Cow Pies in the Classroom

It has not been a very exciting time since my last posting. However, things do happen that keep life in the classroom interesting.

Two weeks ago we had student-led, parent conferences. I caught a chest cold and have been fighting it ever since. The six years I was out of teaching I think I had a total of two colds. Now I have one every fall and again every spring. I suspect the ninth graders are the source. They seem to have no concept of germs (bacteria) as they pass around water bottles and soda pop containers. Sometimes up to four different kids will drink out of one bottle.

I inherited the district’s greenhouse when I volunteered to teach Natural resources. This past week they hooked up two LPG tanks to supply heat. The horticulture teacher used to have the kids doing hanging baskets and vegetable plants. I will be using a different approach and teaching the kids how to do grafting of conifers and how to root conifer cuttings. We will do flower seedlings in the late winter. I want to have some things to sell for community day.

Community day is unique to Eatonville. The whole school closes at noon on or near May 1. Clubs and other school groups set up stands on the school property and sell various things to the public. The elementary schools provide students to do a Maypole dance. A fun time is had by all. We just have to watch for Middle School students coming onto the school grounds and causing problems with their immature behaviors.

Every once in a while something will happen in the classroom that can only take place in a rural school system. Two days ago I was doing a lesson in equation writing with my first period chemistry students when there was a slight commotion. One of the boys asked if I had a hose he could take outside. He was disappointed when I said no and that the outside faucets could only be turned on with a key. The students around him were waving at him and holding their noses. When I gave them a puzzled look, they told me that there was a very bad smell coming from the boy. He was upset over the commotion he was causing. It seems that he gets up every morning at 5:00 AM and does chores on the farm. This morning he was repairing some fencing around the cow pasture and walked through a number of cow pies (cow flops or poop). The excrement was all over his boots and part way up his pants. He had tracked it into my room (luckily I don’t have carpet) and was quite aromatic (for once my cold was helpful). I sent him outside to clean his boots, without much success. He finally went to the lavatory where he managed to get everything off and then wiped up the floor when he returned to class.

One of the other boys started to criticize him but shut up fast when I pointed out that getting dirty doing honest work is nothing to be ashamed of and getting up to do an hour or two of dirty work before school is something to be admired. I have a number of older students who are very hard workers outside of school. Sometimes they don’t see a need for the same amount of effort on their intellectual type of work.

We got the word this week that we have to plan ahead for sophomore and freshmen students who don’t pass the end-of-year science test for graduation. It will be given to biology students and administered through the state. The WASL was such a fiasco that the state has moved in this direction. Students who normally take just two years of science (the graduation requirement) must now pass this test. Since many of them will not pass it, we will have to figure some way to offer two or three more sections of a biological based science. They have to retake the test until they pass or they will not graduate, even if they pass the class. I hope the impact on our higher level classes is not severe but I am afraid there will be some negative impacts.

Two weeks until Christmas break. The last day of school is our Christmas assembly. It seems that a bunch of kids got together and for their Christmas wish want me and another teacher to sing a song at the assembly. I'll let you know how it goes.

Fantasies

Education is full of fantasies. They start at the bottom of the ladder with the students and work their way up to the top at the state level.

A large number of ninth grade students think ninth grade is for socializing with their friends and ignoring teacher directions and assignments. They beiieve that they will become tenth graders, regardless of how they perform as freshmen. Extra credit is a common request, especially by students who do not do assigned work. When they are criticized or told in a firm manner to stop , they reply with comments like, “I’ll tell my mother.” or “You can’t make me.” or “I didn’t do anything.”

The root of this fantasy is that ninth grade students belong in the senior high school setting. Freshmen students cannot be treated like the older high school students. They do not have the necessary maturity. Failure rates are high and behavior problems abound. Ninth graders belong with the seventh and eighth grade students in a junior high school where they can be transitioned to the high school.

Another fantasy is that sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students mix well in a middle school setting. It is interesting that sixth grade teachers want the old kids kept away from their students and prefer their own area of the middle school. Then too, the eighth grade students think that they “rule the roost” because they are the oldest. Ninth grade students would subdue this attitude.

Recently the state of Washington has been fantasizing about graduation requirements.Starting with the class of 2013, all students need three years of math to graduate. They need algebra and geometry to get a high school diploma. The fantasy is that all students can be successful in these math classes regardless of ability. The majority of the students can’t pass the tenth grade math exam that is supposed to test basic skills so why not up the graduation requirement?

Another fantasy is the idea that people who have never been public school classroom teachers can conduct studies to determine the future of education in this country. Or that college and university instructors know how public school students should be taught when they never had to deal with that type of student. These individuals repeat what they have read in books and rehash old ideas using new names.

The biggest fantasy of all pertains to the idea that most politicians want to do what is best for students, not their political careers. More than one graduating class has been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Luckily, students who want to learn, will learn, in spite of the latest educational dogma and politically inspired educational requirements.

Before I fall off my soap box, I will step off of it and mention a few things about this past week.

We are preparing for parent conferences. These will be student led and focus on student testing results and on post graduation plans. Unfortunately there is not much time for parents to talk with their children’s teachers about how their youngsters are doing in their classes. This trend seems to be prevalent throughout the educational community and ignores what most parents really want to do. Then they wonder why inducements like extra credit are needed to bring out the parents.

