Time Management

I complained recently (me? complain?) about the amount of non-instructional time science teachers spend on both the regular teaching duties that all teachers struggle with (such as planning lessons and grading papers) plus all the extra work associated with getting materials together for labs. Keep in mind that most of these labs involve consumable materials that have to be re-organized and replenished after each section goes through the lab plus there's always some clean-up, even if you successfully complete the lab in time for students to participate in the cleaning.

The first marking period ended last Wednesday - I am totally unaccustomed to the 5 week marking period. So of course I had a ton of projects and lab reports due on or before Wednesday not to mention a last minute quiz, so I've spent now the last part of the school week working those 12-14 hour days trying to catch up with all the paper and all day today getting grades entered into those awful new report card scan sheets with over 500 bubbles to fill in for my 110 students, not to mention agonizing over the standardized comments (2 per student) that have to be entered along with the actual grades. At least now I have the computer do all the grade calculations - I can't imagine how I did it all with paper & calculator just a of couple years ago.

It's also Sunday night and next week is the real start of the new marking period and I would like to be ahead of the game, but I'm just a little too burned out right now to think more than a day ahead. I have a lab period first thing Monday mornings, and I think I may have to start making Saturday mornings at the school a regular part of my routine just to get the labs ready for the following week. This Saturday (yesterday) was my twins' birthday party, so I was pretty occupied all day. Otherwise I would probably have been at the school yesterday.

I'm looking at ways of streamlining some of the paperwork - including assigning less of it, having homework monitors at each station just check to see if the work is done or not for the minor stuff, and getting some peer assessment going - not sure yet how I will do it, but when we get more into the meaty content and regents practice questions it should be a lot simpler. I do know that when faced with mountains of work to correct, I start looking for quick, easily recognizable criteria for grading.

For example, I had students write reports about scientists and asked them to write in their introductions about their motivation for choosing the scientist and in conclusion to write about the qualities that made the scientists successful (usually hard work, determination, imagination, etc.) and whether those qualities might also be important for the student's own personal goals in life. In between they were to discuss the biographical information and a summary of the scientific work. Most of the student's papers were plagiarized in the middle sections (copy & paste with various degrees of editing from one or more sources), so I found myself focusing on the intro and conclusion. Their grades depended on the extent to which they made those personal connections. I might be more explicit about those things in the future, or better yet, warn them that I will focus only a particular point as a sort of "spot check" without telling them ahead of time which particular point I will "spot check." Yeah, I like that idea. Here's a perfect example of why I blog - I get to think through what I've done and sometimes ideas just crystallize.

I've got a few ideas kicking around, but not much time to flesh them out or write about them now. I discovered a nice 3-tier "GroLab" that was about to be given away and quickly claimed it for the biology department (me). So I'll be looking for some ways of using it, maybe with some Wisconsin Fast Plants if I can get any. I have a small allowance to spend on biology materials, but it won't go very far.

A New Living Environment Blog

Check out Living Environment Blog by Chris. It's new, looks promising, and obviously a welcome edition to the biology teacher blog world.

Working on a Response

I've been trying to draft a coherent response to the teachers' contract now under consideration in NYC, and I just can't get all my thoughts untangled and presentable in blog format. So I'll give the readers' digest version and maybe post the unabridged account later. Frankly, I haven't the time to polish it up, and lack of time is one of my major points!

Anyway, I'm leaning strongly against the contract. I've been complaining almost since I began my career that teaching conditions in NYC need to IMPROVE, and if that means compromising on salary increases, then so be it. I would rather have the 11% salary increase with improved working conditions. Why wasn't that feasible instead of 15% plus deteriorating working conditions that we are faced with now? Yes, 15% sounds great, but hey, 11% sounds pretty good too, over a shorter period of time with the likelihood of making up most or all of the remaining % points in the next contract. Improve working conditions by lowering class size and incorporating more time in the school day for planning, marking papers, and individualized/small group instruction, interacting with parents. I don't expect these things to happen overnight, but I've been teaching 13 years and there's been not one single improvement or even a plan for improving the class size problem. Can't anyone even outline a 10 year plan to get class sizes down to 22 or so? That gives you 2 years to start building schools and 8 years to reduce, one student per year, down to 22. That reduces by almost a third the number of student papers I have to grade, and increases the amount of time I can spend actually reading and responding to each child's work. It also means my science lab will actually conform to the safety recommendations of the NSTA and other science organizations - yes, the currently allowed 30 students in a science lab is an unsafe situation for the students.

