So, today I'm having them produce regents question analysis posters, as a review of both the process of figuring out the answer and as a review of some of the content covered by the most recent test I gave (cells/cell processes). Here's a model of what they will produce on paper ( I did it on powerpoint, which you can download.) I kept the explanations simple and short, so don't get nitpicky about the details.
I say it's only a matter of time before the facts overtake tradition and politics - the sooner the better.
UPDATE
This article from National Geographic, Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree...(dateline 2003), discusses the issue of reclassification in a little more detail and points out some of the difficulties, among them the confusion that can arise from the domino effect - reclassifying chimpanzees into the genus Homo would necessitate the renaming of several fossil hominids that have been assigned their own genera.
OK. I didn't start this post as a rant, so I'll stop now. We are really starting to get into the meaty part of the curriculum and a lot of students are struggling. There's something more or less intuitive and easy about ecology, where we started the year, but as we get into cell processes it gets abstract very quickly and I don't think a lot of students know quite how to deal with the level of understanding they need for the regents exams. They seem to be groping around for a list of vocabulary words or simple processes or rules they can just memorize. I gave a test on some cell basics, culled from old regents exams. The results weren't impressive. I did allow them to use their books but warned them they probably wouldn't find the books very helpful - since the regents exam requires them to pull together bits & pieces of information from various parts of the book, and apply what they know to novel situations - the answers aren't in the book, they have to be synthesized in the brain. I actually made them work without the books for about 15 minutes, answering questions as best they could, then allowed them to open the books. I may do something similar in the future and find a way to compare their open book answers to their closed book answers to see how much they actually change. Hey, I might even be able to turn that idea into my master's project, with some refinements.
Speaking of master's project, I may have to put that off for another semester. For some reason that class is always in demand and filled to capacity with a waiting list, and I wasn't able to get in. I am on the waiting list, but I won't be that upset if I have to wait till next fall, when I'll have a better grip on my curriculum and materials and will not, I hope, be working 10 hours a day on a regular basis.
My 2nd grade sons (twins, neighborhood public school) just went on a field trip to the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The whole second grade went and I was sort of expecting to hear some backlash, but so far so good. This was entirely their teachers' idea and had nothing to do with me. They did read a children's book on evolution in class before the trip as preparation - (Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story, by Lisa Westberg Peters). The book was my wife's idea and she loaned them our copy. But I was impressed that the teachers organized and carried it out without much fuss or fanfare. I asked my sons about it afterward and they seemed to actually get the major concept of natural selection, through a computer simulation at the exhibit in which the background color changes over time and the color of a population of prey organisms changes with it. "When the background is green the orange bugs get eaten by the birds and when the background changes to orange the green bugs get eaten." I pressed them a little further and asked what was left when all the green bugs were eaten, and they told me that only the orange bugs were left. Pretty good summary for 2nd graders. I hope my 9th graders get it!
I haven't any particularly new ideas these days and not much in the way of new material - we just did a rinky-dink lab looking at onion and cheek cells under a microscope. It's the kind of lab that I despise but I needed a filler as I don't have an alternative yet. As I've mentioned before I like labs where students are trying to answer a question by measuring or otherwise collecting numerical data and I don't have anything that involves making a wet-mount slide and then looking at the cells for some variation that we can quantify and correlate to another variable. I can think of some possibilities but I haven't had time to sit down and test them out or develop a lab around them.
One idea is to take for example a green onion and look at the different parts of the onion - root tips, bulb, green tips - to see if there is variation in the average size of the cells in these different parts (I'm pretty sure this is based on another lab I've seen somewhere looking at the different stages of mitosis in the different parts - but that requires complicated staining techniques if I remember correctly, or prepared slides). My reasoning is that parts that grow faster (root tips?) will show a smaller average size because there will be more of them at different stages of mitosis - the daughter cells initially being smaller than the parent cells. How would we measure the size? I noticed in our labs that 100x magnification of onion cells gives us a nice, easily countable number of cells within the field of view. A greater number of cells within a given field of view means a smaller average size obviously. If you've done this kind of lab or know of links to a version of it on the web I'd like to know. I could be totally off and there are probably other variables that affect the size of cells in the different parts of the onion that would make a conclusion impossible to draw, so I would really need some time to go through the lab myself to see if it's feasible.
On to human body systems and maintaining homeostasis.
