At the moment, for my part I am anticipating tonight with pleasure, mainly because of the free sandwiches the PTA supplies for us.
Oh, and for the pleasure of seeing your parents, too.
This was once the classroom website and blog for Mr. Stevenson's classes at Hufford Junior High. It is now a site to post random questions and to reach Mr. Stevenson if he is needed. Please use actual names, and be respectful.
I imagine that it partially depends on your performance over the past quarter, and on how your parent-teacher conferences went.
At the moment, for my part I am anticipating tonight with pleasure, mainly because of the free sandwiches the PTA supplies for us. Oh, and for the pleasure of seeing your parents, too.
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Today we started out by reviewing the SARs for the Southern Colonies text, including a brief discussion about the introduction of slavery, which we will explore more of next week. I'm anticipating assigning the CAR response on next Monday to be due on Tuesday.
In science, we began our new text on Mitosis, or simple cell division. Each group was given a set of photos of different stages or phases in Mitosis, and had to read through the descriptions of each stage in the text to figure out which stage each photo was of, as well as in what order the photos should be arranged based on in what sequence those stages occur. We also worked to close read the text and translate any difficult vocab. We will start working through the definitions after the test on Thursday, and they'll be due next Monday. Keep prepping for the Science test on Thursday. Know your Eukaryotic cells! Mut meen magain, maybe mot.
All agree alliteration's awesome. Today we previewed the remainder of the week: Wednesday is a half-day. There will be no after school events, because all students will leave at 11:40 AM, while the staff will remain for meetings in the afternoon. On Thursday we have parent-teacher conferences after school, so once again, there will be no after school activities. Friday there is no school, and conferences will take place in the morning. I will be finishing the conference schedule tonight, and sending it home tomorrow. In general, I appear to be totally booked for Thursday, so if parents of students who are not in my homeroom need to meet, it will likely be Friday or after school next week. I can block some time aside for that if need be. Today in class we blocked both periods for Social Studies: we finished cooperatively close reading the Southern Colonies Text, and then took the remaining time to work on the Short Answer Responses, which are due tomorrow for discussion. Tomorrow we will pick up with cell reproduction, as well as discuss the Southern Colonies text from today. We have our next Science test on Thursday. Make sure you know everything about Eukaryotic cells! Study study study! All materials for both classes are under their respective tabs. Ta! Today felt rushed, somehow. Still, we got a fair amount done.
First off, we reviewed the formative test for Eukaryotic Cells in class today as preparation for next weeks Summative Eukaryotic Cells test, which will be: Thursday! Be sure you study and review nightly! Speaking of the formative test we took yesterday, I did end up entering the grades from the first time through as belonging to the homework category because they were (predictably) low, while the grade after making corrections was entered as a formative category grade. Overall, grades are now looking decent, and should hopefully improve after our personal definitions we will do next week. Otherwise, we moved on to social studies. We reviewed our short answer responses for the Columbian Invasion text, and then passed out the next text: The Southern Colonies. That section of the website is now up under the social studies tab. We broke into our cooperative learning groups to work through translating the first page or two, and to generate at least two questions per page. The associated SAR questions were also passed out, and will probably be due next Tuesday after we finish reading the packet. That's all, folks! I'll finish grading the Pocahontas CARs this weekend, and everything should be updated by Sunday. Have a good one! Hmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Okay. So, the tests are graded and entered. There was only one perfect score, and many many imperfect scores. Given that on the nights before the test I had fewer than 30 visits to the website, and after talking to many of you, I am confident that most people did not study. For the most part, this resulted in an unusual grade distribution, with many people getting A's and B's (if they studies the correct material appropriately,) or D's and F's if they did not do so. I threw out some of the questions that most people missed that I agreed were too challenging, and the resulting average in all classes was around a middle C. So, a few ideas based on this: effective students who did well are those that create high quality flashcards, and then use them. I have students who studied low quality flashcards (not enough information or detail, which were made just to get the homework grade for having