Take Your Kids to Work Day

I'm SOOO far behind. This is from Thursday. Quite a hectic day.

Everyone had a great time - my students loved the distraction, my kids got to be the center of attention for a day, and I get to worry about covering all the final pieces of biology before the exam!

The Story Behind the Photo-op

NYC Parents has a story on the recent photo-op in which the mayor and chancellor Klein lined up a group of "independent supporters" who had signed a letter of support for the mayor's latest wave of "reforms." Several of the news organizations did mention that almost all of those supporters had formal or informal connections, in many cases financial ties, with the school system and were hardly independent, disinterested parties in a position to withhold support of the man who essentially pays the bills.

The NYC Parents piece digs up the e-mail that was sent to these organizations asking for their signatures of support. They also find internal e-mails between some of the organizations discussing the possible consequences of NOT signing - i.e., they felt more than a little pressure to sign, even if they in fact do not support the mayor or at least prefer to remain outside the political ring (who do they think they are, educators?)

I've re-produced the e-mail posted at NYC Parents below:

Dear principals and mentors,

We received this letter on Tuesday asking for [our group] to sign on. So far, we were told by one intermediary (who is NOT signing) that there was an earlier version which explicitly criticized politicians and the teachers union and that after pushback, it was revised to this version.

We are asking for your input….(phone or non-doe email is best)…

What cost and/or benefit to your school (and our network of schools) do you foresee if we do or do NOT sign this letter?

We are also reaching out to other intermediaries to gauge their response.

Thanks.

And then I can't resist this quote from the DOE e-mail:

Our students and their families, indeed all New Yorkers, deserve the kind of schools and the kind of school system that our Mayor and our Chancellor are creating.

Interesting phraseology. They might have said we deserve better schools, or even the best schools in the nation. But no, we deserve the system the mayor is creating. Maybe one day they'll tell us what exactly we did to "deserve" it.

City-wide Science Curriculum

The city has announced its core science curriculum for grades K-8. It's a spiral format with a little bit of every area of science each year. Schools are given the option of a textbook-based approach or a kit-based approach. The vendors have been chosen - for middle school grades, Delta's FOSS, and LabAids' SALI are the kit options while Glenco is the textbook option. There are also other semi-approved programs for which schools can request a waiver (someone should write a book about "waivers" and their role in NYC DOE policies) and it's also possible to use some combination of books and kits.

For accelerated 8th graders taking regents LE, the only option is Holt New York Biology: The Living Environment. I requested an examination copy, didn't get a good read on it at the showcase. It is considerably slimmer than the national version of the book, I suspect they simply chopped out some chapters and I will be EXTREMELY surprised if they actually re-wrote any of the chapters that were left in.

Otherwise high school are left untouched, and will perhaps remain so. The state exams petty much dictate the curriculum, and short of approving textbooks, I can't see the city doing much more in that area.

Pasta DNA - Revised

I dug up the original source of this lab at the Discovery Channel's DiscoverySchool website:

Building a Model DNA

I've incorporated the basic idea into my own lab and I am planning to substitute paper clips for the pipe cleaners - after several years doing it with pipe cleaners I simply cannot bring myself to cut out all those little pieces again and then hear students complaining about how they don't hold together and so on...I'll update if there's a problem with the paper clips.

I've written about this lab before and other than the new lab sheets and paper clips, nothing new to add.

Pasta DNA Lab

UPDATE

I just completed this lab with my students and I need to make some revisions. I will try to get the lab sheets updated this weekend, but just in case I don't, be flexible when doing this lab. It's "mad tedious" after the first part, and I modified it on the fly. I have too much repetitious drawing and I need to add a text piece about how real DNA replicates, so students have a better basis for comparison. I'll also add more specific materials requirements, such as the number of pieces needed, etc. On the plus side, the paper clips worked just fine.

New or Newly (re)Discovered Music

Delgados – Accused of Stealing

These guys have been around for over a decade and I’ve heard of them before, but just now getting around to listening. Some nice stuff.

Arcade Fire – No Cars Go

Bright spot on an otherwise dark, slightly disappointing (how could it not be) second album.

Cloud Cult – Rockwell

When you listen to this song and think of the lead singer-songwriter losing his two-year old son, it’s almost too painful. And it’s not even about that.

Asobi Seksu – Sooner

This group has grown on me a bit. A little too pretty sometimes, just enough bite to save it.

M. Ward – To Go Home

There’s this dude who plays guitar in the 59th street subway station. He seems more to be playing the part of a musician – animated, dramatic strumming, low toned but passionate vocalizations – not sure he’s even singing actual words, but very into it. This song reminds me of him.

Sigmatropic – Haiku Ten

A short little piece (I guess “Haiku” gives that away) with Cat Power on vocals. (“I am raising now a dead butterfly with no make-up”).

Superchunk – Cool

When I heard this last week on a compilation album I thought, “Hey, somebody’s covering that song by…wait a minute, that’s the original.” And so it goes with some old songs I heard back in the early 90s in Chapel Hill that formed a sort of background noise to all the academic stress. My wife was actually in an art class with Laura Ballance (bassist).

Spoon – Decora

From the same compilation (Old Enough 2 Know Better: 15 Years of Merge Records). Spoon covering Yo La Tengo

And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead – Mistakes & Regrets

From 1999. Still catching up. Another selection from the Merge Records compilation mentioned above.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Weeping Song.

Thus completes my Chapel Hill nostalgia. Can’t stomach a lot of the Nick Cave material, but for some reason this song always appealed to me.

DNA Extraction

This is NOT my favorite topic to teach in Living Environment. Its importance cannot be overstated, and yet at the level of my students, 8th, 9th, some 10th graders, it's all still so abstract and hard to get your head around. It's our last major topic before the more straight-forward ecology unit (and revisiting evolution) to round out the year.

I still begin more or less with this "demystification" lab. The only purpose is really to see a big glump of DNA that came from the students themselves, and to understand the concept of a "protocol." I've re-written worksheets to follow my standard lab format and changed a few details around after consulting several other sources of information on the purpose of the various steps of the protocol. I don't do a lot with this lab. Some websites offer suggestions on how to manipulate/test some of the variables in the protocol, but I don't have the time or space for that. I'm not 100% sure of some of the measurements - I always gave rough descriptions in the past, and converted in my head to exact measurements - I'll have to double check them back at school next week and make adjustments if necessary.

After this, it's Pasta DNA models (structure & replication - under construction) followed by some kind of protein synthesis modelling, which I will work on and post as time permits.

Cheek Cell DNA Extraction Lab