So instead, I am now faced with teaching not fewer students but more students. In the short run, the union position may be honored and I will only get students I already teach in a more or less tutorial capacity, but I agree with union critics that the writing is on the wall and we are headed toward a 30 period per week teaching load in the near future. I'm sorry, but I just don't have any more time to give. If the contract passes I will do what I have to do, but I can only see my family life suffering even more than it already is. I guess at least I will have more money to buy stuff for my kids in place of spending time with them - one day they will understand, right?

My Classroom

I just love the look of these gas valves. Hopefully we will get the bunsen burners to go with them some day.

Terrible fluorescent light color in this picture that I can't correct because of problems with my computer that I won't bore you with. It's a decent angle, however, from which to view the room. Facing front, we have one of those cool whiteboards with sliding panels, so I can hide things, or save things since I share the room with one other teacher. To the right I have a smartboard, and if you look closely you can see the projector - unfortunately it is placed on one of those long student rows, and that's a little cumbersome, but I'm not complaining! Hey, I've got 11 freaking sinks in the room. The only legitimate complaint I have is the size of the room - there's little or no room to move around, so students will be pretty stationary and I have trouble circulating during group work. Also not much room for all the fun biology stuff like places to grow plants, a place for the aquarium, etc - very tight space. I'm going to have to look for some wall shelves or something, there's practically no floor space for tables or cabinets other than what's there already, which isn't enough. But I'm not complaining!

Living, Non-Living, and Everything Else

Another busy week, and still not caught up. Decided not to go in this Saturday, but next weekend (sandwiched as it is between two holiday-filled weeks) my science department is coming in to get the supply room in order after the chaos left in the wake of summer renovations to the 3 adjoining science classroom-labs.

I put together a "lab" on living vs non-living things. I still don't like the way this subject is treated in texts and I still haven't got a good lab to go with it - and yet I think what could be more fundamental to a biology class than understanding what a living thing is? I think I know why I'm having trouble. My pie in the sky curriculum would incorporate this question into a culminating activity, rather than an opening activity - yes, begin with the question "what is "life," but let the students develop the idea over the course of a year's study rather than cramming the "characteristics of life" down their throats (OK, drumming it into their heads? Pick your cliche) as a content objective to be more or less memorized at the beginning of the year.

So I've spent several days in class on the activity and devoted ridiculous amounts of time to thinking about and planning it, only to realize that it just doesn't fit in or work as a one-shot lesson or activity. It's not too late to salvage some things from it, but I need to think more long-term about how to keep the question alive, no pun intended, throughout the year.

I have this tendency also to overcomplexificate. I have too many things going on in the activity and that, in part, leads to a lack of a clear message to the students. So let me summarize the lab. It's a pretty standard sorting of things into categories. Some are living, some non-living, and some - heck, I'm not even sure how to classify within that dichotomy. In my mind I had created a different set of categories that includes living/non-living, but adds a group of "dead" things such as beef jerky and a dried bay leaf, and a group of things "derived from living things" like milk, gummi bears, and apple juice*. At the time I thought it would be a great idea to incorporate some dichotomous sorting strategy into the lab. I also thought it should be an open-ended task. Big mistakes for a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of the sorting criteria used by the students generated ridiculous amounts of discussion - I know, that sounds like a good thing, but remember the objective here is to introduce the idea that living things share certain characteristics yadayadayada. So now I've opened up whole other areas of debate including natural vs. unnatural, edible and non-edible, etc. Great topics for discussion and ultimately relevant, but a distraction from the objectives of the lab/unit at hand. I guess that underscores why we prefer to use observable features as sorting criteria.

Secondly, students don't have enough information in front of them to really get into the content I want them to get nor do they have the prior knowledge to focus in on it. There's no way they are going to infer or observe most of the characteristics of living things going on in front of them, especially not in a single lab period or two. Or to know that gummi bears are made of gelatinous proteins and sugar, neither of which is "alive" but both of which are derived from living things. How would they know or observe that? Again, this is an argument for thinking of this question as a long-term inquiry investigation that should be infused into the course and revisited at appropriate times.

