Hayley H

A billion pages of theoretical framework and unit rationale…… and this guy still sums it up better than I ever could.

This is one of my favorite blogs. If you easily take pleasure in the simple things life has to offer, you should really check it out. 1000 Awesome Things. It updates every weekday. And for someone who has been spending every waking hour eating, bathing, or in the library, having a portal to a list of wonderful things that the average person takes for granted is like finding a $20 in the pocket of a coat you don’t wear very often – you’ve had it all along but you never realized just how good life can be.

There’s a lot that I miss right now. I miss eating food that doesn’t come from a box. I miss my friends (even the ones I live with). I miss my students. Honestly, I miss the days when my biggest problems were a LabQuest on rice and a “wasted” day at the beach. I miss sleeping.

I guess the fact that I don’t have it in me to write any kind of crafty or meaningful post tonight is evidence enough that this whole “time off” thing isn’t really a realistic goal. Until it is, it’s worth it to take the time to truly revel in those moments when I type my username and password in in a fraction of a second, my cat does something ridiculous, or when I finally find that sweet spot under the covers before I fall asleep for the night.

So this is it, then. We’re all done with our 8 week placements. No more student teaching.

It’s leaving me kind of wistful. Saying goodbye to my kids was way harder than I thought it would be. Leaving my first placement was hard, but the kids were 9th graders and were a little less eager to get sappy about a teacher on their way out. My 7th graders, though… there was hugging, there were cards, we had a party, and there were some tears. It was brutal. The part that killed me the most was the one girl who had been sick that day and made her father come drop off a card for me at the main office because she really needed to say goodbye that badly. :( I’LL MISS YOU TOO, C!!!!!

I had my ups and my downs this semester. Mostly downs. At the core of things, It feels good to look back and say, “Wow, these kids actually liked me.” More importantly, I look over their assessments – the same assessments that other teachers in our grade are giving – and get to say, “Wow, these kids learned what I taught them!” Other teachers in our team were concerned at the test scores they got back at the end of the unit we were all teaching, and my kids did alright. That’s a woohoo moment if I’ve ever had one. I guess I’ll mark that one down as a plus one for Hayley.

But then there are the days I know I could have done better. There are the spots on my student surveys that made me wish I had given them out half-way through my placement. There were the not so hot areas that I can never take back, but I can sure as heck learn from. Those moments are invaluable, just as the highlights were.

Altogether we’ve all now got 8 weeks worth of learning experiences under our belts (plus all that stuff from our 4-week placements and field experiences). We’ve all been reflecting in bite size chunks along the way, but for those of us who are like me and tend to spend a fair bit of time ruminating on how far far we’ve come and what we’ve learned, it feels like it was just last week I walked into the first day of school with my new class of students. It’s a lot to think about. But hey, I’m still sick, so it’s giving me plenty of brain food as I try to get the bed rest I should have gotten a week ago.

Long story short? It’s only been 2 days, but I already miss the classroom. I miss the ups and the downs, and I miss teaching and learning with my kids. :)

Part of the reason is that I think I’m passing a mini-cold or something. Another part is because of how often I’ve been raising my voice recently.

Last week Cailin and I talked a little bit in class about how much time we’re spending disciplining our kids versus how much time we’d like to spend enforcing understanding. She blogged about it here, and I wanted to share my own thoughts because as my 8-week placement closes out, I’ve been reflecting on my own work quite a bit.

As a whole, I’ve come to love my students in our brief time together. I’ve formed amazing relationships with so many of them – some of which never really had teachers they connected to before. It’s really heartwarming/heartbreaking to have kids ask me every so often in a panic, “Wait, is today your last day?!?!?!” followed by a sigh of relief that I’ll be around for a little while longer still.

