I really enjoy curriculum planning. Wednesday was our first of three weekly planning sessions for all North Star middle school science teachers. And it was fun.
We are focusing on moving towards Common Core standards. Common Core is the new buzzword in education in America. It is a series of guidelines designed to standardize all education in the US, with a heavy focus on literacy. It prioritizes teaching kids how to read more rigorous texts, to prepare them for college or technical documents that they will see after graduation.
I worked with two other 7th grade science teachers to map out the year, and find 8 topics that lend themselves to a "Ladder of Complexity". This is a series of three increasingly challenging texts on the same topic, so students can comfortably develop content knowledge, but then push it with texts from newspapers or college-level textbooks. It teaches students to read, and reread, and be comfortable being challenged by a text. I really like the idea.
The weakness of this logic is that we use a standard of measuring difficulty of text called a lexile rating. The lexile uses an algorithm that assigns a text a score based on the lengths of sentences and the commonality of words used. Unfortuantely, this means that science texts have an unusually high lexile score, because they often use words that are not very common elsewhere, even if students are very comfortable with them. This led to some challenges finding the bottom rung of our "Staircase of Complexity", and generally having to use our own judgement. Sometimes, the lexile scores did not match the sequence of complexity of the articles, and there was definitely some rearranging and reinterpreting.
We also focused on writing text-based questions, which focus on requiring the students to go back into the text to answer the question. The idea is that they can not just answer based on prior knowledge from class or other readings. These questions often include parts like "use evidence from the text to explain your answer" or ask the student to interpret a specific example in the text. This makes sure that students are really understanding the more difficult text, and aren't just answering based on notes they took in class. For example: “Modeling the core of the Earth must rest upon even more indirect evidence.” What does the author mean by “indirect evidence”?
All in all, I had a blast planning and collaborating for an entire day, and look forward to doing it again next week.
Content-wise, this marked the first week of genetics! Monday and Tuesday were kind of a knowledge dump: a lot of vocabulary, and as much application as possible to help cement the definitions. The kids had very little understanding of cell processes, so we had to start from the basics: Nucleus, DNA, genes. Cells read the genes to make proteins. Homozygous (giggle) and heterozygous. Alleles are types of genes. Everyone has two for each gene.
The most challenging part, for the students, was realizing that all of this was done inside the nucleus of every single cell.
It got much more fun and exciting when we got to Punnett Squares, but I'll save that story for next time.
Tuesday night was our weekly run and monthly dinner. We had mediocre pizza with terrible pizza near the running trail. We will not go back there. It was fun anyway. I also found a running track near my neighborhood, and managed to cut 10 seconds off my best mile. Now I can run a mile in 8:43. Not great, as I'd really like to go sub-8, but I think I can do better by the end of the summer. Now I have a baseline. It was also very quiet at the track; there were about 3 other people there. The weather was perfect (on Wednesday - about 70 degrees) and I really enjoyed my run. The track is too boring for regular workouts, but I'm happy to know it's there whenever I need a mile time trial.
This weekend, I have exciting things ahead. Tonight, I have tickets to the new Star Trek movie at the fancy theater with recliners and beverages. Tomorrow, I hope to schlep down to south Jersey and get my first open water swim. Cold, but since this is an otherwise easy workout weekend, it's probably the best time to do it. I promised myself I'd do two open water swims before my first triathlon (in less than a month!).
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