At the suggestion of my science coach, I did include a section of the lab worksheet for students to write down any of these questions that came up. I will pick the more interesting ones to put up (A "Wonder Wall") around the room and return to them at appropriate times during the year. I had done this kind of thing in the past, but for some reason I stopped doing it in the last few years. It's a good habit to get back into.

*Items for sorting included a mealworm (live), a sprig of mint (alive I think), acorns (freshly harvested from the park), a glass marble, a rock, a paper clip, coffee beans (roasted), and the above mentioned beef jerky, dried bay leaf, powdered milk, and apple juice. I would post the lab sheets, but they were frankly a disaster in practice. I will simplify in the future and ask students to categorize each item as living or non-living. This would lead to some speculation about what criteria must be met to qualify as "living." It might also lead to an idea that paper clips and beef jerky just don't belong together. There's something fundamentally different about them. Using foods as the "dead" materials was probably a mistake as well. I should have included wood, perhaps, or a preserved specimen. Again, I would leave it at the question stage here, and revisit the materials as the year goes by and ask students to refine their categories.

Annenberg/CPB - Learner.org

I just re-discovered this resource for teachers while looking for an activity on living vs non-living things (I still haven't found one so I will probably have to make one up).

The Annenberg site contains a library of "on demand" streaming videos. Some of them are appropriate for student viewing (either in class or as homework assignments) while others are more strictly professional development videos. I'm currently watching a video on a teacher doing an inquiry (High School level) investigation of crickets. It's given me some ideas on improving my mealworm investigations, which I will post a little later.

Definitely a website worth exploring when you've got an hour or so to just sit and watch someone else teaching.

Annenberg/CPB - Learner.org Home Page

Science Page

Teaching High School Science Page (Includes Cricket Investigation)

Quick Run-down of the Week

I still like the black box activity to generate lots of discussion about the nature of science and how we know what we know. Today we also brought up some ethical issues relating to scientific honesty - someone couldn't help him/herself and cracked open a corner of a box to peek inside. In the course of our discussion a student mentioned the just discovered Kuiper Belt object, EL61, and the accusations of scientific dishonesty around it. I hadn't read the Times article yet, so I looked into it after school today. It's an interesting story and the website I linked above is quite readable and discusses a number of interesting points. See also the same group at Caltech who discovered the "10th Planet." They discuss the definition (or lack thereof) of a "planet," for example, and the issue of following standard scientific protocol in terms of sharing information and so on. It is from the point of view of the scientists who feel they have been wronged, so keep that in mind. Read it!

I know it's still honeymoon time, but I'm in love with my new school. It's a totally professional environment among the staff, the admin is supportive and positive, the students are lively but mostly hard working, even when they have self-control issues and difficulty curbing their enthusiasm. It's a small school - I have 4 science department colleagues and we are all specialized, for the most part, although each of us has at least one class outside our main area of expertise - I have Health (which obviously overlaps a lot with biology, but it's a little different), the Chem teacher has a 7th grade Physical Science class, and the Earth Science teacher has a 6th grade Life Science. The Physics guy has a Math program. All the middle school kids (one class per grade) have science at the same time, which is probably why I didn't get the 6th grade class, since the 8th graders are taking my regents class.

I could say so much more about the school and what is right about it, but I don't want to raise anyone's hackles. I also don't want to jinx anything. I will, however, post some pictures of my classroom as soon as I get a few moments.

Swamped

Transitioning to my new school has been unexpectedly time consuming. I'm thrilled about the school and will write more about it soon, but I'm still settling in, getting used to the new location, a new culture, and even a new curriculum - I've got a section of Health to teach now. Fun, but extra work. My classroom was still under construction the first two teacher days back, so what already ridiculously little time the DOE made available for teachers to set up was even shorter for most of the science teachers in my building (they are still putting on the finishing touches after school). On top of that, all my materials are still sitting in boxes at home. We weren't able to get a permit to come in last Saturday, so it'll have to wait till this weekend. I could bring things in during the week but I don't have a DOE parking permit yet. I expect another week of 10-12 hour days and 7 days a week working until I get my head above water here.

Blogging

With the beginning of the new year upon us, I thought I would post a little discussion of my rationale and approach in starting and maintaining this blog.

First, a little history.