I like to do this lab even though it replicates some of the concepts in the Diffusion Through a Membrane required lab. The eggs are of course a good size to work with and I'm always partial to labs where we can measure the results and graph the data. They also respond pretty consistently and dramatically to the different soultions, making them virtually foolproof if the kids measure correctly (and the eggs don't break - always plan extras). The occasional broken egg adds to the "ick" factor. The basic strategy is this:
Students weigh the eggs before soaking in vinegar. This is the baseline mass that we use for comparison after it soaks in the other liquids, so we are investigating how the egg deviates from that original mass (we ignore the mass of the dissolved shell since it is pretty trivial compared to the overall mass of the egg and the changes we get from osmosis.) We can estimate the original water content (%) in the egg by interpolating from the graph the point at which the change in mass would have been zero - the point where the line they graphed intersects the y x axis. The point where the line intersects the y x*axis represents the point at which the concentration of water inside the cell would be equal to the concentration of water outside the cell. Needless to say the kids get a little confused with the terminology and using a graph in this way. There are a couple of tricky mathematical components to the lab, but all age/grade appropriate - it's just the kids are used to doing math in math class and apparently not comfortable applying the skills to science class. Aside from the graphing, a few kids were uncomfortable subtracting a large initial mass from a smaller final mass (final mass - initial mass) to get a negative change. We also did not simply use the change in mass, since the eggs were all somewhat different sizes in the beginning, so we calculated the % change to control for that variable (thanks to Mathew Davies, my G-K12 fellow last year, who helped me revise the lab).
You need at least 4 days for this lab,longer if you let students soak all the eggs in the various solutions. It is possible to check the eggs at the beginning of the period and have some time left to do other things afterward. You may need to refresh the vinegar after the first day. The eggs don't seem to suffer from leaving over the weekend if you have to start in the middle/end of the week. Have lots of paper towels. I've estimated the water content of corn syrup solutions, but the numbers may be off - something about the nutrition label doesn't make sense, and I got conflicting numbers from the USDA as to the sugar/water content of corn syrup, so check those numbers for yourself if you're concerned about the accuarcy of the details. It's bothersome to me but I can live with the rough estimates.
*I meant the y=0 point, which is actually the x axis. Sorry 'bout that...
Either way, Friday Random 10 goes on. Here's my list from the week, this time actually taken from my mp3 player (portable), so it's newerish stuff that I actually listen to, but again it's getting time to download some newerer material.
Artist Track
1.U2......Beautiful Day
2.Pixies......Gigantic
3.Pearl Jam......Light Years
4.Snow Patrol......Raze the City
5.Ocean Blue......Between Something & Nothing
6.Interpol......NYC
7.Weezer......Island in the Sun
8.Radiohead......My Iron Lung
9.The Arcade Fire.....Une Anee Sans Lumiere
10.World Leader Pretend......New Voices
Judge rules against 'intelligent design'
Sorry for the juvenile reaction, but honestly I'm pretty disgusted by the ID crowd, and seeing their little masquerade exposed is just too satisfying not to revel a bit:
We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom...
I grew up with a pretty strong religious belief, and the unethical tactics used by these people would have appalled me even back then - the lying and subterfuge are below the ethical teachings of most religions - that I know about anyway.
via Pharyngula
But I support the union. The press is totally biased, the commentary of the anchors and reporters is laced with subtle and not-so-subtle stabs at the union. The MTA has billion dollar surpluses and is giving away money to the riders, then they want to screw new workers coming into the system - I can tell you that creates a lot of animosity among membership. As a teacher I am still pissed at my union for negotiating contracts in the past that set up "tiers" within the teacher ranks and some tiers have benefits that I'll never get and in some cases teachers had teaching loads lighter than mine - think about that: Inexperienced and overwhelmed new teachers working side-by-side with experienced teachers who have fewer teaching periods per day. It is unconscionable for a union to sell out it's new members to maintain a level of income and working conditions for it's existing members.
Another consequence of the strike is that our lesson study has been cancelled. I don't know at this point if or when it will be rescheduled. Since it is content specific and part of unit study, it would be impossible to just postpone the lesson that we've now spent so much time planning.
UPDATE (9:30AM)
I took a chance on the bike, and arrived at 8:30 to work without incident. I thought I might have gotten frostbite on my toes as the frigid west wind (in my face, more or less) kicked in hard at about 96th street, but an hour later and the pain is gone - worst case of cold feet I've ever had. Temperature around 22F with wind chills in the teens/single digits and worse with bike speeds factored in.
I don't know the origins of the FR10, but I got the idea from Pharyngula, but he hasn't done it in a while. One student in particular keeps recommending tunes to me, and I return the favor, so I though it might be a good tradition to start. The basic idea is to hit the shuffle button on your iPod and list the first 10 songs that come up. I don't have iPod, but most other digital music players will have a similar function. I just went into my laptop's library of songs and created a random 10-song playlist. Here's what I got.
