Our Graduates

Celebrating academic accomplishments is good for the soul.

Plant Growth and Skills

Students in my middle school classroom are participating in an activity were they are growing Wisconsin Fast plants. During the seed germination part of this activity, students made daily sketches of the seeds. They labeled the radicle and cotyledons. They also labeled the seed coat and hypocotyl. Students used magnifying lens to enlarge the small cabbage seeds.

First Sunday of May

Temperatures in the 80s and partly cloudy. Just finished watching a baseball game on TV. I have been looking for some fun activities for my science classes for this coming week online. Spring time has always been a difficult time to keep students on task.

I have a lab activity that is based on Wisconsin Fast-Grow plants. I am just not sure my students will enjoy this. The activity starts with students observing germination and characteristics of seeds. Monday will be a great time to start this project. It is important that my students learn how to setup a controlled experiment. They have no idea what is meant by terms like dependent-independent variable, control group-experimental group. So, I plan to have them use this activity to learn by doing.

Preparing for the EOC/EOG again

So much to cover, so little time to do it.

It is that time of the year again and our students are ready to play. They do not take EOG/EOC serious. I listen to them laughing and say stuff like, they can't hold me back, I have already repeated 8th grade. Some mumble a threat that they are going to drop out when they turn 16.

What can a teacher do? We are in grade 8. These students have been behind since they started school or before. I am not whining, but I am not a magician.

Both boys made it clear that they prefer doing activities to doing book work. Even though both boys wanted to avoid book work and would prefer doing things with their hands, that did not mean that they didn't want to do any book work. In Shop, for instance, Andy didn't mind taking notes about different kinds of batteries. I wrote in my field notes: "Why are they so well behaved in Shop?... Do they not mind doing the book work and notes because they get to do projects and activities, too?" I noticed too, that the Science and Social Studies teachers, who do a lot of projects and activities, don't do so exclusively. Again from my field notes: "'Activity-based' teachers don't always do activities. They still deliver content, and review, and take tests.

Motivating Learning: The Underachieving Learner's Perspective, Summary Report
of a Pilot Study by Mike Muir
We have trying this approach, but there comes a time that in order to pass the tests, specific content has to be reviewed and assessed. It is the law.

Phishing Attempts Via Google Calendar

Over this past month, I have gotten two random appointment requests on
my Google Calendar. I reported the first one to Google, but did not
even get an email from Google over it. Word of warning: do not use
Google Calendar. There are shifty shady characters trying their best
to lure you into giving them money.

I am deleting Google Calendar. You might should consider doing the
same. You sure will not hear from Google- they could care less about
the little guy.

Night Out with my Father

It has been a long time since I have taken the time to attend an event like last night. I have been invited to this annual wild game cooking party, but something has always kept me from attending. When my father, 83, visited our family doctor this week he got invited again. The doctor is one of the main hosts of the event. He extended an invitation to me as well.

The weather was absolutely perfect. Cool enough so that the charcoal grilled venison steaks, grilled air-dried country sausage, (real) buffalo chilly, fried catfish, herb broiled quail, Eastern North Carolina chopped pork barbecue, baked yams, and my favorite- original recipe seafood gumbo. It was truly a feast to behold. The food was prepared by local businesses that sell products to farmers and landowners in our area. For example, the seafood gumbo was provided by a famous cabinet and construction company from Whiteville. I have know the owners since high school some 34 or so years. Mike, one of the owners of the cabinet shop, flew out to the mid west and killed the buffalo. He purchased a custom built rifle just for the hunt. If Mike had to put a price on the kettle full of buffalo chilly, he would have had to charge $1,000 per plate to come close to breaking even. Everyone was crazy about the gumbo. I noticed a local independent restaurant owner critiquing the steaming hot bowl of gumbo. I overheard him comment that he knew that a pot that large had to have cost over six hundred dollars to prepare. I immediately got another bowl full. Peanut butter sandwiches inhaled in my ten minutes of lunch time pales in comparison to the wild game cooked to perfection I eat Friday night.

As for those present, I will not try to list those that in attendance. However, I only saw two other teachers there. One was my future son-in-law. The other was a coach that is an avid outdoorsman. I did see a retired high school coach in the crowd. It was a real who's who of movers and shakers from our rural county. Our NC State Senator made a brief appearance, As did our current Sheriff and several NC Highway Patrolmen, some off duty and some on-duty. Those on-duty officers eat and ran. They probably stopped to ask that we move all those four wheel drive pickup trucks off the shoulder of the road. I parked very close to the food so my father did not have to walk far.