A few years ago, around the time my twins were born, I rediscovered an old photography hobby. I was never particularly talented at the art, and never devoted the time necessary to improve beyond pretty amateurish efforts, but I always enjoyed it. In looking for advice on buying a new camera (so much had changed since I gave up the hobby in the early 80's I didn't even know where to start), I stumbled upon photo.net. It was my first exposure to "online communities" and featured a number of services to keep people with a common interest connected. I particularly liked the bulletin board interface that included e-mail notification and thought it would be a great model for getting science teachers together to share information. In my brief stint as staff developer in my district, I spent a lot of time trying to create something similar, which is still up and running but at this point almost completely dormant as other services with larger pools of potential users have proliferated (NSTA listservs, e.g.). The forum never really took off. It was useful mainly as a mailing list, since I could post information on the forum and the message went out as an e-mail to about 100 teachers in the district who "signed up" for the forum (I collected e-mails at every PD activity and let them know they would be added to the list).

I still think the majority of classroom teachers of science are behind the times in terms of taking advantage of all the web tools out there and continue to think of the internet solely as a place to look up information rather than a place to form a community. How many teachers have websites to support their instruction? How many regularly read science-related blogs? How many know how to take advantage of subscription services like Bloglines (it's free dammit!)? How many are signed up for NSTA's listservs? What about Podcasts? Google Alerts? And those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure others out there can point to plenty of useful services that I don't even know about. So one goal of this blog is to spread the word.

I decided from the beginning to specialize. I pretty much limit my posts to discussing the teaching of high school biology. I generally avoid topical political events and school issues unless they are directly relevant - I have complained a few times about the facilities and policies that I think are detrimental to teaching science. I have not written much about biology in the news, but that will be something I work on this year.

I write first and foremost as a means of reflection on what I am doing in the classroom. This helps me to analyze my practices and, I hope, improve upon them. I try not to sugarcoat and I am pretty self-critical, which may or may not be a good idea in a public forum. I think, however, that an honest, critical assessment is important both for my own needs and to let any other teachers who might stumble upon this blog know that we aren't all super teachers who know exactly how do handle every lesson and students always come away both enjoying the activity and learning what we wanted them to learn. Teaching and learning are both iterative processes, to throw a little jargon around, and I've always been a little skeptical (or is it resentful?) of published educational materials that make it seem like a straight-forward linear process: Plan - implement - assess - success! It just isn't that easy.

Lastly, most of my posts will be rather short. I find writing a rather laborious task, which should be pretty evident to the average reader. I obviously will also not be the most prolific writer around - for that you will have to check out PZ Myers at Pharyngula - the man must never sleep or there are two of him. If I post once or twice a week I'm doing pretty well. Because of this, I may be asking other science teachers to contribute here. Annie Chien has already contributed and if I find any interest, I will re-configure the blog to make it a group project - much as Sean Carroll did with Preposterous Universe which morphed into Cosmic Variance.

UFT Launches Blog

I am always a little slow about posting this kind of "news" information on my blog. Edwize is the UFT sponsored blog that's been a round for a couple of weeks now and looks pretty promising as a way for the UFT to get ideas out there and to get feedback from members and the general public about those ideas. They do allow comments, but I'm not sure to what extent they are moderated. They do not appear to be deleting comments they don't like.

The official announcement of the blog is coming out next week, but it is up and running. Check it out and make your opinions known!

First Day Dilemmas

I have these conflicting impulses for how to handle the first day.

On the one hand, I would like to jump right in and start teaching, to show that my classroom is about the business of learning. Start right away with classroom academic routines, set the tone, demonstrate high expectations, learn something concrete and significant immediately, don't smile until Christmas, and all that.

On the other hand I am inclined spend a little time getting to know my students, introducing myself, letting them introduce themselves, setting the tone that my classroom will be a nurturing, caring place, minimizing anxiety so that students feel comfortable sharing and helping one another.

If either approach were equally effective, I would probably go with the first option. I'll get to know my students over time, and I always hated those overt attempts to produce a positive affective environment in classes I take or in places where I work - you know, the icebreakers, the sketches, the company picnics or office parties, etc. And yes, I have had to participate in all of those activities in different organizations I have worked for.

