A few weeks ago I posted about the poster that I had created for the new computer programming club that I am running in my school.  “Code Monkeys” is a way for me to get the most interested students some programming experience.  We do not have a computer science course.  We used to (I wrote it), but I wasn’t entirely psyched about the dynamic, it being populated with students who weren’t really fellow travelers, and not uniformly dedicated to learning the task at hand.  So this year, I thought maybe a club would be a better way to get my grubby little hands on the students who are most interested in actually writing code.

The club, which is really an internal, communal, codeyear group, meets on Friday’s.  To make things interesting, I decided to set up a few gimmicks that add to the mystery:

• I sent out an email to a few, handpicked students, telling them that I was going to be starting this club, and that they should, perhaps, think about joining.
• I gave the club poster to only a few colleagues, and asked that they put it up in their room and say nothing about the club to their classes.  The idea being that this mysterious poster would start to serve as a sort of secret handshake.
• A cryptic announcement ran all week prior to our first meeting:  “Code Monkeys Assemble.  Friday’s 256 Promptly.”  When asked about this announcement, I only repeated it back, verbatim.
• During our first meeting, I informed the students who attended that they were now part of an “association of like-minded folks”, and that, when asked by their peers what transpired during our meetings, they could only answer “Code Monkeys Assemble.”  In this manner, I am looking to style the club in the fashion of a Fight Club for Geeks.

We had 20 students at our first meeting.  It will be interesting to see how thing develop over the rest of the year.  The grand scheme is to stoke enough coding interest that when the new AP Biology Computer Science course launches in a few years, I can populate a section with students who actually have some understanding of what it means to program.

As you might remember, I was group observed a few weeks back, as part of our district’s “professional studio” observation structure.  It was a great process, and I thought that the feedback that I recieved from all of the folks who were kind enough to offer was cogent and actionable (outside of the typical platitudes).

A friend of mine, working in a different district, well away from the one that employs me, was not quite as fortunate.  This individual was observed teaching an advanced-level genetics course to advanced-level science students.  The observation was conducted by one person, the immediate boss.  The feedback was not quite as robust as one might hope.  

Here is the relevant bit that really got my goat to the point where I asked if I could write this post.  It’s a direct quote (emphasis mine):

<Teacher> presented highly technical information to the students, and did so in a highly competent manner.  Through providing the students with additional opportunities for exposure to the materials, such as through the Khan Academy, there may be enhancement of the classroom discussions.

Wait…what?  Khan Academy for college-level genetics?  Seriously?  Not awesome.  it’s not awesome for two reasons.  First, Khan academy videos are BO-O-O-O-RING!  At least to my way of thinking about things, they are.  Black screen, colored lines, and the calming voice of Sal Khan.  You couldn’t script a worse lesson.  Who wants to sit through that nonsense for a minute, much less ten?  

But as bad as that might be, here’s the worse bit:  There are no Khan Academy videos on College-level genetics.  None at all.  The closest he gets is maybe his DNA presentation.  There doesn’t (at current), even seem to be a decent video on Gene Expression.  So, how exactly, is a teacher supposed to incorporate materials that don’t exist?  

This is bad feedback, representative of the old adage that supervisors have to put something down when they observe a lesson, just for the sake of making it seem like they are doing a good job supervising, never mind if the feedback is actually useful or representative of the shared reality that we all inhabit.  

Why, if one didn’t know better, one might think that this particular supervisor was maybe just trying to work in a couple of buzz-words just to show that they are hip to the currents of the educational scene.  Not that such things ever happen in education…

When I remember, I try to post the work that I’m generating for my current degree (graduate degree number three!) in school administration.  This semester, we had to read a book on school leadership, and then write 2-3 page summaries of each chapter.  Certainly, you know me well enough by now to know that I took a slightly different tack in my own writing.  If you want to avoid reading 50 pages of my stream-of-administrative-consciousness, the above word cloud from the paper is pretty comprehensive.  If you have 30 minutes to kill, you can get the gory details here.

Every once in a while I’m reminded just how easy it is to teach biology in the Long Island suburbs.

One of my favorite projects that I give to AP Biology during the course of the year is the “Evolution Misconceptions”, in which students choose one from a list of various misconceptions about the theory of evolution that I feel are demonstrated with regularity in various places.  This is done in follow-up to a larger point that I make about the seeming fact that most folks who disagree with evolutionary theory really don’t understand what the theory (and the associated science) actually means.  

It’s a great project for a bunch of reasons.  

This year, I moved to having students publish the work on the course blog, and I have to say I think this was a great decision.  Giving students the task of writing a post for public consumption forces them to write clearly and make points with efficiency.  I also like how some groups linked to videos as they felt necessary.  

I really don’t know if I would get away with doing an assignment like this in another area of the country.  I’d bet I would at least get some background flack. People are silly, that way.  As it is, I have a room full of super intelligent students who are only too eager to start taking apart the various misconceptions that I give them.  Frankly, I have to umpire a bit to make sure they are writing from a place of reason and not a place of emotion.

Evolution education is alive and well, at least around here.

At some point during the haze of the summer, I was invited to participate in the “Holiday Lectures” held annually at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Maryland headquarters. If you are not an extant science teacher, you are probably unaware of what that is. If you are (or have been recently), then you are probably aware of just how cool it is to be invited to such a thing.

So, it was that this past Wednesday (on my 31st birthday), I found myself on a plane to Maryland for a five-day conference and work session marathon. It was a very cool experience. Not only did I get to sit in world-class lectures with world-class lecturers about a world-class topic (Human Evolution), but I then got to work with thirteen other teachers, and a team of very creative folks from HHMI’s educational outreach department to develop curricular materials to supplement the material from the lectures (HHMI distributes the lectures, on DVD, to anyone who asks for them, for free). Like I said above, it was all very cool.

