Have a great weekend, folks!
Today we prepared a little for the science ISATs we'll be taking next Monday and Tuesday. The best preparation you can do is to get plenty of sleep and eat a decent breakfast. Otherwise, relax (unless you were one of the ones to not turn in the homework due yesterday in science.) Phone calls are scheduled to go out for missing progress reports and for missing assignments right as school is ending today.
Have a great weekend, folks!
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I'm not complaining, but this was a fairly long day. Whoo. Alright. It is 9:50 (ish.) I am home, dinner is et, aaand...it is now rather too late to send out phone calls for missing assignments, which I was unable to do 10th epriod because of necessary prep for the Scholastic Bowl matches today, combined with a lot of unnecessary questions from students who didn't want to read very much. So, those calls will go out tomorrow.
With that said, i enjoyed today. In social studies, we discussed what actions could help sellers make more money when selling "goods" or commodities. Among the most important of the suggestions was the idea of selling large volumes of goods to make the most money...we then discussed economies of scale, where profit relies on producing a large amount of goods at the lowest price possible, and how this relates to something we tend not to think about: our food supply (chickens, in this case.) In general, the outcomes we want (cheap food!) are also associated with things we don't want to think about too much. In a similar vein, we then read about the experience of slaves during the "Middle Passage," the trip across the Atlantic from Africa. IT was not pleasant, and the fact that we treated slaves like commodities/animals was not lost on most of us. In Science, we looked at the difference between what gametes are produced with combinations of genes, and what gametes we would expect to be produced based on the gene combinations on chromosomes. It turns out, that genes are getting sorted into combinations not found on the original chromosomes, due to the process of recombination. We also looked at how to construct pedigrees and use them to analyze the transmission of traits from generation to generation...we'll talk about that more tomorrow. And now, goodnight! So, today ISATs started, and in recognition of that, today went a little easy...very little writing, no note taking, and no new assignments assigned. Hooray! With that said, we delved a little deeper into the emergence of slavery in the Americas, which based ib the Southern Colonies text clearly seemed to be the most important development in early American history. It turns out, the racism that in some ways has come to characterize the American experience didn't seem evident in the records of our earliest Southern Colonies. Instead, attitudes towards slaves changed over time, as did the treatment of African slaves by the law. Our first text examined the changes in laws regarding slaves in early Virginia. The second text was one of the first anti-slavery texts written in our nation. After reading and discussing the (fairly disturbing) material, we tried to answer the question: does racism cause racist laws, or do racist laws cause racism? (Discussion led most of us to the conclusion that both were true.) Tomorrow, we'll look at some records of what early slave ships were like, and then discuss dihybrid Punnett squares and pedigrees in class.
Welcome back from the long weekend! Mine was great! I actually had all my grading done by early Monday, which was a bit of a surprise. The range of material that was turned in for the Meiosis outline was rather broad, so I wrote a rubric to indicate how successful the product was at explaining the important ideas necessary to understand meiosis, explain the basic definition for meiosis, explain why meiosis is important to understand our basic topic (inheritance) and explain the important elements of the process of meiosis. I also threw together a basic presentation to cover the same info...this is appended at the end of this post. In social studies, we wrote our responses to the summative essay questions (see Friday's post,) and I have to say that most of the essays were decent. If there was any flaw, most students failed to really explain why they believed the power or right they'd chosen was clearly the best. Still, overall responses were good. So far, I've graded 2/3rds of the essays. I'll get the rest done by tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, we're starting the ISATs. It is important to get some sleep, eat well, relax, and come in prepared. I think most everyone will do well, if you just relax and think. So, rest, and no worries. Plus, I've got an exercise to use tomorrow that some research has been shown to have a large impact on test scores.
With the exception of work turned in late.
See the title, although for the afternoon classes, I had a few missing tests...if you are among the few, please double check your folders to make sure it didn't get corrected, and you packed it up without thinking?
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Mr. StevensonScience Teacher. Fanatic lover of Board games. Historian. Huge Nerd. Scholastic Bowl Coach. |