I hate them, but they can be effective when the goal is to have people interacting with one another and working in teams. And therein lies the dilemma. My teaching style is generally geared toward group work and students working together. As such, it is imperative that they feel comfortable talking to one another. This doesn't happen by simply putting people in a group and telling them to get to work. The ice has to be broken and a non-threatening conversation about any sort of silliness is a good way to warm things up.

So my first day will include the usual introduction to the course followed by some silliness. We will do a little icebreaker activity with "Getting to Know You" playing as background music. I have recorded 15 minutes worth of music from 4 different versions - Deborah Kerr/Marni Nixon from the original MP Soundtrack, Bing Crosby, a piano instrumental version (Fred Hersch), and finally Della Reece. I'm hoping the tongue-in-cheek corniness of it all will be appreciated.

Of course I still need to establish some routines and set the academic tone, but I think I can do it through this little activity by treating it as a serious pedagogical tool - setting it up, establishing a rationale for it, monitoring everyone's participation, and holding everyone individually accountable for it.

UPDATE

After reading Annie's comments below I realized I had forgotten to give proper credit to the source of this activity. The basic idea came from Fred Jones in an article in Education World. It's also a nice discussion of the importance of icebreakers. Scroll down the article and there are several other examples discussed. This one is called Scavenger Hunt. I stole the basic idea but I made up the questions and came up with the background music.

Still Hate E-Chalk

If you aren't familiar with it, E-Chalk is a packaged website for educational institutions. It's terribly unfriendly for teachers who are new to web publishing. There's no preview option for many of the functions, no captions for uploaded images, no idea where files go when they are uploaded, or how to edit them once they are uploaded, and it's difficult to visualize what it will look like before hitting the "Add" button. It is both rigid and cumbersome. I've been trying to set up class pages at my new school, and I may give up and simply post a link to my other website. There's no place for a permanent header or introduction, the layout is blocky. It tries to get way too much information on a single page, and I have no idea what happens when I keep adding material - will it create one long unwieldy page, or start chopping material into separate pages, and then how do I determine what gets on the main page?

There will probably be some training at some point on using E-Chalk, but I don't know if it will be worth the effort.

UPDATE (9/1/05)

OK, I'm getting a little more familiar with the user interface and I'm not in love, but it does offer some advantages. For instance, since I have 3 sections I can upload materials to all 3 sections with one stroke as needed or I can customize each section, Since they each have different lab days and of course the class that has labs on Mondays will inevitably fall behind due to holidays and the like, I will need to post individualized calendars for each class. Once It's up and running properly I'll post a link if I can - I'm a little worried about copyright issues with some of the materials I may want to post, so I may have to limit access to my students. More about that anon.

Preparations

I've usually done a lot more work at this point in time to prepare for the beginning of school. But then again, I don't usually have the luxury of teaching the same topic a second time, so I don't need to work as much to get prepared. Nonetheless, I would like to spend the remainder of this week immersed in praparations.

I have decided to follow, roughly, the NYC draft scope and sequence as described here. I find lots of fault with it, but then again I find lots of fault with my own sequence from last year. And I find plenty wrong with the textbook my school uses, the Prentice Hall Biology: NY State Edition. (I already complained about this "NY State Edition" marketing BS here). There is, of course, no perfect way to sequence a biology course. My preference is to start with big ideas or concrete phenomena, then work down to the abstract or microscopic level, but that is often a tme-consuming approach and I've yet to find a textbook written in this manner.

The Prentice Hall, for example starts as many texts do with the abstract scientific method, as if it were some piece of information to be learned, when in fact it is really more of a skill and way of thinking that has to be practiced. Then they move into the atomic/molecular level. Next a jump to Ecology, then back to an extended period of study of the microscopic & abstract world of Cells and then Genetics, followed by a unit on Evolution. I don't quite get the logic. The NYC draft doesn't improve much on that by throwing Human Biology and Reproduction in between Cell Bio and Genetics. But until I can write or patch together my own textbook, I'll have to just fit in with the existing paradigms.

So, here's a link to my rough outline, skeletal and subject to modification.

Slowly Returning

It's been a busy summer so far and I have spent barely a moment yet thinking about next year. I taught a course at City College for the month of July using GLOBE's hydrology protocols to do a little study of the Hudson River. It turned out nicely for the most part, my first experience teaching an entire course to adults, fellow teachers at that. I've done plenty of workshops over the years at various professional development venues, but this was quite an intense amount of work given the compressed summer school format. Luckily I had a very nice, bright, enthusiastic, hard-working, and forgiving group of teachers to work with.

