Welcome to my third year of blogging! I love teaching; I don’t love school and all that scheduling and seat time and blah blah blah, but I sure as bananas do love teaching kids stuff.

Well, I’ve been guerrilla professional-developing for two years now. I’ve done more in these two years to become a better teacher, scientist, mathematician, and all around person than I have in the entire preceding portion of my life.

It was a lot like this:

No joke.

My students have benefited. I’ve never seen gains like this. My kids’ post-FCI scores are off the charts.

My hunch that assessment reform is the gateway drug to better teaching has been nice to see affirmed in myself and countless others around the nation. The standards-based express is pulling into a station near you.

Shoot, I even met Dan M.F. Meyer.

The Future?

You bet. We’re taking this BlueHarvest thing on the road. I have a team of programmers and some serious motivation behind me. I have to get schools to stop grading what kids don’t have, and start recording what they do have.

This is the key to the whole thing, people.

Also, I’m going to start posting heavily on project-based learning. I’ve been doing a lot of it, and there are some serious hang-ups that might deter the less masochistic.

Also, I’m putting together a summer experience for those of you in the Midwest. Think: edcamp meets a smokehouse meets a chem lab meets dirty dancing. Be prepared for awesome.

A Puzzle! With Prizes!

Last year the puzzles got figured out quickly, so here’s another. You can win a gift card! To a real store!

public static Awesome play(Progression progression){
       Audio Player = new Audio(system.audio.out);
       return Player.play(progression);
}

public static void main(String[] args){
int lat = 60.06;
int long = 30.11;

Progression muss = new Progression(lat, long);

muss = {
              {"whole","I",3,5,8},
              {"whole","ii",4,6,8},
              {"half","iii",3,6,8},
              {"quarter","I",3,6,8},
              {"quarter","V",8},
              {"half","ii",4,6,8},
              {"half","V",8},
              {"quarter","iii",3,6,8},
              {"quarter","V",8},
              {"quarter","ii",8},
              {"quarter","I",8},
              {"half","vii",6,8},
              {"half","V",6,8}
 }

Awesome answer = play(muss);

}

First correct answer wins a $40 ThinkGeek gift card!

This Friday my classroom was visited by a few Iowa-state legislators. Our school is receiving attention for its work on assessment reform, which is by no means limited to what’s happening in my classroom. Even the most entrenched traditional teachers are experimenting with how they assess, and that means students are engaged with the meta-work of how education is done.

F-T-emereffin-W.

The legislators talked to a panel of teachers and students for about 90 minutes. The students were convincing, the teachers were passionate, and I think everyone left with the impression that schools everywhere should benefit form the successes and failures we’ve had here at Solon:

• Failure: Reassessment frenzy. This needs to be controlled and philosophically sound. The students can’t still be addicted to points when you introduce student-initiated reassessments (this took 2 years to hash out)
• Success: Students are reporting more retention and enjoyment of school in general. They’re saying things like, “I know what I know.” This is a positive change from how it used to be.
• Failure: Students try not to do any practice or studying because it’s not worth credit. It can take up to two months for them to mature, depending on their age. That’s a lot of time.
• Success: Students eventually learn that studying and homework are just what normal people call “learning.”
• Here’s a video of my kids giving feedback:

After the panel, the legislators and press came to my classroom to watch a lesson.

Here are my liner notes:

The lesson was about offal, which is guts. I got them livers, stomachs, and hearts. I wanted the suits to see what a lesson looks like when you let kids go, and prompt them to show you what they’ve learned. I wanted them to see that competency-based education, mixed with standards-based assessment is a recipe for more engaged students.

My students reported learning the following, again, umprompted:

• Chicken liver is somehow quite different from mammal liver. This framed a good discussion about evolution. We drew a cladogram with chicken, humans, cows, and sheep on it.
• Beef hearts are really big and look a lot like “meat.” They didn’t know it, but they naturally dissected it into each chamber, this will help me a lot later.
• Microscopes are tricky and require super thin samples. Cells are much smaller than the students previously assumed (none were seen)
• Stomachs are not just balls. They have hugely different layers. They absorb liquid readily. They are undulated. They are not as big as you’d think.
• Lots of other stuff got said and discussed that I can’t remember now.

Again, my goal is not necessarily for my students to memorize the word “hepatocyte.” They’re learning much in the way a pre-schooler does; by experiences that they can’t even begin to know what they’ll build on top of later.

Here’s the run-down of the things happening during the first few weeks of my first biology class:

King Corn and Food Inc.:

These movies are my way of introducing students to why we ought to care about food and biology. Sophomores are astonishingly concrete in their thinking habits, and they freaking love social change. These two films are incendiary, brilliant, and, for the most part, fair.