My freshmen are taking more interest in the Natural Resources class. I started a plant unit and we will work toward lessons on grafting and rooting cuttings in the school’s greenhouse (which was being used for storage). Of course there are a number of them who still haven’t lost their childish behaviors andregularly get into trouble. I am concerned about handing out exacto knives to some of the more moronic classmembers.

My physics students did pretty well in a triangulation lab using surveying equipment to determine distances and elevations. The chemistry students are trying to master stoichiometry, with varying degrees of success. But I have high hopes for them all.

Observed by the Principal

Today I had a visitor. The high school principal sat in on today’s lesson. It is part of his job to observe and evaluate each tenured teacher twice a year. New teachers are observed more often. After the observation, an evaluation is prepared and presented to the teacher. It becomes part of the teacher’s permanent file and if the rating is poor, steps are taken to bring about some improvement.

I remember my first observation at Weatherly Jr.-Sr. High School. I was twenty and several of my students were my age. It was done by a representative from the county rather than the district and it was a disaster. The students put on an obvious act for the observer. I had been hired in January to teach six math classes, all different. (I was the fourth teach that year. The first three all walked away.) She observed my 11th grade, general math class. It was near the end of the year and I was losing control of this particular class. I was even considering quitting and joining the army, even though those were the days of the Vietnam buildup.

But I survived and the following year was experienced and teaching science classes. The same person observed me in November and gave me a superior rating and I have survived almost 80 formal evaluations with all satisfactories and aboves by at least twelve different administrators in my 38+ years in four different districts.

I have always wondered about the procedure universally followed by administrators. The teacher is given advance notice of up to a month as to the date of the observation. Then a preobservation meeting is held with the planned lesson being reviewed. Afterwards, the administrator observes the lesson and does a written report for “the file”. It is a little bit like college, where a lesson is prepared that will impress the administrator and keep everybody happy. If the teacher “screws up” with all of that advance notice, he/she definitely needs help.

Some of us experienced teachers don’t worry about doing anything special for the observation. We know we are observed everyday by over 120 observers who really matter- our students. We do a “show” for them everyday. The principal is just another body among many.

I have always believed the principal needs to drop in at random to do observations. Then he will really know what is going on in a classroom. Of course the principal needs to observe with several goals in mind: give a pat on the back for good things, a kick in the ass for bad things, and be a resource to help the teacher improve.

Every teacher can always benefit from helpful input from any observer. The problem is, however, that teachers are by and large the most insecure people around when it comes to a feeling of job security. If the principal is a rare visitor to the classroom and only points out negative aspects of the teaching techniques, then the teacher will develop fear toward the principal and be one “unhappy camper”. The “drop in” observations take on the aspect of harassment. But handled properly (in a helpful and positive manner), they are more effective than the “dog and pony” show the principal usually gets to see and no teacher will feel threatened.

By the way, my evaluation was exemplary and I believe he enjoyed the two oxygen production demos I did for my first period chemistry class.

Measuring Up

I have two sections of ninth grade students taking a course I helped develop at the county level called Natural Resources. It is available for students to take as either a science credit or a CTE (Career Technical Education) credit. It is oriented toward the students who are not planning on attending a four year college. The past two weeks we have been doing drafting with drawing boards, T-squares, architect scales, and other equipment.

The first disaster was an assignment to draw a 4”x6” square centered on a sheet of paper. I thought most of the students were just being difficult when they said they could not do it. After the third disastrous drawing, I had them do a scale drawing of the front of the high school building. Then I discovered the reason for the difficulty: most of them could not read a ruler. It was like beating my head against a wall as I showed student after student the 1/8 and ¼ marks on the scale. They had no comprehension of the fractional divisions on a scale/ruler.

Then this one girl asked to be excused on the first day of the scale project to go work on a history project. I told her she would fail the drawing if she missed the introductory information. She said she didn’t care. She missed day one. Then on day two she showed up in the middle of the class period. On day three she just sat in the corner of the classroom with two other girls and ignored what the rest of the class was doing. When class ended for the day, she came up to me and said she wasn’t able to complete the assignment because she was absent and didn’t understand it. I was very sympathetic and was moved to tears as I told her that was her choice and have a nice day.

Meanwhile my physics students are studying triangles by triangulating the distance to Mount Rainier from our football field. Then they have to determine the height of a radio tower on a ridge about two miles away. I have two theodolites on permanent loan from a local surveying company. They were just collecting dust in the owner’s garage. Some of the students are really getting “into it”. Meanwhile, my ninth graders can’t even read a ruler and they don’t think that is a problem.

Their math teacher is doing algebra (no one gets general math anymore) and rulers are not part of the curriculum. Whenever they were taught to use rulers, it obviously didn’t stick. Meanwhile the state wants all students to take math through geometry to graduate. I doubt they will “measure up” and are in danger of becoming dropouts.

Teaching is Never Boring

Yesterday my ninth graders started working on a drafting unit. I have them use drafting tools to draw simple geometric shapes with specific measurements. Eventually we get to the point where they are able to do scale drawings. Then when we start studying maps they have a better understanding of map scales and what they are showing. The first assignment involves drawing a 2” x 3” rectangle in the lower corner of a sheet of paper to be used for the student name, date, class, and assignment title. Then a 4” x 6” rectangle was to be drawn in the exact center of the same paper. All sides of the rectangles were to parallel the sides of the paper.