I've also been dealing with some identity theft type of activity. At this point I don't know the extent of the problem, and I'm reluctant to say more about it for now. I have filed a police report and done all the necessary notifications and I hope the scoundrel gets caught. A warning for teachers, though, to be extra careful around school (with all the time sheets you have to fill out for extra work you do) with both your address/contact information and your SSN. I don't actually think my problem is related to school, but the experience has made me think hard about how easy it would be...

Lastly, with my transitioning to a new school in September I'm looking at about 45 minutes of commuting (door-to-door) each way and I decided I don't want to waste that time just staring at the advertisements on the subway car and day-dreaming. So I bought an mp3 player. And just to show what a geek I am, at this point it's loaded entirely with Science Friday podcasts. I might eventually add some music, but I would rarely listen to it except perhaps while running on the treadmill.

I expect to be doing a lot of planning over the next couple of weeks and will post my progress as it goes.

I need to say something!

As guest blogger, I need to say my thing in regards to the LE regents.

After teaching it for the past 6 years, The recent decision to give back waivers to the Regents exam to the consortium schools puts SOF off the Regents requirement list.

Sure I'm relieved. I get to do my own things. That idea I had about using classroom portfolios awhile back, now I can actually research and implement it. That idea I have about expanding biology as a full two year course, now I can plan! And that idea about start a biotechnology course, gee that might actually happen!

I think a lot of the success I had with my students and the regents was the fact that I was teaching test taking strategies when it comes to the regents. It as drill and kill, I was teaching them to pass. I got frustrated when I had to tell those students who flunked my course and goofed around all year that "yes, you pass the regents". My scores range between 65's to mid 90's, of course I was dealing with a much larger group - 100 tenth graders who spend 2 years with me preparing for the test.

Funny thing though... having the regents there was almost a "safe net" for me in regards to seeing how my kids fit in the larger picture. We took the January 2005 Regents, of the 100 students, 3 failed, and 1 didnt show up. It kept me informed (a little bit) about the standards, and what kids should know in their science career by time X. So when they took my safe net away a few days ago, I didn't know if I should celebrate, or think about whether we just hurt our kids... I mean, now that we dont need to face these exams, are we preparing them for the stressors of the SATs and other standardized exams?

I know that test can be revised to be better. I know that test means well - it does pose some challenging and rigorous questions. But my conclusion is that our students should be assessed based on a number of factors, not simply through one exam. I've made the decision to implement more exams (finals, midterms), in addition to the labs reports, projects and student-centered melodrama that constructivism is so famous for. My exams will be designed correctly, to really assess what they know and need, as well as ways to improve on instruction - pretty much how testing should be used.

NYC LE Scope & Sequence Draft

While the exam is fresh in my mind, I thought I would look more closely at the NYC scope & sequence for regents living environment, scheduled to be implemented this fall. Here's the draft version, which I will post without comment, any thoughts from fellow LE teachers appreciated.

First Term: September - January

Unit 1

Scientific Inquiry (10 days)

The role of scientific inquiry in studying biology

The methods of science

Forensic Science investigations

Problem-based learning

Unit 2

Origin of Life (3 days)

Unit 3

Ecology (22 days)

Relationships

Interactions

Aquaculture

Unit 4

Organization and Patterns in Life (20 days)

Cell structure

Cell Physiology

Cell Chemistry

Photosynthesis

Respiration

Diffusion and Osmosis

Mitosis

Unit 5

Homeostasis and Immunity (25 days)

Body system overview

Homeostasis and feedback systems

Immune response

Second Term - February through June

Unit 6

Reproduction and Development (15 days)

Meiosis

Reproductive systems

Fertilization

Development

Stem cells

Unit 7

Genetics and Biotechnology (25 days)

Mendel overview

DNA/ RNA

Protein synthesis

Diseases

Mutations

Bioengineering

Bioethics

Unit 8

Evolution (15 days)

Natural selection

Evidence

Unit 9

Human Influences on the Environment (15 days)

Positive influences

Negative influences

Review (10 days)

First term topics

Regents exam prep

Note: Scientific Inquiry (e.g. asking questions, making discoveries, gathering data, analyzing explanations, and communication) is an integral component of this course.

