I believe in censorship

I have discovered that there are certain banned words in my classroom. I have started referring to some things as “banned.” In the future I hope to make a poster.
“I hate________ (logarithms, chemistry, dissolution, math, etc)”
“I don’t get it.”
“I can’t do ____________ (stoichiometry, logarithms, diagramming, etc)”
This is not because I dislike questions. I love questions. [...]

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The new quarter

Overall, the new quarter is going well. It is going very quickly.
I feel like I have got my stride. I spend less time figuring out what I need to do.
My motto has been, babysteps, practice, babysteps, practice. I don’t let myself show them an equation, or teach them anything, unless they get to use it [...]

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More thoughts on revision

After writing the last post, I think that more of my sympathies for revision are explained. I get to teach all this stuff again next year. I will do it so much better. I’m trying hard, and doing a pretty good job (at least all the people who observe me seem to think it’s about [...]

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A square peg in a round hole

Being a first year teacher, and like all teachers, not having nearly enough time, I often scope out other teacher’s materials on-line to modify or use in my classroom. This sometimes leads to interesting results. Today, for instance, I have a great practice set for Lewis Dot structures, but it doesn’t match well with the [...]

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Lab Today

Today lab was pretty good.
However, the pre-lab needs work. It apparently was not clear enough what reaction was happening, and what product they were forming. Most of my students didn’t realize what they were making, why they were filtering, etc. Maybe that is typical of high school chemistry labs. It drives me crazy.
I realized that [...]

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Molarity

I have tried to teach molarity in an open-ended way, so that they can see the logic of it, and experience a little bit of how scientists solve methodological problems.
Today I put all their solutions from last week on the board, and told them that they were almost all right, because most of them had [...]

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Booooooooring

Yesterday, in the middle of the lesson, I was getting a little frustrated with how little participation I was getting, and slow it all seemed.
Then it hit me. I had planned a boring day. No variety, just me leading lecture/ Q&A.
Poor kids.

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Substitute Plan

I am almost never sick. However, I still planned to make my sub plan this weekend. For this month, it is very simple. There is a very good Nova video about a very good African-American chemist, Percy Julian. In a perfect world I would have guided notes for them on it, so they had something [...]

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More textbook

Today we did a textbook tour, where the students looked for different ‘features’ of their textbook. It was interesting to see what they noticed. Most of them admitted to never looking at the diagrams, captions, pictures, or graphs. Which I expected from research and my “content literacy” course in grad school. I hope now that [...]

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Snow Days

I am conflicted about snow days. Part of me loves a surprise day off as much as anyone, and part of me hates having my schedule so upset. Today, however, the roads were ridiculous, and I feared for my life driving home.

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