1.Belle & Sebastian....Family Tree
2.Ben Folds Five.......Selfless, Cold, & Composed
3.Bryan Ferry..........Heart on My Sleeve
4.Pearl Jam............Elderly Woman Behind the Curtain in a Small Town
5.Smashing Pumpkins....Tonite (Reprise)
6.9 Inch Nails.........Head Like a Hole
7.Belle & Sebastian....Boy with the Arab Strap
8.Nirvana..............You Know You’re Right
9.Breeders.............Divine Hammer
10.Looper...............The Spider Man
Most of this is older music that I don't actually listen to so much any more - I like it, but I've heard some of this too much and haven't had time since summer to add to my library. I load a smaller number of songs onto the mp3 player, which I listen to almost exclusively while exercising, so I'm looking for a particular sound in that context.
Firstly, my school takes PD pretty seriously and right now we are engaged in a science "lesson study." If you aren't familiar with lesson study, here is a short primer. Basically as the name implies, it is the study of a lesson, created in this case by our science team, and implemented by one of the science teachers while a group of other teachers observes. In our situation, the lesson will be presented, we will debrief and revise as need, then the lesson is presented again with a second class, then we debrief again. We have spent numerous hours after school working on the project, and I will have more to say about it after we go through the presentation next week.
Secondly, my school produces 6 report cards per year - that's one every 5 weeks as I've already lamented. I like giving students and parents feedback, but the formality of report cards and the ridiculous bubbling process take their toll on me and I usually need practically the entire week that they are due to get them done. I realize this is partially a problem I've got to solve by streamlining my grading policies and getting the kids work in on time before the panic sets in.
Thirdly, we have an "academic probation" program with after school tutoring for those kids in danger of failing a particular subject. It's another 2 hours of after school activity. I prefer to think of it as "academic intervention," and I hope the school adopts a more friendly term in the near future, but for now that's what it's called. We also have the option of providing an additional 2 hours per week of after school tutoring for students regardless of their probationary status, and I use those two hours from time to time as well to help kids get caught up on missing work.
Combine all this with the day-to-day preparation and checking papers and it adds up to too much work and not enough play.
Enough excuses. I do have a lab that I developed last year with Mathew Davies from Columbia University's GK-12 program. It is a computer modeling lab using NetLogo. Mathew deserves all the credit for leading me to netlogo and helping me figure out how to use it. He also developed a couple of models himself for use in our classroom last year, which I will link below. We worked together on developing a lab for students that involves the wolf-sheep predation model. I never had a chance to use the lab last year due to the difficulty of getting access to computers, but I plan to use it next week and will report back on how it goes. In the meantime, you can go yourself and play around with the NetLogo models. If you like it, you can download and use my lab worksheets.
Homeostasis Model. A simplified negative feedback loop based on temperature regulation.
Mealworms Model. A population dynamics model involving only the mealworms and a food source. Several variables that can be manipulated in an attempt to produce a more stable outcome.
Instructions on using NetLogo with Wolf-sheep Predation
Student Labsheets for Wolf-Sheep Predation
PDF Versions:
NetLogo Instructions.pdf
NetLogo Student Lab Sheets.pdf
You will probably want to print out the instructions and go through it with the program running. Also do some kind of whole class demo with the kids before turning them loose with the lab.
Making the game simple enough for students to understand and still get the desired result continues to elude me. If you aren't familiar with the game, a good detailed description can be found here, or try the version that I copied and pasted into word and modified (slightly) into lab worksheets, which I've posted here. I hope the originators aren't too upset, since I do give them credit and encourage everyone to visit their site and look at other stuff they have created - that's all I would ask of anyone who found something useful on my site, adapted it, and wanted to share it - link and give credit. The idea is that students are given a large sheet of paper (11x17), which represents their meadow, several small squares of paper that represent the prey, and several larger squares of paper that represent the predators. Start with three prey spread around the meadow. Toss one predator onto the meadow. If the predator manages to capture (fall on) 3 prey in one toss, the predator lives and reproduces. If the predator fails to capture three, it dies. Next generation a "new" predator moves in if none survive, so that there's always at least one predator to start the new generation. If done properly, students will see through about 20 generations, two population explosions and 2 crashes. The predator population lags a little behind the prey in both directions (explosion & crash).
Ideally there would be no other variable in the model, just predator & prey with unlimited resources for the prey, but I just don't have enough materials for unlimited growth, and the potential for error among the students is too great so I limit the rabbit population to 75, explaining to students that the meadow simply won't support any more and anything above 75 moves somewhere else.
Problems students have had with the game:
--Forgetting to double the populations.
--Forgetting to remove prey that have been killed.