Aftershocks

I'm in a true blue funk about the exam results, so I will be writing about it for a while as I try to sort it out and come to grips with what I consider failure on my part. I will likely be posting a lot of shorties as I work through one issue after another, and if time permits I will link them all together.

First Up: The Exam

I've gone through the exam now and I could really only identify a few specific questions that I thought were unrealistic as individual questions. The one I alluded to in the comments of a previous post asked students to explain the role of antigens in an immune response. I still believe this question was designed to confuse and should have been worded differently - a student may well have thought she knew what antigens were, but was convinced by the wording that she must have gotten it backwards, and then screwed up on that question. Now, mind you, that's only one point out of 85, and not a reason to throw out the test. Another question asks students to find analogous structures between some cell organelles and some organs of the human body. The correct answer is the cell membrane and the kidneys. I think that a pretty sophisticated level of understanding is required to answer that one, and I'm not sure it's reasonable.

The difficulty in this test is that almost every question requires a high level of thinking and a lot of distractors - irrelevant information that causes confusion. I know that sounds silly, that I seem to be complaining about a test that requires a lot of thinking, but remember this is a three hour exam for an introductory level biology course for 9th or 10th graders - it's not supposed to be an IQ test. The questions are grammatically and logically complex even for students with strong language skills, and we certainly have our share of students who struggle with reading and writing. They ask about biology concepts in a round-about way. Some have complained, rightly I believe, that the exams have too many items that are designed to show how clever the item writers are. The exam reminds me of the content specialty test (NY State) for biology. That was a grueling 4 hour exam for biology teachers with a pretty high degree of difficulty. I left that exam without a clue whether I had passed or not (I did), and I took the full 4 hours to complete it. Most of my students are far more easily frustrated and prone to giving up under these circumstances.

Still, with proper preparation and LOTS of practice on these kinds of questions, students can do well on the exam. I'm just not sure the state's instructional objectives are aligned with the requirements of the exam.

Update

Test Items by Topic

Ecology - 31 points

Experimental Design - 11 points

Genetics - 10 points

Evolution - 10 points

Reproduction & Development - 9 points

Biochemistry - 8 points

Cell Bio - 8 points

Human Bio - 8 points

Obviously there's a lot of overlap in many of the questions among the topics (numbers do not equal 85 points), and some are open to interpretation, but this is a rough, quick analysis of the breakdown of questions.

Results

Overall about what I expected based on the last month of school. I had surprises in both directions - students I thought would pass didn't, and others I thought didn't stand a chance wound up passing.

Out of 60 students, 11 did not take the exam for various reasons - including one unfortunate soul who left in the middle of the exam very sick - she woke up the morning of the exam with fever & headache. During the exam it progressed to nausea, and she just could not make it through the exam. A real heartbreak, because she was certain to do well and just a great kid all around. Several students did not bother to finish labs or get their binders in order, so they weren't allowed to take the exam. Others were relatively recent additions to the regents classes who missed over half the year, so I exempted them from the exam. So that leaves 49 students and here's how they did (all scores are scaled scores - the one that counts):

Number who passed 38


Number who failed 11


High Score 91


Low Score 46


Average 68.7

So that's about a 77% passing rate for those taking the exam. For my own personal tally, I would calculate in a portion of those students who didn't take the exam - 8 students who failed to finish the lab requirement and I take responsibility for not making sure that the labs were done. So factoring in those students brings it down to about 67% passing rate - which is abysmal.

Let the Hand-Wringing Begin

So what went wrong? There are so many variables, I don't know where to begin. I'll start with myself, since that's the one variable I have some control over. And I'll put this in the format of "what to do better next time" to avoid wallowing in self-recriminations.

1. 
   Work on sequence. A question I struggled with all year, which topics to cover in which order. The city is working on scope & sequence for the regents curriculum for next year (I've seen the draft version), which I will probably follow it to a large extent next year. All my creative tinkering with traditional sequence was for nothing, at least as far as the test goes. I do know that as much as possible the curriculum should be front loaded - cover a lot of material early on, consolidate & review at the end. I definitely had too much material to cover at the end of the year when kids were spent. I didn't plan it that way, which brings up the next point...
   