You would have thought I was asking them to do calculus. I had to baby them through the assignment. Eventually most of them completed the assignment with various stages of accuracy. In my last period of the day the students were getting their equipment together to begin work. I was helping some students get started when I heard a loud CRACK. Upon investigation I discovered one of the boys standing with his equipment and blood running out of his nose. He threw his drawing board across the room and started calling one of the girls a “fucking bitch’ followed by an interesting string of obscenities. Meanwhile the girl was just sitting at her desk trying to ignore him.

It turns out that he had used his board to push her board part way across her desk. She told him to stop and she stopped his pushing. He held his board in front of his face and she pushed it into his face, catching him across his nose, thus the blood. His response was to slam his board across her skull much like Randy Orton using a chair across the head of John Cena. The board was cracked and she appeared to be unaffected by the whack. He weighs about 80 pounds (35 kilos) and she weighs about 200 pounds (90 kilos). I turned the incident over to the administration and they proceeded to handle it since I had 31 other students working with the same equipment to monitor.

I am not really looking forward to teaching these students how to graft trees. I can almost imagine the carnage that might result when I put exacto knives into their hands.

Which High School Grade Has the Most Morons?

Today there were a few incidents at school that led me to think of this question, and at the same time also come up with an answer.

My school district has what is supposedly a cutting edge “deployment” of students. Our sixth graders go to our middle school, where the teachers want them segregated from the 7th and 8th grade students. Our ninth graders go to the high school where their middle school maturity leads to all kinds of interesting situations and the upperclassmen wish they were segregated from them.

This year we have been required to institute a half hour study session that actually runs twenty minutes for students in grade trouble. I have sophomores and seniors while my neighboring teacher has freshmen and juniors. We have been telling our students the expectations for three weeks. Many of the freshmen have no idea what is going on. Some of them have decided they don’t care if they are failing everything. Others are angry because they can’t go “hang out” with their friends who are passing everything. They have to stay in the “study hall” and do work.

Meanwhile, in my freshman science class, I had an interesting “moronic” incident. A boy was playing with a tennis ball and fifteen minutes before the end of class he shoved it down the front of his jeans. He then turned in his seat so the two girls to his left could see what he was up to. Somehow he thought I didn’t notice what he was doing. I was going to wait until the end of class (I was lecturing) to have a “chat” with him. But he kept playing with and adjusting it, so I told him to come up front. When he did, I told him I wanted the tennis ball. He had to reach next to his crotch and work the ball down the inside of his leg. He handed it to me with a smaile that disappeared real fast when I told him he was being reported for inappropriate sexual behavior. After class I explained to him that using a tennis ball to make a bulge like a big penis or large testicles was inappropriate and doing it to girls was a sexual harrassment.

When I asked him if his mother would be upset, he said it wouldn’t bother her. I said “We’ll see later tonight.” Ten minutes later I called his home and spoke to his mother. She had just talked to him and he explained that he had the ball in his pants pocket and I took it from him. When I hung up five minutes later, she was very upset, with him.

Yesterday I announced to my freshmen that too many were going to the bathroom during class so the privilege was taken away. They were just going for walks. One of them told me I couldn’t stop her from going and if she had to go, she would just go. I was so frightened!

Freshmen kick each other, throw things at each other, get the most F’s, walk around in their own little worlds, BUT eventually they grow up and become normal people.

Phew!!!

This is my first chance to work on my blog since school started. I plan on retiring from teaching in three years and I guess I’ll go out “firing on all cylinders”. Chemistry is taking up a lot of my free time. I am so glad I spent much of this past summer building the curriculum and I was actually to get the first semester all set up. Doing a chem lab every week is very tiring but also very effective. I build each week around one basic concept or set of concepts with coordinated lecture, lab, and homework for the class.

I am enjoying teaching chemistry and watching student expressions “light up” as they understand various concepts. Their lab technique was not the best, but in just two labs I have seen a lot of improvement. The lab this week involves determining the thickness of the layer of zinc on a piece of galvonized iron. Hydrochloric acid will be used to remove the zinc and the students have to be able to work with mass, area, and volume to calculate the thickness.

Teaching a section of physics between my two chenistry sections is sometimes confusing to me. This is my third year of teaching physics and I am still becoming comfortable with the subject. So, of course, I had to also take on chemistry! I had a comment from one of my chemistry students the other day. “Why do the physics kids get to play with toys and we don’t?” I love questions like that. It shows that the kids are communicating with each other about science, not just what they did over the weekend.

Physics labs are set up differently from the chemistry labs. In physics I work on a number of basic principles to prepare the students to successfully complete a lab. The lab itself may take several days, unlike the single period labs of chemistry.

This week we are finishing the lecture/worksheet part of lessons on velocity and acceleration in physics. The lab I designed has several parts to it involving scale RC cars, friction powered cars, and model trains (HO and O scale). The kids will have some time playing with “toys” and learning science.

Then my afternoon classes become the focus for the rest of my day. I have two sections of Natural Resources, a class for students who have a history of difficulty with their science classes in the middle school. My major goal in these classes is not to simply teach subject matter. I also try to teach self esteem by helping them become successful without treating them like babies, not an easy thing to do.

We have been working on insects and the interest is high, as long as they don’t have to overexert themselves. For the past two weeks I have been after them to bring in jars so we can go outside and collect some insects. I have four jars from 60 kids (I have one class of 32 and another of 27) and 9 jars from one young lady, who insists on dressing like a boy. Last week she was punished by her mother. She was made to wear girl clothing and put up her hair.

