Integrity

I DID IT. All 3 classes went well today, and I held everyone accountable for high expectations. It helped a little that my buddy B was on ISS, but I guess this is a step along the way to 100%.

Today's class was fun. We were practicing using graduated cylinders and triple-beam balances. I managed to create (loose) context for the activity by creating an investigation of which cookie brand has bigger cookies. It was basically an excuse to eat cookies, but we did discover (fairly surprisingly) that crunchy and chewy chocolate chip cookies have about the same mass, even though chewy cookies are much more dense (and therefore smaller).

I am also having a great time with the new curriculum this year. Not only is it different, it is also sequential, so that the curriculum I am teaching this year is a direct continuation of the curriculum I taught last year, even though it's different students. For example, over the weekend students had to write a lab report conclusion, which is a skill we had begun last year and added on to last week. Their conclusions did not look like start-of-7th-grade conclusions (at least as I had seen in the past). They looked like end-of-7th-grade conclusions (or start-of-8th-grade), because these students had done the 7th grade lab skills already. It was awesome, and I think I will enjoy continuing this journey with them.

Lunch detention, though. Lunch detention is going to be a challenge for me this year. It's just an opportunity for...holes. Students have so many opportunities to push boundaries in terms of off task behavior and noises. I hate noises. It's tough because they aren't supposed to be doing anything, and 7th graders get distracted really easily this way. I will have to enforce "look at your food or book only", which will be tough (i.e. a pain in the butt) to enforce at first, but I think it will pay off later. Once I have that expectation down, I can more easily correct students who are messing around but not doing anything specifically naughty. For example, if a student is not quite making funny faces, but is looking weird enough that other kids are laughing, I will get a crazy reaction if I took dollars (our consequence system uses fake money). However, if students know they can lose dollars for looking around in the first place, it would then be easier to take a dollar for "not tracking book/food". It's crazy North Star logic, but it has actually been proven to work.

Today, something really weird happened with lunch detention, in a way that could only happen here. The students...did lunch detention themselves. For like 10 minutes. The lunch detention teacher was late, and somehow they had gotten the message to go inside the room and start eating. They sat themselves evenly spread out and started eating, pretty quietly. When I walked by a few minutes later, they all shushed themselves into silence by the time I got inside the room. We found the right teacher, and the kids got a lecture on why they shouldn't be in a classroom without a teacher's permission, but it was cute. They do what they're supposed to, even when nobody's watching.