outs in the Final Four games.

I'm thinking of some possible measurements for the frog dissections that we wll do in a couple of weeks. I'll post more as I work out the details.