The afternoon is when I have to fight the cell phone battle and stop kids from chasing each other around the classroom. One boy likes to take things from other students and run off with them. The other day in another class he knocked a friend’s hat off his head. The teacher had to intervene to separate them and prevent a fight. Then they were both supposed to come to my class but luckily one went home early. I have the kicking, socializing, forgetfullness, throwing of objects, refusal to do homework, and several other behaviors coomon to middles schools. It’s amazing how different these kids will be after I have worked with them for this year.

It’s too bad I can’t bring former students back who left the system and never finished. I know of several who have bad jobs or no jobs, with wives (whom they got pregnant in school) and kids to support, and have just about given up on having any sort of a good/happy life. Unfortunately the ninth graders have to learn these things for themselves since adults don't know anything about what they are going through.

I Am Back and Primed For Another year

I don’t know if I have been missed but I have been on vacation from school and I was very busy at the end of last school year.


Today was a teacher work day at school. We always spend a couple of days before school begins doing things that are supposed to make us better teachers. I have been in the classroom for almost 40 years now and I have pretty much seen it all come and go and then come again. It is interesting how a new idea comes up to improve student achievement which on closer inspection is just a new packaging for something that has been done before.

At the end of last year the chemistry teacher at the high school was given a different schedule for this school year. Now I will be teaching two sections of chemistry, one section of physics, and two sections of natural resources (a course designed so a student can receive CTE or science credit). My CP Science 9 is now being taught by another teacher. I gave up the CP Science 9 in order to teach the chemistry.

The previous chemistry teacher did very few laboratories with her students. I believe chemistry needs extensive lab work to ensure an understanding of its basic concepts. This summer I spent a lot of time designing chemistry curriculum and have the basic course designed with the lectures and labs all prepared for the first semester. The basic plan is to do one lab each week to reinforce the topic covered in the weekly lecture/lesson.

Last year I was also involved with a group of teachers in designing a course about natural resources that met the requirements of a biological science course or a career technical education class. It is for ninth grade students who have problems passing a traditional science course. My goal is to show these students that there is some value in education and help them to be successful as high school students.

We also got some recent news that students in the state of Washington are scoring low in tenth and fifth grade high stakes exams. What a surprise! The state has been vascillating on this whole topic for years and gave an all new battery of tests last year. This reliance on standardized testing for high stakes is not only disrupting the educational process but is also helping to convince students that they are stupid.

Then throw in the Federal Government’s Race to Top money and how it is being applied to force Charter Schools into state programs through bribery and I begin to wonder if the people in charge care more for the kids across the country or their own political careers. If charter schools are so great, then why not let public schools operate under the same conditions. Besides, how does filtering off the best students from the public schools help them become better?

The Race to the Top money is also being used to force more teacher accountability into the educational system. The problem is coming up with a way to do a fair evaluation of a teacher, Right now a clunky due process procedure has to be followed that depends upon the competency of the principal. Letting student testing play a role is ludricrous as is any other method that could turn things into a popularity contest. I'll talk more about this in a later blog.

As usual it is time to dump the blame on the teachers, create assinine simplistic fixes to our educational system, and then compare us to other educational systems around the world that do not even attempt to educate everyone in a well rounded educational program that includes the fine arts, athletics, and academics.


I should have lots to talk about this year from the viewpoint of a science teacher who loves what he does and has little tolerance for anyone who uses his kids for their own advancement- be it at the local, state, or national level. Of course my main intent is to let my readers know what goes on in my classroom as I interact with my students but I will do some agitating from time to time.

The Dropout Rate

We had a science department meeting this past week and one of the topics was our student dropout rate, which is above the state average. The principal would like ideas about how to reduce the rate.

Unfortunately that is a million dollar question. The federal government seems to think that the wholesale firing of teachers in schools that don’t become perfect is the solution. The department of education seems to think that requiring students to complete a battery of tests as well as three years of math through geometry and algebra II will help provide a solution to the problems of education. This emphasis on academics has not been without a decreasing emphasis on physical education classes (more fat kids) and tech education (fewer carpenters and plumbers).

The middle school philosophy is a great help. Spend three years developing a high esteem in each and every student at the expense of any substantial academic achievement. That way when they hit high school and academics are the focus, the self esteem inflation gets shot to hell when reality hits and students have to perform to advance. Too many students end up losing their self confidence and taking the “I am a loser attitude”. Or they do not accept the reality and responsibilities of high school, thinking they can be successful without it.

I have a number of students who will make no attempt at completing any in class or out of class work or assignments. They don’t just exhibit this behavior in science. It occurs in all of their classes. They have no explanantion for the behavior. They discuss the situation politely and then continue the behavior. Some come to school because of the courts saying they are required by law to be in school. Some try to go to job corps, thinking it is better than school for some reason. They can’t say why it is better. They just see it as some sort of a better alternative to what they are doing.

Some of these students are into drugs and incapable of making any sort of intelligent decision. We can hope they will turn their lives around but unfortunately many of them never do. However, once in a while I get through to one of them and that makes it all worthwhile.

They all want to live “the good life” but don’t necessarily want to work for it. Many of them just can’t make the connection between success and work.

