Posted June 25th, 2007 in Uncategorized


Camp website: http://www.cbet.org/ca/

This unique two-week bioscience summer camp experience is designed for students entering grades 6-9. Campers will discover how much fun it can be to learn and think creatively about the natural world through observations in the field and experimentation in the laboratory. This camp is a perfect opportunity for youths interested in biology to also learn more about biotechnology, environmental science and bioinformatics.

 

 

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Posted September 26th, 2006 in Uncategorized

The internet is so freaking cool. So are web stats. I don’t know how or why but I’m still getting 20 or so hits a day which has inspired me to keep posting from time to time. I see that some of my hits come from people looking for particular labs and it makes me wish I had posted every single one we did. But that would have been crazy.

Anyway a super cool animation of a cell was posted on boinboing.net today and I have to repost it here. It was made by some people at Harvard (you’ll see their names when you watch it) and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The stuff that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute puts out for teaching is awesome, a visit to the BioInteractive site can keep any bio-geek busy and as an added bonus you can have several DVDs sent to you for FREE. Yes free. While the lectures are a bit dry, the included animations really caught my student’s attention.

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Posted September 10th, 2006 in Uncategorized

My new new blog is up and running. tech.modiolus.net/csblog

Just in case you need one I have put together a list of the top five reasons to click the link above.

  1. I used a new theme and it looks so very nice and simple.
  2. You might read something interesting or useful. I don’t feel comfortable promising you something interesting and useful, so I’m going to use the less confident “might” and “or”.
  3. You’re looking for one more reason not to start correcting papers. Come on they can wait.
  4. There will be pictures. I’m going to go post one right now and I have a new camera so there will be more, lots more.
  5. Because I’d visit your new blog. Really I would. I may not go back again, but I’d at least stop by to show I cared.
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Posted August 24th, 2006 in Uncategorized

The new school year starts in two weeks. I have had a great summer and am excitied to start teaching again. I want to keep blogging but have been wondering how to go about it since I won’t be teaching biology this year. Should I start a new blog? Should I just change this one? Should I make a new subdomain? What if people want to read about a biology teacher and all they find are posts about Java? What if there are computer science teachers looking for a blog and they think this is about biology teaching? Is it good practice to reengineer a blog to a new purpose? Lesson learned about being a teacher: be flexible.

In the end I’ve decided that I want my blog to be subject specific  and I am going to start a new one. After all its a new year and a fresh start is in order. When I come back to teaching biology (I will be back) then I will come back to this blog.

Stay tuned. I will post the new link as soon I get it set up.

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Posted June 21st, 2006 in Uncategorized

So tomorrow at 8:15 I will find out how many of my students can pass the regents. While it is a measure of what they’ve learned, I really don’t think it will show me what they’ve learned. I’ll be excited if I get an 85% passing rate, ecstatic actually. But the fact that one student said, “I didn’t like science before but I like it now” is enough of an assessment of my success. To a point of course. Anyway, the year is drawing to a close and of course I wish I had posted more of my experiences but for anybody thats still reading this, thanks. I will probably post a long reflective piece for posterity once I get the scores and final grades in. And then that will be it for the Living Environment blog. (Sad, Sad, Cry, Cry) Next year I will be teaching computer programming.

The interesting thing about schools is that seniority counts more than anything and there is a teacher coming back from her sabbatical next year. She may be a great teacher, I don’t know but the fact that she has more years in the district means she gets the biology classes (back?). And it doesn’t really matter how well I taught this year, or how much I love teaching biology, or how many students were hoping to have me as a teacher next year, I won’t be teaching biology because she has seniority. I’m tempted to say “How funked up is that?” but to keep things in perspective, maybe someday I will want to take two years to study frogs in Nepal or Monkeys in South America or whatever and the fact that some young punk won’t be able to take my job will probably be a good thing.

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Posted May 4th, 2006 in Uncategorized

So its been a while, I got discouraged by the fact my blog was somehow discovered by spammers but today I got my first laugh and its gotten me back to writing, so if there’s anyone still reading I’ll tell you how I got my first real laughs today.

We’re doing the pGLO bacterial transformation lab this week. The what??? Basically we’re inserting a ring of DNA with a jellyfish gene into E.coli that makes the bacteria glow under a UV light or in other words bacteria for clubbing.

Tuesday was the first time most students had ever heard about genetically engineered organisms (except for cloning) and its been hard to convince them that what we’re doing is really cool. Its also a bit above thier heads conceptually so there not really into it as much as I think they should.

Yesterday I told them they were probably only a handful of high school classes in the whole country that were doing this type of lab and they should be excited about the fact we were going to make bacteria glow. I also showed them pictures of other animals that have been engineered to glow and even made glowing rabbit stickers.

Today I wore my lab coat to look more “sciencey” and told them that this lab is so cool that I was going to pop the collar on my lab coat just to be as cool as the lab. And then I popped the collar. This is where I got my laugh. A real laugh, not the groan, not the I get it but I don’t thin its funny laugh, real laughs.

The funny thing is that I think collar popping is the opposite of cool (seriously if you pop the collar of any shirt, coat, article of clothing, STOP!) but somehow the hip hop world has picked up on this trend and in their eyes I exhibited some knowledge of what was truly cool.