2. 
   Pacing. I frequently dragged my feet because of the sheer amount of work involved in moving from one topic to another - i.e., putting lessons together, or developing a project, or getting everything set up for a lab. Fact is, I know that this is a personal weakness, partly attributable to burn out from teaching a different subject almost every year I've taught and constantly repeating this nonsense of re-inventing the wheel every year. But partly just because I'm really a little slow and disorganized, which is why I need a some simplicity and continuity in my life. Next year I will have so much already in place that I can move at a faster pace and hopefully, in the process...
   
3. 
   Work on student motivation. I think the pacing definitely affected student interest, which clearly waned as the year went on. I probably did more labs, hands-on activities, & projects than I've ever done in the past, but somehow I wasn't able to find a way to connect it all to the students' interests - biology, of all things, which you might think would require a minimal effort to connect directly to students. Somehow I just didn't pull it off. And when I did find individual topics that seemed to connect (reproduction, human bio in general), it didn't seem to carry over to other topics or the big picture.
   
4. 
   Just plain staying on the kids in an effective way, about keeping up with work and staying focused. Obviously this will be more or less necessary depending on how well the previous issues are worked out, but there will always be times when some students need a little extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards or calling parents or whatever.
   

There. I feel better already. In a separate post I will talk about some issue I have with the curriculum, the test, regents in grade 8.

At least SOMEBODY is panicking

(Besides me)

I usually get around 50-100 hits a day. I don't track this in any organized way: SiteMeter gives me free info that's pretty limited - they want me to be curious enough to pay for more detailed analysis, but I don't need it. I got a little spike in hits recently when I posted a message on a bio teachers listserv about blogging, then a link and a mention from Jenny D. provided a little bump, but here in this past week hits have been through the roof by my standards- around 700 1000 for today. Most are hit and run.

A quick look at the referring URL usually reveals a generic sort of google search for something like "regents living environment," sometimes adding "answers" is a pretty good giveaway that it is a student looking for help here in the final days before the exam. I feel bad that there's not much on this blog to help students, and maybe that's something to consider adding next year, although there are lots of other resources out there. For some reason my blog comes up pretty high on google's results for regents-related searches, so maybe I should add links in the sidebar for students to point them to the right place.

Anticipating the worst...

...and hoping for the best.

A feeling of helplessness creeps in. I've been unable to compete with the overwhelming message my 8th graders get that school is over. This started in late May, with the first "end of year" festivals. They aren't called "end of year" events, but they do in fact signify the end, and why we begin this nonsense in May is beyond me when school runs to the end of June. It affects the entire school, not just grade 8. Spring Concert (chorus, band) was first. Then comes the award ceremony, then Grade 8 exams in Social Studies & Intermediate Level Science, then senior T-shirts (which have to be signed, of course), prom night, graduation rehearsals, yearbooks distribution/signing, graduation itself, report card & diploma distribution. All that and we are still waiting for June 22nd and the Regents Exam. Of course the regents students want to relax & enjoy the festivities like the rest of their grade 8 classmates, but their mean old science teacher won't let them. For an entire month getting time with my students has been hit or miss. I've had to require that they come to class & work on days when other students are signing year books or other activities, the details of which I won't go into ("seniors" get a lot of privileges, let's leave it at that). As a chaperone I joked about "homeostasis" when we were sweating on the cheese bus going to the prom. I won't allow them to get report cards or diplomas until after the exam, when their non-regents classmates are getting all that on Monday - and if they don't show up for the exam (as some have whispered about) then they will have to wait till the last day of school. In the end I've had to resort to threats, and I don't feel good about the whole situation.

I knew the schedule in June would be weird, but I was totally unprepared for the level of active resistance and apathy I've seen in a lot of the kids. One day I threatened half seriously to cancel the exam, hoping to light a fire under them, and instead they cheered - and these are some of the top academic students in the school. In May I was realistically hopeful that only a handful of kids would fail outright. Now after the month of folly, it's looking like 15-20 out of 60 students will likely fail to reach 65. I've got two days to review if they show up - and I fear the ones who need the most help won't even come to the review sessions.

I know I've made mistakes and I'm compiling a list in my head of things to do differently next year, but I'll save that until after the exam - right now I'm not thinking clearly. I probably put too much of the wrong kind of pressure on them at the wrong time, which I will elaborate on later. And who knows, maybe they will surprise me next week and show up ready to get it together.