Two hours ago I went to the front door and a former student wanted to say hello. He was in my science class five or six years ago and showed me almost no effort. But he had a bad situation at home and was living with relatives. When he asked me for a job, I hired him part time for a summer and worked with him on various projects. I treated him like an adult and gave him my trust. He was a responsible worker. The following school year he disappeared from school (dropped out) and I lost track of him.

Tonight he told me he has a good job where he is respected by his boss and has been employed for three years. It is a position with the possibility of advancement. He has his own place, pays his bills on time, and has benefits. He isn’t interested in getting a G.E.D. or any sort of diploma. He doesn’t need it right now and can always get one at some future time if he changes his mind. He likes the work and has job security.

Like I said before, the ocassional success makes it all worthwhile.

Water Water Everywhere

We had some excitement in the remodeled biology lab this past week. Students had been working on a microbiology lab for almost two weeks. One of the basic procedures involved sterilizing an innoculation wire with a gas flame from a Meeker Burner. Unfortunately the fire control system used sprinklers installed directly over the lab tables at about a height of about ten feet (three meters). You guessed it- a sprinkler discharged during the last period of the day. The water sprayed over students, five computers and sundry books and clothing. By the time it was two inches (five centimeters) deep in the hallway, twenty plus gallons had gone through the floor into the technology computer lab immediately below the biology room. Luckily the teacher saw it coming and moved about ten computers out of the line of fire. Classes were back to normal the next day.
The fire department was a big help with controlling the water spray and replacing the discharged sprinkler head. They also pointed out that the sprinklers in the science labs appeared to be residential sprinkler heads. They have a temperature release rating of about 130 degrees fahrenheit (55 celsius). Much too low for a lab setting. Nothing like taking the lowest bidder on a construction job.
I also discovered this week that I will be having some major changes in my teaching schedule next year, I will be teaching a basic reading class using science as the conduit. To do that, I have to give something up. Right now it appears to be my two college placement nine classes. Then I will also pick up something else to replace the second cp nine class.

What's Been Going On?

I have been busy at school so I have been truant from my blog. A few things happened at school during the past month that have kept life interesting.


One student fell asleep during a video about the moon. When the class was dismissed, he was sound asleep. When that happens, I tend to let him sleep until the next class enters. One year I had a student wake up about a half hour into the next period. He was very confused upon awakening. It was good for a chuckle and a learning experience for the sleeper. That type of thing stays with the kid for many years. He never fell asleep in class again.

The week before spring break, a ninth grade girl was suspended from school for a day. She came back on campus during her suspension to see her boyfriend and refused to leave. The police had to be called to remove her. They had to take her down to the ground twice before they got her into the patrol car. She then had her suspension extended for 58 days. Surprisingly, her mother withdrew her from school. I am sure she was immediately enrolled in her home school district. (She was an out-of-school-district student). We take these kinds of students for the state funding that comes with them. Sometimes it benefits us  financially and the student educationally due to a shortened bus route. Other times we spend more money on discipline and disruptions to the educational system than we get from the state.

My ninth grade CP Science students have completed several labs during the past month. They still haven’t learned to read the lab packet before starting to work. They start right in on the procedure without having preread anything. Then when they cannot complete the different steps they think it is too difficult to do and they get frustrated.

Unfortunately this behavior does not change very much through most of high school. Students just do not want to read and follow instructions when completing lab work. The minority who do read the instructions can only follow cookbook types of procedures. If they have to read and then interpret what they read to create a hypothesis, confusion and inaccuracies reign.

Either the instructional methods for reading trains students to regurgitate what they have read with little understanding, or the mental abilities of teenagers are restricted by their immaturity. I suspect the latter is the main culprit, since I remember how much easier I could interpret complex data/information to derive inferred hypotheses or mathematical data after I entered college.

Today we began a complex multimedia research project in CP Science Nine. Every student needs individual computer access. I will be sending five students to a neighboring biology class and five to the library to use PC computers. I have 14 student computers in my own room. The fifteenth needs a reinstall of the operating system. I have been waiting for three weeks to get the work done. Our district wide, two day a week, computer tech hasn’t gotten to me yet.

The first day of school the superintendent gave his welcome back speech and told us we have the best technology available for us and our students to use. Then he eliminated the district computer tech position and contracted with the local educational service district for a part time tech two days a week. Later all of the teachers were locked out of their computers and basically given student access levels. I can’t even correct the time of day on my computer. I have to do a work order.

In physics we are studying waves. I am spending two weeks doing lectures and labs about sound waves. One of the labs involved taking two paper cups and connecting them with 50 feet of string through their bases. The students were fascinted that they could talk to each other through the cups and that the sound waves went through the string. Then we spent two days manipulating a wave tank. Monday we work with resonance and will then be ready to study the properties of light.

Next week our sophomores will be taking the science WASL Exam. It is designed to show them how stupid they all are. Then the same students, and a large number of juniors and some seniors will take the math WASL to reinforce the idea of their stupidity. The juniors and seniors are exercising the rites of futility since they have failed it in the past and will probably continue to do so. As a trained educator, I abhor any test that is designed to punish and denegrate the intelligence and abilities of my students. It is not designed to improve education since the results are not fedback to any teacher in a way that can help that teacher improve the instructional methods in his/her classes for a better success rate. In a high stakes test having a high success rate is obtained by teaching to the test and the hell with anything else. Especially if merit pay is involved (a later blog topic).