The best part of the evening was shaking hands and getting caught up with all my old friends. I chatted with people I had not seen in 15 years. It was like a homecoming. The funny thing is that none of the men there has a blog, none of them have a wiki, none of them could tell you the difference between Facebook or MySpace. I would be willing to bet that less than 5 of them use email. Yet, they all are making a living, have sent kids to college, could buy and sell most any thing they want, and hunted everywhere in the world, have boats, lake front, river front, or beach or mountain vacation homes. Technology is not part of their lives. Sure they have cell phones so their kids and wives and keep up with them. I did not see a single one of them with a cell phone stuck in their ear. The doctors there left their pagers/cell phones at home. The judges walking around with plates of catfish and cups full of their favorite beverage, could care less about answering text messages or if iPhones will have push email in July.

Social networking still is all about face to face personal contact. I am not going to miss another one of those events. It has been too long since I have been to a pig picking/wild game cooking. Blogging compared to wild game cook offs are a waste of my time. No one reads what I blog anyway. Who cares what a small town school teacher has to say.

Poll Everywhere in my classroom to engage thinking

I ran across Poll Everywhere and signed up for a free account. In a recent email, the folks at Condense, Inc, recently changed from offering prepaid blocks of votes to monthly subscription plans. Since I had registered for 100 free votes to try it out, they’ve transitioned me to their free plan which includes 1000 free votes every month, up to 30 votes per poll. They
wanted to make a useful product that is free for K-12 educators (schools today pay over $1000/room for hardware clicker systems). They’re providing an audience/classroom response system over ten times cheaper than buying hardware!

Brainstorming how to best use this tool to enhance learning, I am considering trying to use it to ask students to come up with their own Power Point Polls. I need a resource on how to write poll questions. I do not want the polls to be "do you like Rap?" However, it could be interesting if we could have all our students create their own poll and students vote. I do not think our polls will exceed 30 votes per poll. If they do, then our school may invest in Poll Everywhere. Free is good.

Eating too Late and Nightmares

I have always heard that eating too late in the evening can lead to nightmares. Is it true?

The other evening, my wife and I enjoyed a wonderful meal together at San Jose, one of our famous Mexican restaurant. San Jose is in Whiteville, North Carolina. It is located about 18 miles from our home. It is near Wally-World and Hibbetts Sporting Goods which we like to walk through after eating. The walk usually helps our meal digest. This dream may not have been the product of the meal, but it was weird.

In my dream, I had ordered a science kit to use with my students. One of those kits that come with everything we need. The kit arrived and my students were working on another project. Instead of using the kit, I put it way to later. My dream was interrupted by my dog jumping on my head and licking my ear. He does this when my snoring is so loud he can not sleep. I rolled over and fell back asleep.

When the dream resumed, some time had passed and I had pulled out the science kit. Students gathered around the box. It was a black box with handles. As the box opened, a plant-like puppet came out of the box. It was like the plant creature in some play I watched years ago- I think they called the man-eating plant--Seymour. Well, as the students participated in the activity, I noticed a packing slip that had written in bold print: "OPEN KIT IMMEDIATELY, CONTENTS ARE...I could not make out the rest of the notice. But in my horror, I realized that the kit had a human-like being in the kit that ran the puppet. It had been in the box, locked in the cabinet. Another piece of paper appeared stating that if the kit was not opened within two days of arrival, the school would be charged a daily rate of use for the kit. [...dreams of fine print? Lord, help me!]

The dream seemed to restart at a point where the bill and the overdue fee for the rental of the science kit had come due. The school board had me sitting at a table and were threatening to fire me. This woke me up!

Someone could make this into a horror short-film. Maybe this summer, I can make the time to storyboard this nightmare.

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Using Wii to blog

This is my first time using my Wii with the Opera browser. I need a wireless keyboard. Using the Wii remote to type is too slow!

This Makes Me Sick

Teaching is a challenge. Students today are engaged in a plethora of hardcore criminal behaviors. Violent behavior is just beneath the surface of every conversation. Drugs plague our communities and spill over into the school yard. My point is that teaching is a hazardous endeavor. NEA has an interesting article online at the link below. Now in my last decade of teaching, I look at the number in the NEA article and want to throw up. Teachers are blamed for everything. Poor test scores, drop-outs, poor eating habits of fat kids, and more.

Oh well, what do we know, we are just teachers.

Check out this interesting article: Be prepared to self-medicate.

NEA: Professional Pay - Myths & Facts About Teacher Pay

MYTH: Teachers make just as much as other, comparable professions.

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Lesson Plan Template

This is a template we are now required to use for lesson plans. I am posting on my blog so I can share it with my fellow educators. There are several parts of this template that as a teacher, I am challenged to master and find quality time to implement. In coming blog posts, I will be investigating and sharing "how to" strategies. If you are reading this blog and you have POSITIVE- CONSTRUCTIVE comments, tips, or strategies you would like to share please share. I have been looking for links to resources online that may help, but have not found very much to brag about.