That being said, there are some who have started to pull away from me, and it’s because of how I’ve changed with respect to discipline. My last CT was empathetic. She always worked with kids to get to the root of misbehavior and put a lot of time and energy into helping them. She would turn on them sternly in a heartbeat if they were completely out of line, but there was some wiggle room. My new CT is much more strict in her classroom, and it took me a while to adjust. Now things I would have joked about or given some leeway on, I find myself immediately jumping to, “No, this is not acceptable. Take out your pencil – do your work.” My CT wants me to push them harder so they’re not out of control when she gets them back, but I can’t help but get frustrated with how much of my day I spend chastising kids for their behavior. I’m getting meaner, and I’m not sure if I like it.

On one hand, it’s effective. Well…. under the right circumstances, it is. It’s only effective if I get stern and follow up on it by sending someone out. It’s not until I’ve written someone up that the kids in question start to get with the picture. I don’t like sending people down to the detention room. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t promote change in that student’s behavior, they get to take a break from class, and they miss out on important class work that I end up having to chase them down to make up if I want to ever see it. There has to be a better way to enforce rules other than making an example of one student in particular.

I know part of it is how you build classroom culture. I know part of it is that I’m a student teacher. I know part of it is that I’m trying to emulate someone else’s practices. It still doesn’t help that I feel like I’m getting needlessly harsh. More importantly, I feel like I’m doing less adapting to my kids and more forcing them into what I want them to be doing. There’s a blurry line between keeping a general sense of order and oppressing student voices, and I’m struggling to find the sweet spot. I guess this is part of what student teaching is for, but it’s hard. I’m doin’ too much.

It’s certainly not all bad. Most of the shouting I’ve been doing is still healthy attention-grabbing from a crowd of energetic 7th graders, but it is food for thought. When a student stares blankly at a closed notebook for 10 minutes with the defense that they “didn’t have a pencil,” it’s hard to not get frustrated. I just hope that with experience I find the balance I’m looking for.

Science is a wonderful thing. This is something most of us knew already, and it’s probably one of the greatest factors that put my cohort members (including myself) where we are now.

For me, though, this has been recently eclipsed by educational policy, lesson planning, resume revision, grading, reading, writing, reflecting, job panicking, and sometimes eating and sleeping. With my focus scattered, my energies depleted, and my stocks of Excedrin and chocolate running low, I didn’t even realize how detached I was from the wonder of science until, of all things, our book reports came around.

Hearing the stories that came out of the books we each read and our own personal reactions put my mind in a reflective gear. The Ghost Map sounds like an awesome read that really draws from the notion that science is a mystery – it’s a puzzle you usually won’t get all the pieces to. Jodi and Katy’s talk on the history and classroom applications of HeLa cells was an awesome fusion of modern scientific conflicts with the rich history that supports every major discovery. Even the infamous Botany of Desire brought me back to how connected science is to each and every one of our lives.

The real firestarter for me, though, was Zack’s activity on The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Simply put, I like to build. More specifically, I like to invent. For me, creating what I need from the limited parts I have available is one of the best kinds of challenges. The 20 seconds we spent doing that on paper during seminar was the only excuse I’ve had recently to do that kind of work, and it was kind of like a quick snap to clarity. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about the 427 things I have to do before I can experience anything resembling free time, I was thinking about bicycle parts and scrap metal and I knew exactly what I was doing.

See, the way I view the world and each discrete object in it is as the sum of all its parts. Whenever I see a bicycle, I don’t just see the bike as a whole, I see this:

And when I see a Van Dorn Water bottle, I see a tube with some plug caps on it that could easily just be some PVC pipe and toilet flaps. I see these things and intuitively figure out what they do and how they work together in their current arrangement. I see how each individual component could be used in a different arrangement. If I can’t immediately figure out how something works just by looking, I feel the need to find out somehow. My mom used to pull lost screws out of the carpet all the time when I was a kid from the amount of broken CD players, computers and radios I would carefully take apart and try to understand. Sometimes I fixed them. Sometimes I had to break them further in the pursuit of knowledge. Either way, I know she hated it.