Tomorrow I get to ride in a parade. I was selected by our school’s daffodil princess as her Educator of the Year. The Daffodil Festival is county wide and has been in place since 1933 (http://www.daffodilfestival.net/). The young lady who selected me was a ninth grade student of mine three years ago and last year took my physics class as a junior.

It is amazing what stays in kids memories. When she was in my ninth grade class, she was diagnosed with leukemia. It was during the first half of the school year. She had to leave school and do school lessons at home during the first year of treatments. During her last day in science class, she asked me if she and a few of her friends could make friendship bracelets from some wooden beads I had in a plastic box on a shelf. (I would not let kids play with the beads because I used them for a classification lab in my biology class.) I let them spend the class period making bracelets because I knew they would wear them and remember each other while she was undergoing her treatments.

When she surprised me with my selection as Educator of the Year two months ago, she gave me a copy of what she wrote about me. It was the bracelet story. I like to think that what I allowed her and her friends to do may have helped her just a little through her ordeal. She is a beautiful Daffodil Princess. She placed sixth out of twenty-two princesses. And most importantly, her leukemia treatments ended a few months ago (she had monthly chemo treatments while in my physics class) and now she will just be doing regular checkups as she lives a fairly normal life. Her college plans include training to be a pediatric nurse.

This is the kind of a story that makes me proud to be a teacher.

What a Tangled Web We Weave

The past few weeks have been interesting ones at school. There is a superintendent search going on and we met the three finalists this past week. During one of the presentations to the general public, I sat by a friend of mine who is a computer assessment guru at a neighboring school district and lives in our district where his children attend school. He found it hard to believe that the district doesn’t have a full time computer guy on the payroll. We contract with our local ESD for a tech 1 ½ days a week. The rest of the time the librarian handles the high school’s problems. I’m not sure how the other buildings handle their needs.

Many districts still wrestle with the new technology while other districts move ahead and manage to fully exploit its capabilities. I suppose that we fall somewhere between the two extremes, unfortunately near the lower end. For example, we went the first six months of school without an antivirus software throughout the district. The high school had just been remodeled and there must have been 200 new PC computers on the school network without any protection. We were lucky.

Students and teachers have both been aggravated since the district installed an internet filter and set it to maximum security. It has put strong limitations on surfing the world wide web for all of us. Then the teachers were given a higher level of access than the students. That meant we only get blocked ¾ as many times as the students. Some of these limitations are due to the lack of sufficient bandwidth coming into the district. According to the part time computer tech, we have about 40% of what we really need. I suppose as long as we have a restrictive filter in place we moronic teachers don’t have to make any decisions regarding the web sites being visited by our students or ourselves.

I believe getting students ready for life involves giving them some chances to make some wrong decisions while the consequences of those decisions are not so terrible. As long as teachers proctor computers while their students are working on them, the internet does not need to be so strongly filtered. If teachers are sitting on their asses when kids are surfing the net, then problems will arise that are the fault of the teacher, not the kids. That being said, there are times that even the most hawkish teacher will miss a student visiting an inappropriate site. But then, that is part of education. Students do get away with things once in a while and they will occasionally get caught. That is part of life.

Yesterday I asked to have chess.com unblocked so my chess club students could practice on my computers. It is blocked as a gaming site. I haven’t heard back yet. Then a formal email arrived telling me that I was causing problems with the computer network and undermining teachers. I had shown my physics students a simple computer game called pocket tanks. Two tiny tanks shoot assorted projectiles at each other to score points. Each player sets the gun angle and the power to try and score a hit. It is a free download off the internet. I used to use it to interest the students in projectile motion. When I let students play it from my thumb drive, some of them copied it into their network folder. A few of my advanced ninth grade students did the same thing. The librarian came unglued (she is our pseudocomputer tech) and reported me to the principal as the source of the pocket tank scourge that could destroy the computer network.

Then a formal email came from the principal to me that began with the statement that video games are not allowed in school. I think he mistakenly believes that pocket tanks is a video game. If he means any computer games, then I will point out that the games section of windows needs to be removed from all of the school district’s PCs. It will be interesting to see how far that I get with that approach.

I noticed Tacoma is looking for a horticulture teacher. That might be interesting. Instead of working with computers, those students would be working with pruners.

The Classroom Menagerie

Kids always enjoy animals in the classroom, within reason.

My ninth graders really bugged me a few weeks about some prospective class members. I had picked up two desktop aquariums from RiteAid for $10 each and set them up in the front of the classroom. Then some of the kids were into checking as soon as they entered the room to see if I had gotten any fish yet. When I put a beta into each tank, I started receiving regular instructions about putting them together and watching them fight.

I think a typical teenager has a little bit of sadism in his/her makeup. They are fascinated when the classroom has a large fish in it, especially if it is fed live food. I once had a gar in a large tank. Watching it grab a goldfish never became old for most of my students. Even a tank with a crayfish (crawdad) was a source of excitement whenever an earthworm was dropped into the tank.

For seven years I kept an albino California king snake in my eighth grade classroom. The only snake that is better to keep in a classroom is a corn snake. Both types tend to be very docile when they are used to being handled, provided they are left alone when shedding their old skin. The corn snake also has such small teeth that it is never a risk. The king snake will eat small mammals as well lizards and other snakes. It is the easiest snake to keep fed. Not only did students enjoy watching it feed after school, many of them also enjoyed handling it. Snakes in the classroom are an excellent way to help kids get over their fears of snakes. It has to be done in a careful manner and is not effective with all students.

