W. W. JC. D

Do you know this kid?

http://goo.gl/l5IXG

You have probably seen this photo with the caption "I freaking love coloring!!!!"  I want to be this kid.  I want my passion for whatever I am doing to absolutely explode out of me.  But, more importantly, my students should have this type of passion for whatever they are doing.

A good friend and fantastic teacher is an innovative teacher whose classroom is like mine, organized chaos.  His students are engaged in meaningful activities and the volume in the room tends to grow as the discussions grow more heated.  His colleagues call him Johnny Crayons because crazy, non-traditional ideas tend to be the norm for him.

I have 1 goal for this school year:  BE JOHNNY CRAYONS!  I am going to try every non-traditional, off the wall, crazy idea I find.  If it sound fun, engaging and my students are still going to learn the material, we are doing it.

Every day I am going to ask myself "What Would Johnny Crayons Do?" and then I am going to do that.  I am going to take lots of pictures of the creative work of my students and post it here and Twitter.

If you are doing something creative in your classroom, tell EVERYONE about it!  Open your doors and let everyone see the great things, too.  If you are on Twitter, post pictures and tag every off the wall activity with #JCrayons.

Let's #JCrayons the heck out of this year!

Invisible

Connected to my post from yesterday, I ran across another tweet that has really bothered me.  One of my students from last year, retweeted something from a student I will have this year.  I am paraphrasing

'I am one of those people who will go through HS and no one will notice I am there.'

This statement really disturbs me.  First, my former student is a wonderful person.  She is intelligent and hard working, and a pleasure to have in class every day.  I always noticed when she was working and when she was absent, but clearly I didn't make enough of an effort to demonstrate that to her.

But now I have an incredible opportunity because I know how this new student feels about high school and I can do something about it.  Every chance I can get I can try to show her that she is important and I know that she is there.  So, to this student and to all the other students I will have this year (because everyone is important to me)

Life's too short for hate

Since I encourage my students to follow me on Twitter to see the interesting things I am saying, I follow them as well if they follow me first.  As the school year approaches I am seeing more comments that look like this:


I don't think I'll ever fully understand why anyone would want to go back to school. Am I the only one nauseated by the thought? #ItsHell


Thinking of going to school in a week actually makes me sick


Now I know that students have been doing this basically since public school was invented.  The problem I see is that social media intensifies the problem.  Before it was 1 person in his/her room or maybe with a small group of friends complaining.  Now they are making a general post on FB or Twitter and 400 other "friends" are seeing, then liking it or commenting on it, and suddenly it is a misery party.  Others are jumping on there to share sob stories.


The worst part is school hasn't even started!!  This is just what is going through their head; garbage that they are inventing with their imagination.  It could be the greatest year of their life coming and they think life is over.  Sure teenagers are melodramatic, but there is something else going on here.


I feel schools educators parents hell everyone needs to take advantage of opportunities like this.  Let's nip this in the bud and do crazy, memorable things to start the year off every day!  Somewhere, every day, every student needs to find joy in school.  Teachers need to throw the curriculum out for 10 minutes and do an activity, lab, video, ANYTHING that keeps kids wanting to come back tomorrow to see what curve ball we are going to throw at them.


I love the following videos, and they will definitely make an appearance the first weeks of school, but what things do you do with your students to make them love being in school?

Flying buttress

As I have said previously, I have no problems simply jumping feet first into a new method/technique.  Forget getting your feet wet, I dive in and figure it all out as I go.  However, to make a flipped classroom work really well you need to take it slow.  But more importantly you need to find a good support system.

http://goo.gl/vrkCK

I use the term flying buttress here, partly because I am juvenile and giggle when I hear the word (what?! I work with teenagers every day!), but a buttress is the support used on the side of cathedrals to make it stronger.  The building could stand up on its own with no problem, but it will last longer when additional stresses are applied to it because the weight is distributed through its support system.