So if I’m such an engineering geek, how did I end up teaching biology? To me it’s a simple leap – when I see a person, in my mind’s eye I can see a complex network of specialized tissues that all communicate and collaborate together as one to create a single living, breathing, thinking machine. For a powerful (but visceral) image, click here. It never ceases to amaze me that somewhere along the line a few billion years ago, a couple molecules came together in just the right way to make the key for a code that would warp, mutate, change and evolve through a series of tiny mistakes to eventually produce the blueprints for a human being. The sheer number of cells that work mindlessly in synergy to keep us going, the stream of electric impulses and chemical transmitters that ultimately create our personality, thoughts and memories, the automatic regulation of each and every cell by a part of the brain that we don’t even have the ability to consciously control… when you realize the full scope of it how could you NOT be amazed?

I want to know everything I can about how life does what it does and came to be as it is. I want to know how matter behaves at the core of its parts. I want to know what makes the world tick, and I want to know what I can do to fix what’s broken. I’m still learning, but while I take in everything that I can, I feel strongly that the same inherent curiosity I’ve always had needs to be fostered in those that feel a similar spark. I want kids who ask questions to know how to find the answers for themselves, rather than just being told, “Sorry, we won’t get to that in this unit.” I want to pass on what I know and how I learned it to anyone who is willing to listen. THAT is why I’m teaching biology.

This post may seem long and rambling and pointless, but at the end of the day when we’re sitting in seminar or in Topics or in Lisa’s class, even I can tell how tired everyone is. I know I needed a reflection like this to give myself space to remember why I’m here and why I’m working so hard for this. When all else fails – science is AWESOME. If that’s what it takes to get through the day and keep my head on straight, then so be it.

So I have this student. He’s got a couple relatively minor physical impairments (he’s hard of hearing and practically blind, but his parents seem pretty much unconcerned with getting him help with this). He gets distracted easily, cares quite a bit about his reputation, and could not care less about school. He’s seriously struggling, but won’t advocate because he’s completely apathetic towards his grades, and as much as the teachers on our team want him to succeed, we can’t move forward with getting him support unless he has some kind of IEP or 504 or SOMETHING official. For now, we’ve sort of unofficially set some structures in place that we, as his teachers, can implement without making more too much more work for ourselves (or pissing off the administrators), but the teachers he sees in years to come are going to have to reinvent the wheel with him if we can’t push the paperwork.

The fun part? The school administration doesn’t want to be the ones to nudge testing on parents “unless it’s necessary”. And the parents? They’re just about as uncaring as the student. We went around in circles during one of our team meetings when one of the teachers raised a point – let’s just show the guys upstairs his state test scores! Won’t that kind of light a fire under their butt a little bit?

Enthusiastic faces popped up all around save for one. He sighed and just said, “Not gonna work – this kid is a 1. They’re long past given up on him.”

My heart sank, and it’s not the first time. For the sake of efficiency and practicality, the amount of focus given to the “almost passing” crowd is disproportionately ramped up. Kids who have been deemed hopeless are left in the dust for the sake of improving state test passing rates. Kids who probably won’t be “fixed” in time for the state tests get lost and forgotten in detention limbo because nobody knows (or is willing to find out) how to get them what they need to succeed.

I don’t mean to rail against the administration like they’re a board of evil grade-mongers – they’re just trying to keep their school running. I get that. It just also breaks my heart to see kids left behind by a policy that promises better.

EDIT: On an unrelated note, it looks like something has broken in the code for my post comments, rendering many of them totally unreadable. I’ll tackle that sometime this weekend. :(

Wheeeeeeeeeeewww this was a long week. Recently I’ve been coming out of every week saying that, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Long. Week. Ugh.

So when I sat down this weekend to write a blog post, plan, do some readings, grade for 12 hours, plan, clean the house, write reflections, and plan, I felt in dire need of some kind of break. We all know this by now, but teaching is hard. As with our long weeks, it doesn’t get less true no matter how many times you say it. But sometimes being a science teacher has its perks. And sometimes rescheduling your demonstration for a Friday and not being able to return equipment until Monday is as good a reason as any to have some fun. Heck, sometimes that means you come home and take quick inventory of the fridge/pantry and find out that you happen to have cream, milk, vanilla, sugar, and a mostly-but-not-quite-empty dewar of liquid nitrogen on hand. Sometimes it’s obvious when it’s time to take some time for yourself.

