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.