NewLessonPlan.dot

Last Week of the Fall Semester

This semester has been interesting in my classroom. I have been teaching, or trying to teach Physical Science, Biology, Earth Science, and both 7th and 8th grade science. Admittedly, I have not covered every topic in lectures, demonstrations, or even lab activities. Also, my classes are very small. However, I do not feel like I have accomplished anything. Students have been used videos, textbooks, activities, laptop computers with online resources, digital camcorders, graphing calculators with probes, peer-tutoring, and lots of teacher student conferences.

Reflecting on how I could have met the needs of my diverse students and broad spectrum or science concepts I do not have a clue. Trying to keep the curriculum relevant and rigorous is highly impossible with so many different preparations.

Burned-out is a good way to summarize my feelings.

Tidy Up Your Teacher's Desk

This post is inspired by an article I read in a Wired Magazine, Allen, David. "Tidy Up Your Desk...." Wired Aug.2006: 022-023.

1. "Stack the Knickknacks", well, not sure teachers have these because students do not give teachers anything these days. My desk is covered with curriculum CDs, a US/NC flag, whiteboard markers (most of them are almost dried out), a cup for pencils I find on the floor, and several coffee mugs. I guess coffee mugs would qualify as knickknacks. Pile it up until you can see the desktop
   
2. "Line up the books and binders to establish a perimeter for your work area." I would not really recommend this for a classroom. Piled up books end up falling when students try to slip late homework on your desk and then accuse you of not asking for their homework or tell their parents or guardian you lost it on your desk. Do I like do, throw the textbooks in a box and stick them in the back seat of your car. I have used the say textbook for so many years I have the answers memorized. I only use them to write lesson plans. They have the Standard Course of Study numbers our school district requires on lesson plans so they can fire teachers that have poor test scores by saying we are not teaching the curriculum.
   
3. "Hit the Container Store." Container Store? Forget that! The only place I can afford to go to is Big Lots. I bought some cheap CD containers. They are full. I need to weed my collection. Bet I have some CDs of Apple software that will not run on Leopard. I also park my truck near the school dumpster at the beginning and end to the school year. When teachers retire or quit, I volunteer to carry their old stuff to the dumpster. If there is something like document trays or pencil holders, I just drop them in the back of my truck and keep on going.
   
4. "Set Aside A Few Minutes daily to clear your desk." The Wired Magazine article suggests using your daily planner to schedule time each day to clean off your desk. Use iCal or Google Calendar to make a repeating appointment, each school day, to remind you to clean off your desk.
5. "Create A Folder Hierarchy." The article changed describing the desk to the computer desktop. Tip: "group files into folders labeled by year, then make subfolders for each set of tasks. Make sure your naming conventions are clear and concise." This is a problem on my Windows machine. However, I love Leopard's new feature called Quick Look/Slideshow. This is awesome for unorganized teachers like myself. I never remember what I saved a file as. If I download a curriculum file from our State Department of Ed, they name their files differently and I never remember to rename them.
6. "Color Code Your Files." Sweet! I am not going to do this. The article recommends using bold colors for "urgent" files.
   
7. "Move Your Folders." This tip is lame. "...create a desktop shortcut pointing to current assignments." Have you heard about Box.net? Instead of using a flashdrive, I am trying this. Shortcuts are useless if you are having to work on multiple computers at home and at school.
   
8. "Choose Attractive Wallpaper." I like this tip- "if you've got a background worth looking at, your're more likely to keep the desktop free of file and folder clutter." I am doing to download some photos from Harley-Davidson for their bikes and maybe set up that "retirement date" ticker. That is worth looking at. Cheers!

Happy New Year.

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Remembering the Green Swamp

Festive Freaking Fruit Flies

With temperatures in the lower 70's today and upper 60's yesterday, fruit flies have invaded the sweet potato processing plant next door. I have sprayed Black Flag so much that my coffee tastes like bug spray. If I had the money, I would be on a cruise or in the mountains skiing. However, low teacher pay makes this only a dream.

The exact same thing- Invasion of the Fruit Flies, last year at Christmas time.

Prevention

The best way to avoid problems with fruit flies is to eliminate sources of attraction. Produce which has ripened should be eaten, discarded or refrigerated. Cracked or damaged portions of fruits and vegetables should be cut away and discarded in the event that eggs or larvae are present in the wounded area. A single rotting potato or onion forgotten at the back of a closet, or fruit juice spillage under a refrigerator can breed thousands of fruit flies. So can a recycling bin stored in the basement which is never emptied or cleaned.



People who can their own fruits and vegetables, or make wine, cider or beer should ensure that the containers are well sealed; otherwise, fruit flies will lay their eggs under the lid and the tiny larvae will enter the container upon hatching. Windows and doors should be equipped with tight-fitting (16 mesh) screens to help prevent adult fruit flies from entering from outdoors.