Liquid Nitrogen Ice-Cream. Can’t say I had ever made it before today, but I knew the basics and had my good friend Google do the rest. One of my housemates is a baker by trade and knows a fair bit about culinary arts. He offered to help with mixing and ingredient proportions. Being the science teacher, I was in charge of safety and “cool science facts” that eventually people stopped listening to because I kept unintentionally punning by saying the word “cool.” Our third helper was a computer scientist, so barring any trade-appropriate ask he mostly just cleaned up and took pictures. It was a good night and a great way to end to one of many long weeks.

We do a lot of work doing what we do, and I know that I find myself so tired and worn-down that it gets hard to focus why it is we do it. I love science. I love its explanatory power, I love its inherent curiosity, I love asking questions, and yeah, I love the explosions. Science is awesome – and I want my kids to see that the same way I do. Obviously they can’t take their own dewar of Nitrogen into the kitchen for some impromptu cooking, but tinkering and toying with stuff in a safe way is how memories are made and how questions are formed (and maybe even answered). I’ve been so focused on trying to create that perfectly scaffolded experience for my students that I forgot how much fun it really is to just play.

My only regret? Not quite enough sugar. Maybe next time I happen to have nitrogen on hand we’ll be able to nail it.

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In case anyone wants my horribly, unscientifically vague recipe, here are the basics:

SAFETY FIRST – I’d be a poor excuse for a science teacher if I didn’t first slam you with the most important things you need to know:

• Liquid Nitrogen is about -200° C (-300º F). For reference, ice is 0°C (32º F). Basically, it’s cold. Cold enough to seriously, seriously injure you if you’re not careful. Always wear thermal gloves when pouring or mixing the stuff.
• Wear eye protection. When it comes out of the dewar, it’s boiling (at the aforementioned chilly temp of -200ºC). It will sputter, bubble, and splash, and you do not want this stuff in your eyes.
• The vapors won’t kill you – they’re just Nitrogen! If Nitrogen was toxic or combustible we’d be in a world of trouble as is, considering the air we breathe every day is about 3/4 Nitrogen. That being said, if you fill a poorly ventilated space with the stuff, it is possible to eventually suffocate from lack of Oxygen. So crack a window.
• Work in a space you don’t mind getting messy, like a sink or on a tarp or outside. You’re going to spill.

1.) Make your favorite ice cream base in a stainless steel mixing bowl. Repeated cooling is super-bad for the structural integrity of glass, so you really do want to pay attention to that. Here’s a template:

• Cream/Milk/Half & Half (some combination of these that gives the desired creaminess/amount of product you want)
• Sugar (enough to make the milk/cream sweet to taste…. and then a little bit more because the flavor dulls when you cool it)
• Vanilla/other flavoring (we just put in a few teaspoons of our homemade vanilla extract)
• Toppings/fruit/whatever you want (we actually used brown sugar in lieu of regular sugar as our core flavor, but I’ve heard fruit gets deliciously frozen if you add it in)

2.) You’ll need at least as much liquid Nitrogen as you have ice cream base. Some recipes I’ve seen say you need as much as five times your base. We got by with equal parts Nitrogen and ice-cream. You’ll also need something to easily pour your Nitrogen from if you’re like me and ended up with a gigundo monster tank. I took advice from the supplier I bought from – coolers and thermoses work splendidly for short term storage! Just make sure there’s a way to vent the gas, like one of those straw things that pop up from the lid if you’re going to close it for any reason.

3.) Pour a bit of your Nitrogen into the cream. DON’T GET STIR HAPPY JUST YET. My baker started mixing right away, forgetting that he was now combining a rapidly evaporating gas and a thick liquid. It overflowed almost immediately and made a huge mess for the computer scientist to clean up :(. Let it sit for a few seconds, and then slowly stir everything with a wooden spoon.

