Kate's Eye View

This is how I spend my time. Making DNA models out of pasta! I'm going to have my classes do this next week during our DNA unit. I came across this activity on the internet and I think it has the potential to be good in a high school class. Particularly, I like how it shows the three parts of DNA, a phosphate (ziti), a sugar (pinwheel), and a base (pipe cleaner). The different colors are the four different bases (A, T, C, G). This model is weak in the area about teaching why A goes with T and C goes with G. So, I am addressing that on a different day where they will analyze the percentages of A, T, C, and G in different organisms DNA. It is also weak in how it models the bonds. The bases are really boded by hydrogen bonds which are actually more like a magentic attraction rather than a sturdy, covalent bond. However, my students have not had chemistry yet so this detail would be lost on them.... Hopefully it goes well. I am doing this with them next Friday.

This is the Before (from last month): This is the After: I had a chance to work on the little bit of yard around my door today because yesterday was the end of the 1st quarter and today was grading day. Yay! Half-way done!!!! I got all of the grades entered yesterday so I didn't have to go in today. From here on out I am doing all four biology classes and unit planning, within the constraints of what my mentor teacher wants of course though. Jeremy is coming on Thursday!! I'm so excited to see him. This period, between his last visit and this visit, is the longest we have ever been apart! Looking forward to next weekend.... :-)

Student teaching is going OK. I have been teaching 4th and 6th periods since my last posting. I have a good relationship with both of those classes but 1st and 3rd are another story. I lead all four classes on Monday and it went well with all but 3rd period. They pretty much look at me like “Why are you telling what to do? You’re not my teacher”. I think that class is going to be a struggle. Thursday, I think there was some damage done to my working relationship with the 6th period class. They are, for the most part, really good students and they get their stuff done. However, there is a group of students who are very outgoing and very loud--all of the time. And I know for a fact that they distract other students in the class. So, Wednesday we moved out about half of the tables from the room and rearranged students so that they can sit around the edges of the room and at tables in the middle of the room. It gives us much more room to move around the room. So, when we made the ...

Friday was my first day teaching the class by myself. I was really expecting to get quite nervous but I didn't and everything went fairly well! From here on out 4th and 6th periods are mine and I will be adding 3rd and 1st a little later. 4th period went well in its own ways. I didn't have any management issues and the students seemed excited about the change. I started the class with a think-pair-share activity. They are not used to this sort of thing so I gave them a lot of time, but I think I gave the too much because I discovered that they weren't going very deep with the questions I presented to them. If I continue doing this they will get better. So 6th period I didn't give them as much time on this portion of the class. 4th period I ran all of the way to the bell and they didn't have much of a chance to do the worksheet or book questions, whereas 6th period had about 10 minuets to work on them, but because it was 6th period on a Friday they weren...

This week has been pretty good at the school. I have been interacting with students more both helping to answer questions and enforcing rules. The class with the most questions was Earth Science unfortunately because I will not be actually teaching that class later in the semester. There were two major times that I had to ask students to behave. One, a student returned from the restroom and my mentor teacher had stepped out and this student went to a friend instead of his chair, so I told him to go to his seat. The other example was when two guys were gradually getting louder and then horsing around and I walked up to them and asked them to sit down and explained that they were being very loud and distracting other students. They sat. I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday grading all of the Biology homework that they had turned in from the first week of school. I spent today grading Earth Science. Today the students did their first lab activity with microscopes. It went wel...

I found out this afternoon that my grandma passed away today. It was unexpected because she didn’t have cancer or anything, just an old woman’s heart. I don’t know why she died, all we know is that she was found on her floor. Very sad. She is the only grandma I had because my mom’s mom was never a part of my life. Now that I know she is gone it of course it makes me think about all sentimental moments in my relationship with her. We were not as close as a lot of granddaughters and grandmothers, but we were close enough. I remember going to her house over the holidays and reading The Night Before Christmas every year and doing puzzles. I remember planting watermelon seeds in her back yard and coming back to see the sprouts. After my family moved away from California I saw her much less so most of my memories of her and I are from before I was ten. Even though I lived far away, she was always wonderful about sending birthday cards and cards for no reason. Last week in fact she...

I have survived the first two days of school with students there! Yay! My first impressions of the students are that on the whole they seem well behaved and respectful. There were only two minor incidences where students tried to challenge my mentor teacher as she was explaining the rules and such on the first day. She handled it well and did not argue with them. She told me that she had a very hard time with classroom management when she was in her first year of teaching. After that, she went back and took some classes on it and today she doesn’t have much of any problems with students because she has figured out her own style and discovered what works best for her. I do anticipate that this will be an area that I will struggle with. I think that I will have to remember that it is more important to maintain order in the classroom than to seem cool to students or to give them too much power. I didn’t actually interact much with the students today or yesterday, but I really tried...

Friday was the last day at the school before students arrive on Monday. My day started off with a visit to the principal’s secretary to fill out an emergency contact information card. I also found out there are permits to park in the faculty/staff lot, but the lady in charge of that was not in and I was told to check back on Monday. I made it to the classroom early at about 8:10. My mentor teacher didn’t arrive until about 8:30 because of dropping her son off at kindergarten. 9:00 was when the “Making the Grade” seminar was scheduled for. We went up to the computer lab and I brought along a small notebook because I thought I would need it but I didn’t. The meeting was sort of a waste of time. The leader didn’t really teach anything. The main point of this was to tell teachers how to do extra credit in the grading scheme. There must have been problems with this last year! Also, there was a big monsoon storm on Thursday night and apparently that knocked out some servers in the m...

My second day at the school started off rather awkwardly because I had to go to the cafeteria where all the faculty and staff were for the first meeting with the principal. I walked in and went toward the “sign-in” line and a secretary walked up to me and asked me, “Who are you?” I said I was a student teacher so I probably wasn’t on the list and she told me to sign in anyway and find her later because she needs to keep track of everyone. The next line, which was very long, was for ID pictures. A lot of teachers mistook this line for the food line. Slowly but surely word spread and most left the ID line for the breakfast line which was provided by the Army for some reason. While in line, some teachers introduced themselves, including the band director who overheard me say who my mentor teacher is and he said that she is excellent and that his wife was a student teacher with her a while ago. When I finally got to the person running the ID machine I told him I wasn’t on the list an...

Today was my first day at the high school I am student teaching at. It was a little crazy because the science classrooms were remodeled over the summer and they are not quite done yet so it was full of construction people and supplies along with the teachers rushing to get their classrooms ready for students in only 3 days! I arrived at 8:30 and finally met my mentor teacher. There was a mid-summer mix-up as my previous mentor teaching took a non-teaching position which left me find a new one! I know this sounds very girly or something, but I was really worried about what to wear. I settled on black shoes, gray pants, and a pink polo. I felt comfortable, but was very over-dressed for what I did this morning! I knew that I would be moving stuff around and unpacking boxes but wanted to make a strong first impression. My mentor teacher had her young son with her and he was so cute! His first day of kindergarten is tomorrow. He was very talkative and helped me do most of the things...