Pythons and boas are too big for the classroom and are not native to this country. They don’t belong due to high risk and little actual educational value when compared to corn and king snakes. They also require larger food such as rats, which leads me to another classroom “prisoner”, the small mammal. Nothing stinks worse than a cage of mice, unless it is a cage with rats. They produce large amounts of urine and will stink up a room in no time, even if held in a storage area off of the main room. Students have enough smells to put up without also having to put up with smelly rodents. Having dirty cages is unsanitary and disrupts the educational process.

I used to raise gerbils to feed Leroy (my albino king snake). They don’t breed as fast as mice and need to be fed to the snake when young. But they are native to desert areas and produce small amounts of a pasty urine. Their odor is minimal and the smell is easy to contain. The hardest thing about feeding them to a snake is that they have furry tails as compared to mice with scaled tails, s they “look cute” even though they are close relatives.

When I taught in Pennsylvania I had as many as three tarantulas, one Asian scorpion, and the gar in my room at one time. Students enjoyed them and the only live food was crickets and goldfish. I never handled the scorpion but we had lots of fun with the tarantulas. My good friend, who taught science next door, got carried away. He was studying eastern rattlesnakes in their native environment and was raising some young ones from eggs. He even kept one in his room and often had it crawling on his desk. Once in a while it would bite him. (This was all illegal of course.) It had minimal effect. Then he almost died from a bite from a large adult in the field. After he was back to normal, he still played with the young one. However, when it nipped him again, his resistance had been compromised and he got quite ill. He released all of the young ones near a rattlesnake den and stopped playing with fire. Now he studies less dangerous forms of nature.

Security for any caged animal is important, since the custodians don’t relish coming across a snake, rodent, or large spider crawling around the classroom after dark. They also don’t care for the possibility of salmonella being produced in a dirty reptile tank. So many school districts have shut down classroom menageries and only allow a few fish in a small tank. Liability is a big concern, but so is security and cleanliness along with student allergies.

Being exposed to animals in the classroom is beneficial to students. For many it is their only opportunity to interact with wildlife in a controlled environment. Unfortunately too many teachers “get in over their heads” and create problems. But then there is the exceptional teacher like the one I met in Pennsylvania many years ago who had a menagerie in a specially built section of his high school that contained an alligator, a crocodile, and a caiman as well as up to twenty different kinds of snakes, a number of lizards, and several turtles. Everything was maintained by a herpetology club under his direction. It was a professionally run setup. Not typical to a high school, and most impressive.

It’s A Testy Time

The halfway point of the school year equals final exam time: something brand new to the ninth graders. We did the final exam testing last week and the kids seem to take it in stride. At least one freshman teacher gave his final exam before the schedule testing days. I'm not sure what he was thinking. Kids told me that they watched a movie during finals in  his class. Maybe he thought he was doing the kids a favor.

I have never agreed with final exams as a grading tool. Students who are doing well tend to do well in the final (It just means they are under that much more stress.) Likewise, students who are doing poorly in a class will do poorly in the test (even it is designed for them to do well). Many educators argue that a final exam gives these low scoring students an opportunity to improve their grades. I haven’t seen that happen more than a very few times.

Students going on to college have to learn to handle the pressure of final exams. I have no problem with testing these students since it helps them be more successful in college. The students who are not going to college do not need this experience. In fact, it just reinforces the feeling of hopelessness concerning school that predominates among these students. In my own basic science classes I deliberately design a test that anyone who is not a complete idiot can pass. Only apathetic students are not successful. Or should I say ‘pathetic’ students?

It seems as if the prevailing message across the land is that everyone needs to be prepared for college. That is unfortunate because not everyone is college material. But put a bunch of educators together and all of a sudden they forget reality and make up all of these benchmarks for students to attain. For example: all students in the state of Washington must complete Algebra 1 and 2 and Geometry to graduate. About 35% of Washington students are able to pass the math WASL so of course they are all capable of doing geometry. The old fashioned word for this thinking was “balderdash”!

Our final exams are scheduled at special times with two given each day for two hours each. Wednesday’s finals were interesting. School starts one hour later on Wednesdays so teachers can do all kinds of neat things relative to teaching/training. That meant that after finals the student class schedule was abbreviated. The afternoon classes were twenty minutes each. So of course quite a few students went home right after finals. The excuse was that their parents said it was ok. Lunch detention was so full this past week that they had to spread it out to additional rooms.

For my two fundamentals classes, I had the students complete a powerpoint about dinosaurs. I even let them start it two days before the scheduled final. Three students refused to do anything on the powerpoint. Two others did next to nothing on the powerpoint. It carried enough weight to raise grades for the semester nearly 10%. Only five students failed. Guess who they were.

Another day I’ll do a blog about student apathy.

Never A Dull Day

Last week was an interesting one at school. One of my freshmen girls came back from a five day suspension for fighting. She had said some things to a smaller senior girl who proceeded to slam her head into an elevator door. It gave me five days without hearing the word fu__ in my classroom. She came back and started dropping f-bombs right and left. I put a stop to it and it moved out into the hall during passing time. What an exceptional young ‘lady’. I consider her a “work in progress”.

I have another young man who wasn’t doing his work this past week. When I talked to him about his problems, he told me he doesn’t like to do any writing and would as soon take a zero in the assignment. If we did projects in science that involved building things, he would be fine. When I reminded him that he would not build a bridge project earlier in the year, he pointed out that that was with craft sticks. He’d rather work with power tools. Some kids are very difficult to reach but I just look on it as a challenge.