Most importantly, it worked in at least one class. They took the lab very seriously and were really into it and this is all I wanted. Tomorrow we’ll see if it worked. Tomorrow we’ll see if they think its cool that the bacteria are glowing because there is a jellyfish gene coding RNA to make a protien that glows.

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Posted March 28th, 2006 in experiences and thoughts

It seems like I’m averaging about a post a month but today was a good one and it has dragged me from this cave I call “March” (and not a moment too soon). We had a union organized superintendents conference day and before I get to the meat of it I have a few observations:

1. I never imagined that they could round up every teacher in the district but they did. It was cool to see all couple (?) thousand of us at the convention center today. I found many people from the past, teachers and friends, but at the same time lost them every time I turned around.
2. I got a kick out of being adressed as “brothers and sisters” by the NYSUT pesident. They called in the president of the AFT too. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about being in a union but today was check on the plus side.
3. Bob Duffy is going to be an awesome mayor. He told us today that he wants to make Rochester the number one city in the country. That’s damn ambitious but I’m on board. He could have told us to go over the falls in a barrel and I would have got up out of my seat and jumped in the river.

The highlight by far was the keynote speech by Jonathan Kozol. What he had to say didn’t surprise me. American schools are segregated (Almost as much as they were in 1950). These segregated schools are unequal (11,000 per student/year in the bronx, 22,000 in Manhasset,LI). Standardized testing is sucking the life out of education and teaching.(Schools Cut Back subjects to Push Reading and Math)
Urban schools are old and dirty (they smell bad too). Children in urban schools notice all of this (a child from the bronx once asked him what it was like over “there”). White people have created this situation by moving their children and their money to the suburbs (Do I really need a reference?).
If I thought people would read it I’d go through every point he made in his speech. It has moved me and has helped me to remember why I am teaching. What I heard today has my head spinning and as I type and delete and retype I realize I’m trying to write a thesis rather than a blog post. All of this is there for anyone to see if they care to and the real question is what can be done.

Tomorrow and for the rest of the year I’m going to start my class with lessons about how complex and beautiful and ugly life is rather than a regents question (I’ll save that for the end of class) and I’m going to convince as many white people I can to stay in/move to the city. After all Bob Duffy is going to make this one the best in the country. Its already better than any darn suburb.

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Posted March 10th, 2006 in Uncategorized

I had a studnet stage his own mini sit-in today. I feel good about the outcome but I couldn’t help but a feel a little like an oppressor. This young man came to class late, wasn’t doing his work and was trying to talk to some others. I told him he needed to move or work in another classroom (we have an arrangement with another teacher), it was his choice (I thought a good tactic). He chose to just sit in the same seat quietly. I repeated yo him that he had a choice and I would suggest that he make one soon or I would choose one for him. At this point other students were paying attention to what was going on and it was obviously a power struggle. I went to the phone, took my time dialing (all the while giving him looks that said I don’t want to do this) but he still sat there making no effort to move or do work so I called for a sentry to remove him. When she came he still refused to move and at this point the other students were urging him to just move or start working. She called for an administrator and somewhere in the radio transmission it got lost the he was behaving peacefully. One came almost immediately and he still refused to move. Soon after four more showed up expecting to find a ruckus but only saw him sitting quietly with his arms folded. at this point he decided he would give up the fight and was escorted out.

This class in particular has given me some trouble in the classroom management area and I have committed myself to being tougher with them. There are of course other ways I could have handled this but in the end it was clear that I was going to go as far as I needed to assert my authority. I have been called “a soft touch” in the past and I have no intention of becoming a “hard ass”. This is all a bit of a shift in my philosophy of classroom managment and in other classes I still don’t see the need to go to such measures. We’ll see tomorrow what comes out of all this.

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Posted March 6th, 2006 in experiences and Uncategorized

I ended last week feeling so good about it I took the whole weekend off. Although it wasn’t a new idea by any means I put together a lab where we tested different kinds of milk (regular milk, lactaid and soy milk) for glucose. I intended to turn this into an enzyme lab where we added lactaid to regular milk and saw that the concentaration of glucose increased to match that of the lactaid milk. What acutally happened is that the lactaid milk and regular milk showed the same concentration of glucose and the soy milk had very little lactose in it. I didn’t get to extend the lab but it did lead nicely into a discussion of lactose intolerance and different types of carbohydrates (like, why does the soy milk have 10% of the rda of carbohydrates but no glucose?)

All in all the students were into the lab and took it seriously, my mentor came by one period and seemed to like what he saw, thought the lab included good inquiry and my students were on task. All in all I felt good about the whole thing which was nice.

This week I hoping to get together something where we use yeast to look at how glucose concentration decreases and CO2 is emitted. That would be cool.

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Posted February 28th, 2006 in Uncategorized

Today after school a student asked me if there was really a scientific community and where it was. He is an interesting guy and likes to talk about watching MTV nature shows. I don’t know exactly where he heard about “the scientific community” and I did my best to explain the term but I think he left more convinced it exists. Possibly somewhere in the state of Energy. It has me thinking about what Science Town would look like. There would probably be a cooler name and people would speak “science”. There might even be a movie theater that only showed science movies.

It was a tough question to answer anyway. I’d welcome any suggestions for describing the real or imaginary scientific community.

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