I wish I had recorded the conversations I’ve had with students since.

They chose to do art projects based on the films. I have an installment down stairs of mirrors that show people’s faces inside of corn cobs. I have posters showing the percentage of a McDonald’s menu that’s made from corn (90%). It’s pretty awesome, and most of the other students had no idea.

Other groups have taken a more experimental bent. They’re doing a lot with grass- vs. corn-fed beef. I have beakers full of beef and digestive enzymes sitting on my tables. I have a controlled rotting experiment happening to test the effect of antibiotics, fat content, and other intangibles between the two.

Finally, my students are emailing Monsanto quite frequently trying to get a tour. We live less than an hour from Monsanto’s headquarters, and you can almost smell the Round-Up.

Macronutrients:

Technically, we’ve covered a lot about proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. They’ve learned about Nitrogen fertizlizer and proteins. They’ve learned about carb-to-lipid conversion for storage.

We delved deeper into the world of proteins via enzymes. We started a lactose digestion experiment, where the students are treating milk in different ways using Lactaid (lactase supplement) to digest the milk.

The cool part is that the lactase turns the lactose into sweeter sugars, which the students then test on a relative scale to measure the digestion rate. They’re using an array of sugar waters to compare sweetness (Not unlike Scoville testing)

Some groups are also using coke/pepsi to lower the pH of their milk without making it unpalatable (like vinegar would).

Where We’re Headed:

I’m going to use the enzyme thing to launch into cells and antibiotics. The antibiotics part was brought up heavily by the movies, and the kids are already quite interested in things like MRSA. Which gets us into prokayrotes who are the gateway drug to the rest of cytology, let’s face it.

The organelles have me stumped. I’m trying to think of a way to introduce them with having to make a grocery list of names and functions.

I’m rolling around the idea of showing different cells that are highly differentiated that have their oraganelles stained. That way kids can make generalizations about “that pancakey looking thing” and why it would be englarged in a liver cell versus a muscle cell.

Any ideas are welcome and appreciated! YAY SCHOOL!

It’s not like I’m one of those crazy people who are totally against it [Evolution], I’m just not sold on it.

– A precocious, incorrigible teenager in rural Iowa

What’s a teacher to do? I’m not a kool-aid salesman, but I’m also not a it’s-ok-to-deny-something-just-because-you-don’t-like-it guy either. I mean, just because Richard Dawkins is just as intolerable as Chef Ramsay doesn’t mean I hate evolution or cooking (quite the contrary, actually).

Where to begin? I just rewrote this sentence looking for evolution’s analog to “bible-thumping,” but I couldn’t figure it out. Anyways, I can’t just do that, they’ll just repeat me without actually listening.

It’s the same reason that so many people raised in the church end up hating the idea of religion. If your misconceptions aren’t addressed, you’ll just go on assuming everyone else doesn’t get anything either, which leads to all sorts of bizarre psychologies (and inane YouTube comments).

I’ve come to rest pretty heavily on mitochondria and squid. There’s just something about both of those that seem to flesh out the whole concept of evolution for me in a way that doesn’t seem so, well, because-chuckyD-said-so.

Not real, but awesome.

On that note, let me know what you know or have about mitochondria (looking for a plush toy, too)

Second, squid just seem to be so far unrelated to us, yet so, so… smart? I have to bring them up. Each leg has a brain. What a solution!

Finally, there was a super awesome documentary on PBS/NOVA/IDK about cuttlefish that showed their extremely awesome skin and hypnosis patterns. Does anyone have a link? I can’t find it.

OH! P.S> I also want to dissect a squid! Anyone know where to get a few big ( >3′) ones and how to keep it from reeking?

I picked this idea up, like so many things, from Dan Meyer. He claims that it’s one of those games–like chess or mancala–that just has always existed.

My students have become enamored with the game, which we’ve dubbed “Lone Wolfs.” It’s an unintentionally awesome play on words spoken by a student earlier this year (“We’re just two lone wolfs”) The time spent trying to understand whether that was poetry or paltry grammer was longer than you’d expect. Anyhoo…

Here are the rules:

1. Choose a positive integer
2. You lose if you choose the same number as someone else
3. Lowest number wins

Strategy and tactics abound, but my students keep coming back to the central argument that number of players matters most.

I put together a quick website that sets up games for a random number of players. Give it a play, play it with you students. There’s always a live game, and it starts over immediately. Help us gather statistics!

[FYI: if you put your phone number in to receive text messages, that information is destroyed at the end of the game, I promise.]