them done on time,) and who didn't know enough to do well, no matter how much they studied, because the flashcards lacked details. I also have students who simply didn't study, or who studied the wrong information. Remember, I set up tests AFTER we have finished the material in class. This means that AS WE MOVE ON TO NEW TOPICS, you are still supposed to study the old material. The alternative is no study time as we immediately take the test before moving on to new subjects, or to waste class time reviewing material, when the goal is to be an independent and disciplined learner. So, partially to address this, I am shortening the gap between finishing a unit in class by taking the formative assessment and taking the summative version to just 1 week, or seven days, or 5 school days. Secondarily, let me make it clear that success on this means you are actually reviewing the material several days in advance, and that you are using detailed and high quality materials. If you simply throw some words on a flashcard to get quick credit for it, you are getting an easy low value grade in exchange for a low high value grade later, which is....stupid from a long-term standpoint. In any case, today we took our Formative Assessment for Eukaryotic Cell Structures. That means that the Summative Test on Eukaryotes will be next Thursday. I am also going to change how formative test grades are entered. I have been including the original score (first time through) for teh formative tests in the comments section, but I worry that people are ignoring that information and just looking at the overall grade. Since previously this grade is from the test that has been corrected when using notes and then regraded, I am concerned that people are assuming they know the material and will do well on the Summative version because they got a good grade, when it is the lower original grade that is the most informative as a rpedictor of how people will do if they DON'T study. With this in mind, I believe I will enter both grades for before corrections and after. The before grade to clearly indicate how well you will do without preparation, and the after grade as a sort of buffer for the presumably low first grade and as an assessment of the quality of study materials. I'm as yet unsure if I'll enter those as formative versus homework category grades. I'll update to reflect that later. Otherwise, in social studies we just handed the due work in. Tomorrow we will review the Invasion SARs, and in science we will get into our new unit: cell division and genetics. Grading today's tests and getting them entered. They are...bizaare. It seems like most classes fell into two groups: those who studied over a long term and did well, and those who didn't. We shall discuss this tomorrow.
I said that I would put up a link for a simpler version of the Pocahontas Text, so here that is: http://www.ck12.org/book/U.S.-History-Sourcebook-Basic/section/2.2/ Don't forget, the CAR for the final question from that text is due tomorrow, as are the SARs for the Columbian Invasion text. Ta! Well, hello there! Today was a fine return to form. We took a brief moment to check off the flashcards for the Eukaryotic cell structures that were due today (all 25 of 'em!) and in most cases reviewed briefly for tomorrow's test on PROkaryotic cell structures. Do study, since this test will the first grade entered after the homework, and will have a huge impact. Basically, if you bomb this then you won't be able to bring your grade up for a few weeks at best. Study study study! We spent the majority of today talking about history. In particular, we noted the basic method we use to study historical events: using documents. Primary source documents are the originals from the time, and reflect the actions of people at the moment of history. Secondary documents are based on primary documents, and are written after the fact. There are even tertiary documents based on secondary documents, like many history textbooks. In this case, the benefit of examining such documents is it allows us to evaluate what really happened in almost mythic events set in our nations history. In particular, one of the founding myths of America is the helpful and loving Indian Princess: Pocahontas. Most of us are familiar with her story. Out of love, she saves John Smith from execution. But what really happened? In class, we started by examining two clips from movies that try to depict this event. The first is Disney's Pocahontas. In this, angry and fearful natives are about to kill Smith, but a loving and pacifistic Pocahontas intervenes to save him. In this next clip from The New World, the outlook and motives of the Natives are more ambiguous. The encounter seems more like an example of theater or politics, and less like a passionate drama. We then moved on to try to discover the origins for this story by reading some of John Smith's own accounts, as well as some excerpts from historians arguing whether these events truly took place as advertised by Smith. That is attached here: We discussed these as a class, and the final question of the text is due as a CAR on Thursday, as are the SARs for the Columbian Invasion text.