A third boy was loafing along, missing class on a regular basis and avoiding work whenever he did show up. Yesterday, he came into class and spent the whole period on task. Then an email came from the counselor telling me that he had just realized he needed to pass classes to earn credits. I guess he thought he was still at the middle school. He isn’t a discipline problem but he is definitely hurting himself.

Yesterday saw two fights on campus. One was between two guys that was stirred up by a girlfriend of the one. The other was between two girls who had said some nasty things about each other. Different teachers had to intervene to break them up. Fights between two boys usually involve a lot of posturing and hoping that someone will come along to break it up. I made a bit of a reputation for myself when I broke up a fight last year and didn’t even put my clipboard down to do it. But when girls fight, it is usually no holds barred and step between them at your own risk.

My physics students had a test today. Hopefully they did well since even the calculus students have trouble handling the math (algebra based) in the text. I don’t think high school students have developed enough mental maturity to interpret the questions and determine the proper method to arrive at an answer. The questions are often too complex for a junior or senior in high school but appear to be simple when they are just a year or two older. They know the mechanics but the setup is often beyond them. Part of the problem might be the way math is taught with repetitive sets of problems that involve little actual thought and limited problem interpretation.

Wednesday morning was a lot of fun. We had a faculty training session on computers. We were taught how to plug in a keyboard and mouse among other basics. It was unbelievable that the district paid money to bring in outside consultants to go over such basic information. I suspect the training was part of a requirement from the state to maintain our special rates for internet access. Computers have been a bit of a recent sore point among the faculty. We are following a business network model with a central server and all computers set up so we can only use them and not add any programs or peripherals. Unfortunately we do not have a full time computer tech on staff to do installations so our computers provide less flexibility than they did in the network system. The trainer didn’t know we had such restrictions and many of her points didn’t apply to us.

Never a dull day.

Sex Education

This topic hits more hot buttons than Evolution. I taught sex education to eighth grade students for five years. It was part of their health curriculum. The state of Washington requires the teaching of this topic. I think many parents are relieved because they are actually embarrassed to sit down and talk to their children about this topic.

I volunteered to take on health as part of the eighth grade science curriculum. The phys ed teachers had avoided the subject for years, short changing the students. I could see the need for the curriculum whenever I talked to students. I am not just referring to the high school pregnancy rate.

Students refused to shower after taking a P.E. class, leading to some smelly situations. The P. E. teachers had given up fighting this battle with the students. In conversation with different students, I arrived at the conclusion that most students weren’t too lazy to shower. They were apparently afraid that one of their classmates might be “gay” and would see them nude. Then the “gay” boy would obviously make a pass at them because a gay eighth grader has no self control around nude boys.

A number of the eighth grade girls had other problems. The high school campus was next to the middle school campus and high school boys were meeting middle school girls in secluded locations on the middle school campus. The girls were providing oral sex for the boys. We never did determine just how widespread the practice was, but when we caught two of them in the act, there were a number of upset parents spending some “quality time” with their suspended daughters. The girls thought oral sex was safe and they not only could not get pregnant, they also could not catch a STD (sexually transmitted disease) from the boys.

These were two of the immediate problem areas that needed work. The other, long term one was teen pregnancy.

Since I had the students for a full year of life science, I was able to develop a rapport with most of them before starting the health unit. I conditioned them to feel free to ask me any question on their minds and I always gave them straight answers. I got them used to words like penis and sperm so they got the giggles out of their systems. They felt comfortable with me.

I used a realistic approach with my students and only ever had one parent complain to me about teaching sex ed and told me he was standing up for all of the parents who were afraid to approach me. I felt sorry for his daughter and she was excused from the one day of “ask me anything about any sex topic, using the appropriate language.”

Eighth graders think they know all about sex. Their naiveté was interesting, to say the least. On ask any question day, the girls seemed to ask the most pointed questions. The mechanics of sex for procreation and effects of STD’s were part of the regular curriculum so the questions tended to be more about gays and how they could possibly have sex to why boys are so fascinated with girls’ breasts.

I never showed how to put a condom onto a banana but I did present a unit on birth control and abstinence. Many students previously thought condoms were 100% effective at preventing conception and STD’s. I pointed out how that train of thought could easily lead to problems later on. I always preferred to point out the consequences of sexual behaviors and focused my comments more toward the girls, since they could not walk away from an unwanted or accidental pregnancy. When I finished the unit, students understood that abstinence was the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy and STD’s. But they also knew how to handle situations where abstinence is not an option.

Studies show that teaching abstinence alone is not only a waste of time, it is misleading and criminal. Anyone who says otherwise, needs to get a teaching job in a different field where they will do less harm.

I enjoyed teaching health as part of my science curriculum. I felt as if I was having an effect on my students beyond academics alone. Students responded to the curriculum in a positive way and many of them looked forward to seeing me when I would regularly visit the science teachers on the high school campus. They would go out of their way to visit with me.

The WASL testing fever hit the state of Washington and I had to change my curriculum to reflect the demands of the science portion of the test. I converted my curriculum to the earth sciences and gave up the health unit. It was to be taught by the P.E. teachers. For my last three years at the middle school, it wasn't taught as a separate course or unit by anybody. Supposedly it was integrated into P'E' as part of a "wellness curriculum".