She Lives!

Hello World!

I feel so out of the loop at this point I'm not even sure how to get back in. 

Soon, I will get back to reflecting on my teaching (oh, do I still do that???), but I am so excited for my kids that I really feel like I have to share. As you may know, I sponsor a Robotics team, but what you may not know is how something like that can completely take over your life. I discovered that last year, so I knew going in this year more or less what to expect. What I was not expecting this year was to continue on after Game Day. 

Yep. They did it. 

This year my kids placed fourth in our hub and qualified for the Frontier Trails BEST Regional Competition. Talk about being blindsided. All season we had talked about what it would be like to go, but it truly was never really on the radar. But then it happened. So we spent another three weeks working on Mike and all his paraphernalia. Then we loaded up a bus and I hauled sixteen teenagers across three states into the unknown (again) to one of the most amazing activities I have ever witnessed. If you have ever been to a robotics competition, you know how crazy it is.* Go to a regional competition and it is that times ten. My ears are still ringing.

We had a blast. We learned a ton. We got to see the amazing creativity that comes out when you let kids run with an idea. We even placed higher than we thought we might!

I have been involved in a lot of activities in the time that I have been a teacher. None of those can hold a candle to the experience of a robotics team. My kids are excited about learning. They are excited about science. They are excited about accomplishing something difficult and amazing. They are excited about next year. We were at GAME DAY and my kids were making a list of things they wanted to do for next year. 

So it must be a good thing. Seriously. Look into it!

*You know kickoff at a football game where the band is playing, the people are cheering and the atmosphere just feels charged? At a robotics competition, this goes on for six hours. It. Does. Not. Stop.

Schizophrenic

I follow quite a lot of blogs. I mean a lot. I'm not even sure I can count that high.

A while back, I accidentally discovered the math blogosphere. I had no idea what a blog even was, let alone that there were teachers out there using them to share ideas.

From there, I discovered that there were science teachers out there who had classrooms that had kids doing what I wanted my kids to do.

So, I began filling my Reader with teachers who know what they are talking about. There was no organization to it, I would find someone who had something interesting to say and start following.

Today, I got a chance to sit down and do a little much needed Reader organization. I wouldn't have worried too much about it, but I would sit down and start at the top. It was an emotional rollercoaster going from one blog discussing SBG, to someone else trying to explain to the world how education is failing, to still another describing their struggles in going paperless and back to another incredible teacher getting their kids into inquiry.

Looking to compartmentalize a bit, I created six folders:
1. My Classes - Stuff that specifically pertains to the classes I teach. This is mostly connect-me-to-the-real-world type information and a lot of it gets reposted for my kids to see.

2. Technology - Pretty self-explanatory, really. I've come across many incredible tid-bits that I can try to integrate into my classroom.

3. Fun - Not education related, but help my brain change gears. Some days, believe it or not, I just need to not focus on teaching.

4. Policy - Educational policy and commentary on how education is being treated by our federal and state governments. I believe it is important to have this information, but these are the ones that make me cry, cuss and spit. I honestly have a hard time believing a lot of what is being done.

This is what makes me want to quit teaching.

5. Classroom - Here are the people who matter, who make a difference. Here I find my inspiration. These are the teachers who love teaching, love their kids and are not afraid to say so. AND they are willing to let me visit their classrooms.

This is is what makes me want to stay in teaching.

I have to say, this has made a huge difference in my outlook.

Probably because I have read everything in my Classroom folder and have 285 unread posts in my Policy folder.

I can really get used to this.

The Yellow Lab

As you can imagine, and may possibly be experiencing yourself, our run of Snow Days played havoc with my teaching schedule. The last one we had was a week before our trimester ended, and I sat down and re-planned. I resigned myself to the fact that I just wasn't going to get through the next unit and had it figured out how to end on the right day. Looking back now, I think that may have been more planning than I have done all year.

The day we came back, our principal sent out an email asking us to vote whether or not to extend the trimester to the next week. Um, no. No, I don't. I was, however, in the minority.

I sat down again. We were finishing up with molarity, so I went in search of a project that I could use as a final.

As luck (?) would have it, my computer died. It was a quick death, with it dying in its sleep, simply not turning on one morning. This could have been a set back. However, it sent me scrambling into my backed up files. I have been teaching since 1997 and apparently have never deleted a file. I found an "Ideas" folder from early last decade that I had forgotten all about. In it I found a bunch of things I had copied from The Chemistry Coach that was run by Bob Jacobs at Wilton High School. He has since passed away and the site is no longer maintained, although I am definitely going to check to see if there is an archive somewhere. I corresponded with Bob several times (mostly to see if I could use his stuff), so he was sort of the beginning of my PLN.