--Tossing all the predators at once before removing killed rabbits - I've revised that rule.
--Stopping before 20 generations - How to tell them why we need 20 generations without telling them what will happen?
--Just keeping track of the numbers - requires some concentration that they have trouble mustering in groups of 4.
I'm getting to the point where I'm seeing the need for some formal group roles, so the next class that does the simulation will have a designated recorder and rules enforcer - I just have to pick the right people who will be obsessive about doing things the right way - hope I can find 7 such people in one class!
UPDATE 12/11/05
I've just devised some roles for my groups. It's a little incongruous in that I'm using more or less courtroom analogies, but I think it will work for this particular class. I have judges who will know and transmit the rules or procedures of the game (or other activities in the future), a sheriff who works with the judge to enforce the rules and keep the peace, to the point of having the power to issue tickets if necessary, a bailiff who is essentially the materials manager, and a stenographer whose role should be self evident. For this class I have 29 students, which leaves an odd man out in groups of 4, so I have created a special role for this person - Devil's Advocate. The devil's advocate will be assigned a home group, but will roam around to other groups to play the role for all groups. I already know who will get this role!
I have personally selected the judges. I will send them to a private place in the school (an empty classroom or the AP's office) with a list of recommended sheriffs. They will select their own sheriffs and are free to suggest alternatives to the ones I've recommended. Then together with their sheriffs, they will select the remaining roles for their groups. I hope that giving them this responsibility and freedom will create a more positive environment. I do have a lot of faith in the judges I've selected.
I've created role cards that you can download here.
My professional position on religious matters has always been agnostic - I tell students when they ask that I do not discuss my religious beliefs or lack thereof, and they can make any assumptions they wish, but I will neither confirm nor deny any particular belief. The problem is that refusal to discuss religion is always taken as evidence that you are an atheist. I often wonder if I shouldn't just come right out and tell them, but I remain silent as a matter of principle and wish my colleagues would do the same - not just the science teachers, not just the religious ones, or the agnostic ones, or the atheists, but all of them. I have heard many teachers sharing their belief in god with students. They don't proselytize per se, but talk openly of their activities with their church, their religious observances, their faith, etc. On the other hand, I've never heard a teacher discussing his/her atheism with a class. I know that most of my colleagues are silent on the subject most of the time, but wouldn't hesitate to answer if students asked. I think the answer should always be a polite "none of your business."
The only acceptable position for a public school teacher is, in my opinion, professional agnosticism - "there may be a god or gods, there may not be, but as an employee of the state I have no personal position on the matter to discuss with students." This is not a denial of one's god or religion, it is an understanding of our role as public school teachers and our obligation as such to remain neutral on religious matters.
For many years I "experimented" with different turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast. I tried different cooking techniques - covered/uncovered, basting/not basting, high heat/low heat. I tried free range turkeys, smaller turkeys, all the while refusing to go the butterball route with the industrial strength water infusion. Still, I was never happy with the finished product, and many years I swore I wouldn't even try turkey again. Then every year tradition would pull at my conscience and I go for the turkey again anyway.
A few years ago, I tried brining a turkey at home. Brining is simply soaking the turkey in a slatwater solution, which I will discuss in a little detail below. The results were OK - the turkey was less dry, but too salty. Not only that, but the the technique is quite cumbersome and messy. So I decided to try the kosher turkey route, since brining is basically part of the koshering process already, it was a ready-made, brined turkey. And it came out pretty good. It's still a little salty, perhaps I will try a little soaking before cooking might to draw out a little of the salt next year. It's mainly an issue when using the drippings to make gravy. That seems to concentrate the salt (makes sense, a lot of evaporation takes place in making gravy anyway) and leads to a salty gravy.
At first thought, brining seems a little counterintuitive. You might think that soaking a turkey in saltwater would cause water to diffuse out of the turkey (from higher concentration in the turkey meat to lower concentration in the saltwater solution) but apparently the process is a bit more complicated, and I'll summarize here, but you might want to click on the links to get more detailed in formation. Basically, it is true that the saltwater is a hypertonic solution, compared to the turkey, which should result in diffusion of water out of the turkey. But, at the same time, salt diffuses into the turkey meat. As a result, the salt starts to break down or denature proteins within the cell, increasing their water holding capacity, as well as their osmolarity (more solutes per unit water) - the relative concentrations of water then favor the diffusion of water into the turkey, and you get a moister piece of meat. This is my synthesis of the explanations offered by the two science-related websites below that discuss brining. Other explanations are offered on various food websites, mostly summarized in this Virtual Weber Bulletin Board article.