4.) Once the mixture stops producing vapor (or whenever you feel you’re ready), add some more Nitrogen. Repeat step #2. Keep going like this until the mixture is at the desired consistency. If you want to really harden it, pour some Nitrogen on top and let it sit alone while the stuff boils off.

5.) Enjoy! Make sure all the Nitrogen has evaporated before serving. If it starts to melt, you can always just add more Nitrogen. We stored our extras in our regular freezer and they seem to be doing just fine. :)

So…. remember that time that I’m kind of clumsy? And remember that time I was all excited to be back in school? Yeah. Funny story…

Monday I was introducing density. To kick us off during first period, we reviewed mass and volume and broke down the definition of what density really is. After that, I had a demo planned for the kids to record a POE (Predict, Observe, Explain). The demo was simple – If a 6lb bowling ball and a 16lb bowling ball of equal volumes are placed in a big aquarium, what happens?

The answer is that the 6lb ball floats because it is less dense than water, while a 16lb bowling ball sinks like a stone. A 16lb stone that even when carefully placed down (just as you practiced it) still has enough oomph behind it to crack a pane of glass. A pane of glass much like the bottom of an aquarium, in fact. One slow motion “crunch” later, and my classroom is flooding with something close to 20 gallons of water. Oh dear.

Fast forward 5-10 minutes and we’ve got our kids settled across the hall in an empty classroom with a janitor vacuuming up the mess. My CT and I manage to communicate without words that we’ll just pass their exams from last marking period back a little bit early, and she’ll go over them with the class while I go get set up for the class we had coming in during the next period. A moment or so after that and I’ve got YouTube ready to go as a substitute thanks to the searching I had done a couple nights prior. The rest of our classes went off without a hitch, and I became the cafeteria celebrity of the day. At a faculty meeting later that day, the history teacher already knew most of the details just from talking to students. Ouch.

So I didn’t get the Monday I wanted. Or the Tuesday I wanted. Wednesday and Thursday went swell and Friday was hit or miss across my 5 classes… but the point is that short of being clairvoyant, do what you can to expect the unexpected. In this particular case, I had heard about a teacher that had done the exact same thing in a previous year. So yes, I knew it was possible, and had planned accordingly. Not just the YouTube video, but I had gone through the scenario in my head and how I would handle the students afterwards. Turns out it paid off – the cafeteria gossip was about a freak fish tank malfunction that “Ms. H barely even touched!!!!”  and not about that stupid student teacher that was breaking lab equipment in class. The unfortunate soul that broke the tank in the past was not so lucky, and her kids had persistently made fun of her until she cried. (As a side note, this teacher is still at my school and was, in fact, wonderfully supportive after I ran into her room asking for help finding a place for my students)

We’ve all had our own little reminders to expect the unexpected and plan for the worst, but it doesn’t really sink in until you have a little big encounter like this – Murphy’s Law does not bend for teachers just because they plan, but it’s still worth it to have those supports in place.

This “vacation” week has been weeeeeeeeeeeird.

At first, when we were all sitting in class talking about how strange this week was going to be, I was just breathing a sigh of relief at the chance to catch my breath. I was (and still am) grateful for the more flexible hours we got this past week, and all I could think about was how amazing it would be to get a few good nights’ rests. On Monday there was little time spent worrying about how much I missed school. I was just easing into the little bit of wiggle room we were granted.

Now? On Saturday? I can’t wait for 7:40AM Monday morning.

I miss my students. I miss having a reason to be awake at 6AM rather than just waking up that way naturally. I miss not having a gummy bear experiment I promised my students I’d watch over vacation sitting on my kitchen counter. I miss routine. Well… I miss whatever parts of my schedule could be categorized as “routine” before break came around. In other words, I’m ready to dive back in. Or… at least I’m ready to casually wade out from the shallows.