Eradication

Once a structure is infested with fruit flies, all potential breeding areas must be located and eliminated. Unless the breeding sites are removed or cleaned, the problem will continue no matter how often insecticides are applied to control the adults. Finding the source(s) of attraction and breeding can be very challenging and often will require much thought and persistence. Potential breeding sites which are inaccessible (e.g., garbage disposals and drains) can be inspected by taping a clear plastic food storage bag over the opening overnight. If flies are breeding in these areas, the adults will emerge and be caught in the bag.

After the source of attraction and breeding is eliminated, a pyrethrum-based, aerosol insecticide may be used to kill any remaining adult flies in the area.

simple fruit fly trap

A better approach, however, is to construct a trap by placing a paper funnel (rolled from a sheet of notebook paper) into a jar which is then baited with a few ounces of cider vinegar. Place the jar trap(s) wherever fruit flies are seen. This simple but effective trap will soon catch any remaining adult flies which can then be killed or released outdoors.

Source: http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef621.asp

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My Ustream.TV Christmas Greeting

Twitter or Pownce

As a classroom teacher, I should probably avoid using presence social networks altogether. I once was told by one of my college professors that if you coach sports, or mess with politics, and teach school-- you must live in a mobile home because you have to move often. Online presence my be the new coaching/messing with politics topic in the coming days. 

Saturday, December 15, 2007, the kind folks at Twitter.com warned of impending network disruptions. Early in the morning, I began to notice folks looking for alternate Twitter-like solutions. Pownce was the immediate preferred replacement. The chatter flew. Someone quickly posted a wikispaces page for educators to "help transfer twitter refugees to Pownce". Great use of a wiki! 

After joining Pownce, I added about 30 educators as my friends. As I was busy sending invites on Pownce, I keep noticing Twitter was still online in and Twitterrific continued to refresh. Heck, Twitter has never been known for having the most stable API. I think that is part of the alure for me. Twitter is like my old CB radio. It has channels in that I follow educators that I have read their blogs, attended their professional development sessions, or listened to their podcasts or vlogs. These 30 educator "friends" in Pownce pales in comparison to the humble 75 educators I follow on Twitter. 

I love the enhanced features of Pownce and plan to try to continue to use it as long as others stick around. 

Social Networking in our School

Fifth period class was well underway when one of my students asked if I had gotten the text. It was caught off-guard by the question. My first instinct was to say yes. However, day had not been a normal day. Students were mostly in shock. One of their classmates had been missing since November 19th. A body had been found
and positively identified as the your male. Several of my students had known the student since kindergarten, others were related to him. The student that asked me about the text message was kind enough to share the message with me. I have deleted the names from the message but wanted to blog the content of the message.

Fr: Jus yesterday Delemerz was found dead n we want 2 send lov 2 da family n hope that justice is done
R.I.P. DELEMEZ WE LOV U!
KEEP DIS CHAIN GOING!
De 6 9:14 a.m.

None of my students needed to check their emails, MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, personal blogs, typepad, and more are all blocked. Still their social network was uninterrupted.

My sympathy's are with the families and classmates in their time of bereavement.

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Is Your School "Crackerjack"?

Cold drizzling rain and cloudy skies met me and our dog Gavin on the Sunday, the last day of Thanksgiving vacation. The weather ran us back into warmth of comfortable couch and my MacBook. While checking my email, I glanced at the list of articles in summarized in the New York Times. I subscribe to their daily email feeds on a few topics that that generally find interesting and thought provoking.

This morning, I read an article that warmed my heart and got me to thinking about why I teach. Let me just say, it is complicated. This article has a great phrase that I plan to steal: 'crackjack'.

Let's ask the question: Is Your (our) school- crackjack? If not, then why.

The New York Times: Reference Search for 'crackerjack'

crackerjack
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Dictionary

crack·er·jack (krăk'ər-jăk') pronunciation also crack·a·jack (krăk'ə-)
adj. Slang.

Of excellent quality or ability; fine.

[Probably from CRACK, first-rate + JACK.]
crackerjack crack'er·jack' n.

logo The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. See crackerjack on Answers.com

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Wanted in my Science Classroom: Asus EeePC

Have to share this educator's first impressions of the Asus EeePC. Would this device serve the purpose of a school? Can its configuration be customized to meet the restrictions of school districts? Can it support our wireless printers? Can students and teachers maintain the device without overwhelming tech support?

I love the idea of it being the size of textbook (smaller than most science textbooks). When I saw it has a built-in webcam I was sold! What do you think about using it in your classroom?

source: http://edu.blogs.com/ewanmcintosh/