Links:
MadSci Network: How does brining a turkey before smoking make it juicier
Cooking for Engineers: Kitchen Notes: Brining
Now if I can just figure out a way to use this application of osmosis in a science lab activity...
Last week I used a cheese making lab that I got from a listserv - I would like to give credit where credit is due, but I can't find the author of the lab. This lab was more or less on topic as we were discussing biochemistry (proteins, carbs, lipids, etc.) and the cheese making lab has to do with denaturing proteins with a mild acid (we used lemon juice). Most of the students refused to taste the cheese (I used food prep materials for the heating and "fresh" lemon juice and paper cups to keep everything clean). I mixed in some sugar and tasted it myself - not unlike cheesecake in some ways. What really grossed them out, for some reason, was when I drank a little of the whey. Of course I mentioned Little Miss Muffet as well:
Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
This week we created food webs for a lab, based on a set of cards that depict various players in a Chaparral ecosystem. I reduced the cards so that they would fit on 2 sheets of paper, then students cut them out and arrange on poster paper, draw lines connecting them based on information on the cards. Understanding why the arrows point toward the consumer (away from the energy source) is a real challenge for the students.They always want to point toward the one that gets eaten.
On Friday we had a field trip to the American Museum of Natural History to see the Galapagos IMAX film and the Biodiversity exhibit. I didn't prep them as well as I would have liked to. This being my first experience taking a high school group on a field trip, there were a number of issues I didn't anticipate or really have a good grip on - logistical issues, not behavioral. For instance, in high school there are no real "official" classes, so my 2nd & 6th period classes have students who are in different humanities and math classes - in other words, unlike middle school where students form a pretty much cohesive unit that stays together all day, in high school students get individual programs, so the whole field trip experience is in many ways a more disruptive process. The museum was also packed, so completing the "lab" was problematic, just as a matter of being able to view all the necessary exhibits and stand in a position to read the material and gather the necessary information. It was, however, all-in-all a positive experience.
Comment
I may have given a false impression here regarding my feelings about labs (vs. lecture, e.g.), so a little clarification. The difficulty I have is not with the idea of doing lab or hands-on activities, but doing them on commmand according to a set schedule and set time limit regardless of whether we are at a point in the unit where a lab makes sense or not and regardless of the fact that we may have a lab one week that takes several days to complete, and the scheduled lab time falls on a day where some discussion/lecture would be a more pressing need. I would much prefer a schedule where all science classes were 55 minutes long and one meeting per day, allowing me to schedule activities according to the needs of the unit rather than the needs of an artificial and outdated model of lecture and lab periods.
Anyway, later that day someone was remarking on some cool feature of the smartboard I was using and I couldn't resist noting that yes, I guess you could say it was "dumb smart." (Groans all around.)
We've finally got most of the computer issues resolved, and I've been using a lot of PowerPoint recently, trudging through the chemistry that the LE curriculum assumes students know (thus no time is budgeted for actually teaching these concepts) but of course the majority of them are clueless. It seems to me that there is a tremendous leap from what students are expected to know in middle school (or at least what they can reasonably be expected to learn) and what they are assumed to know (or need to know) for the LE curriculum. I just don't know how we can get very far with cellular processes, genetics, homeostasis, or cycling of matter without some basic understanding of chemistry. So I've been killing them with the chemistry content these last couple of weeks with lectures, asking them to understand as much as they can and just memorize the rest, because we will return to the concepts over and over in the context of the above mentioned topics. And I left a lot of things that I do think I can teach better in context - like acids & bases, enzyme action, etc. I may be wasting my time and theirs, but I don't know any other options here for teaching covering these largely middle school topics like atoms, elements, compounds, mixtures, solutions, etc. - basic chemistry in just one week!
Which brings me back to the smartboard, the main purpose of which seems to be delivering lectures. Makes sense, I guess. I find it useful for elaborating on a slide, answering questions by drawing a little diagram or picture or adding an aside or throwing in an "enrichment" vocabulary word that I hadn't thought of when making the slides. It's also useful for helping kids learn to take notes, simplify drawings, etc. I'm thinking of incorporating more note-taking skills in these presentations, since kids usually just copy word for word or letter for letter what's on the slide, without processing. I want to try showing a slide just long enough for students to read, then moving on to a blank slide, and then asking volunteers to come up and write how they would summarize the material on the smartboard. Again, I would prefer not to lecture so much, but sometimes you just have to plough through some material to get to something more interesting or just to make it through all the stuff that's in the LE curriculum. I only have 6 periods per week this year - last year I had trouble getting through the material with 8 periods. So I want to make the most of it when I do use it, and get students to take notes both more efficiently and more effectively.
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.
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?