As many of you probably know, “drowning”, “sinking”, or maybe even “flailing” are pretty apt descriptors of my performance recently. I’ve been in over my head for a long time now, and I’ve been seriously struggling to keep at it. Long story short, it’s hard. This week I’ve hit the books (and the hay) pretty hard in my efforts to go back to school with a plan and a buffer (and a reasonable sleep schedule). I’ve still got one more day, and I aim to make the most of it.

So weird week aside,I’m ready. Here’s to the next 6 weeks.

My spring placement… a world of difference from where I was during the fall. My CT asked me on the first day, “So, how does being here compare with where you were last semester?” The question drew an immediate laugh from me – the difference was so vast that it was almost like comparing apples and oranges. It was still school, but everything felt different.

I guess the term that Katy used in class a few weeks ago – “reverse culture shock” – would be the most accurate way to describe it. I spent so much of my fall placement trying to adjust to the fact that I could not and should not expect the same experiences I had back in high school during my placement that I ultimately got comfortable in my new setting. With comfort came tolerance, and this ultimately evolved into acceptance of behaviors that I would have previously considered unacceptable. I’ve gone soft, and that’s not going to cut it in my happy little middle school classroom. My bar for student achievement has been reset far lower than it should be, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer as I progress in this placement.

Turning something in at all was commendable with my last batch of students. Under the constraints of the curriculum of my last placement, we weren’t allowed to mark down assignment grades for being late, giving our kids less of an impetus to hand things in on time. I came to accept that when I assigned work, about half our kids would actually turn it in. This is not okay, and no matter how many times I would tell them this, it was lingering in my head that it didn’t matter anyway – this was just what I was expecting. So when my new kids had a 90% turn-in rate on their homework, I got happy. My kids did great!

Except, here’s the thing: I shouldn’t be settling on 90%. ALL of my kids should be completing their work. ALL of my students should have that expectation, and NONE of them should be getting away with anything less than their best. They don’t deserve that lack of confidence in them, and they shouldn’t get a pat on the shoulder just for handing in a half-finished homework packet. I’m seriously astonished at how easily I fell in to these lowered expectations, and it’s time to turn that ship around. My kids deserve better than that.

Saying I’ve had a rough week would at this point be a massively grievous understatement. It’s because of this that I apologize in advance – this will not be the most inspired post I’ve ever published. I’m more than a little tired. And part of this rough week is that my iPod appears to have been stolen, so I don’t even have my tunes to keep me going. So yeah. Sorry about this little brain dump.

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Lisa B’s class on Monday was one of the most informative lessons I feel I’ve seen at Warner in a long time. The buzz words of “Common Core” have been floating around us for a while as we look ahead to our first year of teaching, but before Monday I (and apparently the rest of the class) was more than a little unclear about the purpose and potential practice that we, as a science teachers, needed to get out of the Common Core. I’d seen/heard the basic premise and had read a few of the literacy standards before, but just sitting down with the science/social studies expectations with a highlighter in hand wasn’t enough that I could put confidence in my understanding of the next steps. What do I do with this? To what degree will I be assessed based on these standards? What does a science curriculum founded on these standards look like?

I don’t have all the answers just yet, but then again, neither do the majority of administrators that will be employing us. These common literacy standards are new to us all, and the more knowledge we can arm ourselves with before heading into the gauntlet of job interviews, the more successful we can hope to be. Citing specific applications of these shifts that we are already practiced in is bound to give us a leg up over less informed applicants, so now is the time to lay the groundwork. As we plan for our spring placement and begin design work on our innovative units, I think Lisa Z’s idea to make good use of Common Core standards in our plans is one of the best ideas that came out of class. If we start now, we’ll have a leg up not only in the application process but we’ll be better prepared to lead the way through the needed shifts in literacy education, ideally giving our kids an even bigger leg up in the world at large once they graduate.

The end result of this is that I’m committing now to keeping the Common Core in mind during my new placement. The more practice I get now in putting the Core to work, the less transitional struggle there will be when the Core goes into effect.