One of his creations was The Yellow Lab. Its story is based on the Clue board game and the students have to go about finding Miss Scarlett's murderer. The killer either used potassium iodide or lead (II) nitrate to do her in and the molarity of that solution.

After listening to some of the discussions my kids had, I felt a lot better about what they learned this year. For all the complaining that they didn't understand what we were doing, they sure stepped it up when they were required to use that information.

My latest obsession has been project based learning. I've never done much in the way projects, but after this week, I am going to make it more of a priority. If I can get organized, that is.

I also offered the extra credit mini-project at the end. I had three students write hilarious stories and one group create a video. I need to do more stuff like this :)

That's More Like It

So I plunged into Standards Based Grading this year, along with my Modeling. I have to tell you, it's been a pretty rough year. I am exhausted, but my kids are finally starting to get over their shell-shock.

A couple weeks ago, some of my kids started panicking about their grade.* And then it dawned on them that they could come in and retake some quizzes to help raise said grade.** For the last four weeks, I have had no less than 9 kids in my room before school, after school and during seminar. And then some at lunch and plan period.

Today, one of my girls finished a quiz and let out a nice long sigh. She really struggles with this whole thinking thing and has worked her tail off to even be passing. Then she turns to me and says, "you know, I really wish I could come in and make sure I understand some of this stuff before I take a test over it."

"Um, why do you think you can't come in and study for a test?"

An interesting conversation went on with the kids in the room. We as a staff seem to have given the impression that tests are used to not measure what the kids know, but what they DON'T know.

The universal feeling amongst the kids is that we as teachers WANT them to do poorly. Apparently, we LOVE it when kids fail our classes.

"Well, except you, Mrs. Schroeder. You let us come in and retake some things."

I really didn't know what to say to that. I can honestly say that I don't know a single teacher in our building that enjoys failing kids. Yet, somehow, these kids truly seem to believe that we spend all our spare time devising ways to keep them from passing.

So we dropped everything and had a study session. Not a catch up session. Not a retake session. We sat down and discussed everything that was going to be on the quiz tomorrow. The kids asked questions and did practice problems. I helped them and they helped each other.

It was a great time and I think we all came away from it feeling better about tomorrow. Several kids expressed interest in making this a regular session. I assured them that I would like nothing more than to help them learn the skills BEFORE they tested on them and it would be a much less stressful trimester if they didn't have to spend it trying to catch up.

Now if I could just figure out how to get this done during class time with all 25 of them.

*I know, it should be about the learning, not about the grade. We'll work on that next year. I can apparently only work two miracles at a time.

**The fact that I have repeated this option every day since the beginning of school had no bearing on this, of course, they figured it out on their own.

NSTA

So I just got back from the NSTA Regional Conference in Kansas City.

Wow.

Just wow.

If you have never been to one, go. Just GO. You must find a way.

It is a surreal feeling to be surrounded by science teachers. These are people with the same challenges as me. And the same experiences as me. And the same goals as me. Yet, I don't know hardly any of them.

And I am willing to bet that each and every one of them has more than a few ideas that I could use in my classroom.

So many brilliant ideas, so little time.

Atlantis

Want to ramp up interest in any class?

Watch a live launch of the space shuttle on NASA TV. We watched this today during my Applied Physics. Atlantis made her final launch about 30 minutes into the class period and although not my Astronomy class, we made it a point to see. We put away all our work away and listened to Mission Control talk to the astronauts. We turned off the lights and saw the engines start to fire.

And when they reached zero time, goosebumps spread through the entire classroom.

The NASA Launch Commentator is awesome. I want to meet him. Every couple minutes, he updated us on the speed and altitude of the shuttle. These little tid-bits floored my kids. It took just 7 minutes for the shuttle to leave our atmosphere.

AND, the camera on the fuel tank gave us an incredible view of home.

Even if you don't teach astronomy. Even if you don't teach science. If you teach children, they need to see something like this in their lifetime. Kids (and grownups) can't help but be amazed by this.

Most common question? "Is this happening now?"

Second most common question? "What are they going to do in space?"

This sparked an incredible interest in the space program that I really didn't see coming. So we went to the library and looked up the specifics of Atlantis' last mission.

Not in the curriculum. Not in the state standards. Not on the state assessment.

Worth a "lost" teaching day.