More teachers are talking about starting to flip a few lessons.  I ask them their method, what resources they are going to use and if they need help, and I keep hearing things like "Oh, I'll figure it out as I go."  I did that and while I didn't fail, I would have been far more successful if I had reached out from the beginning and asked for help. (probably would have been less stressed too)

If you are thinking about flipping, please check out the Flipped Learning Ning (www.flippedclassroom.org) and get on Twitter and follow the hashtag #flipclass.  There are amazing educators there willing to do whatever they can to provide you the assistance you need to get started.

And, of course, feel free to shoot me questions whenever!

This sucks

I hate this phrase.  I teach chemistry so this gets thrown around a lot.  While I would love to make my class as real-world as possible, there are just some topics where it is not possible.  The connections are there, but things like balancing reactions and conversions are just mechanistic topics that have to be pounded through and practiced.  So, naturally, students love to say "this sucks" when they are not interested in what we are doing.  One student this year said this, on average, at least once per day.

But here's the thing, when a student says "this sucks" I hear "you suck."  They don't truly hate me, but if I am the one designing the activity that is causing them to feel this way, the negative comments are really an attack on my thinking and teaching.

I wish I had an easy way around this.  Besides designing more creative lessons, which I am always trying to do, what strategies do you have for getting students to say more constructive comments for your lessons?

Hug it out

Before I say anything more I want you watch the following video:

Now that you are all warm and fuzzy inside, let's talk about building relationships.  It's the first day of school. Students are beginning to roll off the buses, excitement rolling off of them as they get ready to see friends who were missing from their lives all summer, and tackle new teachers with new challenges for the next 10 months.  As they approach the entrance, they look up to see half a dozen students holding up large signs with

http://goo.gl/oeAic

The first reaction would be apprehension, but some would take a hug, some will walk right by, some will run right up and take the sign from us.  But, the hope is some of those kids who really dread coming to school, who move through their day with their head down, who try to hide in plain sight, will forget their troubles and reconnect with some bit of sunshine inside of them.  Hopefully they will be just a little bit more interested in being there that day.

What better way to connect with someone than through a hug?

Oh, and if you want to participate, make sure to check out the Free Hugs Campaign.

What's the point?

We have to teach a lot of topics in a given year.  I don't know of a single teacher who didn't wish they had more time in the year to cram in a few more of the items that we stuffed into the textbook/curriculum.  If I could create the perfect chemistry class, it would focused around chemical reactions--as much is physically possible.  Chemistry is a lab science in which we study the interaction of molecules in a variety of scenarios.  Yet, an inordinate amount of my time is spent teaching math.  Not just teaching math, but trying to come up with real-world examples of the math to develop "meaning" for my students' question of "Why do we need to know this?"  I understand real-world examples are important, but if I have to manufacture examples, maybe the information isn't meaningful in the first place?

This coming school year we have a challenge.  We are shifting to an A/B Block which actually reduces the time in class by 88 minutes per week, but are not modifying the curriculum nor the district-wide exams.  Some teachers turned to the textbook and started looking at what chapters could be shrunk or cut.  I took a slightly different approach to the problem.

One of biggest pet peeves is "teaching math" inside of chemistry.  While there are obvious places it is necessary (stoichiometry, moles, solutions because they all relate to chemistry), there is one place it is not and that's Dimensional Analysis.  You remember this:  I give you a measurement in feet and ask you how many nanometers it is.  Where's the chemistry in this?  What purpose does this serve in either my class or the real world?  I used say things like "Well, if a person walked up to you on the street and held a gun to your head and said 'Perform the following metric conversion' you would be able to do it", but that's ridiculous.  In today's world, if someone actually did that, I would pull out my phone and GOOGLE THE ANSWER!!  I have a friend who is an actual scientist for a pharmaceutical company and he hasn't performed a metric conversion since he took Physics back in college 14 years ago!

So, why do we continue to teach topics that have no relevance in both our curriculum and the real-world?

Please don't let the answer be "because it is in the textbook."