And that we have three days off. I need to catch up on my own homework...and I've got plenty! (My program is self paced, in that there is only one due date for all my math homework, but that due date is coming up soon!) Today we started out Social Studies with a brief overview and Q&A session about the civil rights era as prep for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is next Monday. As part of this, we watched a short video from the old standby, Crash Course, about the 1950's and the civil rights era. I'm posting the video below, starting at the point where civil rights starts getting discussed. I really hope that, as you enjoy Monday as a free day, that you stop to consider the incredible challenges and sacrifices that members of the Civil Rights movement faced. Not merely among the leaders such as Dr. King, but also the bravery of the individuals who protested and worked to end Jim Crow and Segregation. We then moved on to discuss and review the possible CAR responses from the Columbian Invasion text. The remainder of the period was spent working on the Short Answer Responses for the Columbian Invasion text that are due next Thursday (attached below,) as well as finishing the Flashcards for studying the Eukaryotes unit that are due next Tuesday. Ideally, this will leave everyone with nothing major to do this weekend other than prepare for the Prokaryotes test we will take on Wednesday. Study well!
Or some kind of stimulant. I don't know what was in the air, but people seemed universally exhausted today, and I was no exception. I even allowed myself to sleep in an hour, and I'm still really tired! Woe is me! Okay, enough whining. Today's plan is relatively simple, to my mind. In science, we started out by trying to identify the different structures in a Eukaryotic Cell based on a diagram. Part of this was to demonstrate the importance of proteins to cell structure and function. We then moved on to watch a short clip about how the info in DNA is transcribed to form a messenger RNA (mRNA) that could leave the nucleus to deliver the information to a Ribosome, where the info is then translated into the language of a protein. The last 2 minutes of the video are not critical, so we skipped them. It is: here! We then discussed this briefly, and finally took some time to take the information from the Eukaryotic Definitions presentation that we went through yesterday. (I gave out hard copies of that in class today, but remember that the presentation is also up on the website under the science tab....) Those flashcards will be due next Tuesday. And, no, I am not currently planning on using class time to work on those tomorrow.
In social studies, we got back into our cooperative groups to finish reading through the "Columbian Invasion" text, and to take some time to pick one of the prompts to respond to in CAR format. For those students who finished early and completed their response, they were allowed to use a laptop to go to the History.com website and read and watch some of the videos about Columbus. About that: As a social studies teacher and a general fan of learning about the entertaining complexities of history, I revile the History Channel. Why? Principally because it is not an educational venue, but an entertainment channel driven to draw viewers so they can charge advertisers to show commercials. There is no real professional standard for historical accuracy when it comes to their shows. With that said, their production values are high, and at the minimum they can be interesting. The goal for students who finished their work was to watch some of those videos and read some of the material to generate questions for discussion. The caveat I would like to emphasize is that anyone who uses entertainment as a source is to remain skeptical, and to ask themselves, "How would we prove that? How could anyone know that what they are claiming is true?" In any case, for the curious, more information can be found at the History Channel Website. See you tomorrow, and get ready for a three day weekend! Ominous, yes? But it is actually rather good news. I realized that since I will be out of the room next Wednesday for a conference at JFK, it makes more sense to set the test for a day when there will be a sub in the room. Hence, I'm moving it to Wednesday instead of Tuesday. This means an extra day to study. I hope you take advantage of it.
Today, we reviewed the definitions from the Eukaryotic Cells packet. I have put the presentation answer key up under the science>biology>eukaryotes tab. We peer graded them, and I checked them over as well. Those should be entered in the next few hours. Otherwise, we spent some time today mechanically breaking apart strawberry cells (by vigorously smooshing them) and then chemically separated out the DNA we had liberated from the membranes using soap, salt, proteases and isopropanol to precipitate them. For my part, I had fun. Tomorrow we'll start working on prepping for our Eukaryotes test, and fiish up the current social studies packet. Toodles! |
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Mr. StevensonScience Teacher. Fanatic lover of Board games. Historian. Huge Nerd. Scholastic Bowl Coach. |