You don’t need me to sit and dwell on the day-to-day minutiae of the process, but I do think it might be fun to run off a list of things that I have learned since arriving at HHMI at noon, Wednesday. So here is a brief list:  

• “Uncle Howie” is both incredibly loaded, and thankfully dead. An organization which was incepted as a tax shelter for a reclusive billionaire, has benefited from the passing of said billionaire tremendously. I never could find out specific numbers, but HHMI is something like the second most philanthropic organization for biomedical research in the world. They seem to have more money than they know what to do with. This is by no means a complaint. All of my expenses were paid, from my plane tickets to the cab faire. The campus has a functional hotel staffed by thoroughly hotel-esque agency staff. I had a private room with a queen-sized bed. It was cleaned every day. There is a giant cafeteria that serves massive amounts of gourmet food on a round the clock basis. There is always desert. There is a work-out room. There is a bar in the basement with unlimited free drinks.  
• I will never stop being impressed with how normal scientists are, no matter how famous they might be. Maybe it’s the fact that even the super-famous in scientific circles are still the equivalent of Joe Labcoat to most members of society. Whatever the reason, the fact remains, scientists are the best. You can talk to them about seemingly anything, and they are all as big a geek as you are (if not bigger). Sean Carroll (the EvoDevo version) is the current VP for the institute for education, and I don’t think I ever saw him without a smile on his face and an open ear during the time that he was around this week. Yesterday, I had lunch with the President of the Institute, who splits his time between HHMI and running a functional molecular genetics lab in Berkeley. How these cats keep all those balls in the air simultaneously is well beyond me, but it’s pretty damn awesome that they do. 
• The staff at HHMI is incredible. They sure know how to treat a guy. The workshop was expertly scheduled and executed with aplomb. Outside of my classroom, I have never worked in an environment where I felt more appreciated. At no time did I want for anything that I thought I might need to get the work done. I got taken out for a Lebanese dinner. I got a tour of the grounds. I got more free schwag than I know what to do with. It’s nice to have a group of incredibly talented people telling you how incredibly talented you are and encouraging your every whim (you almost start to believe it after a while).  
• Great teachers remain the most impressive people that I have ever had the pleasure of working with. I was one of fourteen teacher guests, and I think it goes without saying that my resume was easily the most unimpressive of the bunch. I simply do not know where people find the time to do the things that they do for their students. This is compounded by the fact that most of these folks are working a whole lot harder for a whole lot less money, and a with whole lot more administrative headache than I have to deal with. If any Long Island teacher ever starts to feel like they are working too hard for the money, let me put them in touch with some of the great people that I met this week.  That should shut them up right quick.

 I think I’ll leave it there. It was a great five days and I loved every second of it. Words can not express the gratitude I feel toward HHMI for the invite (and my district for encouraging me to go), and the awesome peers that I met and got to work with for this week. Though I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am happy to be home in the comfort of my natural environment, reunited with my favorite mammals.

In AP Bio, I put a big stress on labs in the gradebook.  Unlike exams, lab reports seem to really document student conceptions of science as a process and provide me with a lot of genuine demonstration of what students are currently thinking about how science works. I only count the experiences that actually have students using the scientific method as labs, and I give students a good long while to write the reports.  This year, I have moved to a format where students are publishing their lab reports online, which has eliminated the need for me to actually collect physical documents.  I’ve also been able to eliminate the need to deal with the grading process (which is rubric driven) in any physical space.  Here’s a brief description of how things go down:

• Students are given a document explaining the expectations for lab write-ups and the rubric by which they will be graded.
• Following the completion of the experiment in class, we decide as a group what an acceptable due date for the write up is (I usually shoot for ~3 weeks from the end of the experiment).
• Students must create the lab in Google Docs (or they could write it in another word processor and then convert it to a GDoc if they want to go through and deal with the inevitable formatting issues).  I’m a bit torn on requiring students to use a specific program, but GDocs has a few features that are very useful for what’s to follow (and it’s FREE!).  Plus it provides students in the same group an easy way to share protocol, data, and any graphs they may decide to create together.
• Once the lab is created, students do two things.  They give me editor access to the lab, and they make the lab publicly viewable.  Students link to the publicly viewable version of their lab in the comments of a magnet post that I put on the course blog.
• Once that’s done, I can go into the lab, leave comments about it, etc.
• I grade the lab according to the rubric on a google spreadsheet that I have made.
• Once the grade is determined, I use GDocs email function to email the grade to the student.

That’s it.  Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy.  The first batch of lab submissions in this new model are coming in right now (the deadline is midnight tonight), and I am impressed with how students are adapting to the new model.  I’ve decided that any student who submits the lab early will be given the chance to revise according to the comments that I leave, which only seems fair, since there always seems to be some areas of the labs that could be a bit better-developed.

It will be interesting to see if the process of requiring students to publish their lab reports will lead to the generation of a higher quality of report.  I’m hopeful that it will.  At the very least, it will provide students with examples from their peers, and that has to be a good thing, no?

AP Bio- Cells 4: Transport on Prezi

A few weeks ago, I posted that a Prezi that I had created for my AP Biology class was the winner of a twitter contest, and as a result was accessible on the main page of the site.  At the time, the good folks at Prezi sent me a note informing that the thing would be on the home page for “a few days”, which has turned out to mean “four weeks and counting”.  Being on the homepage has meant a nice little bit of bragging clout, but it has also meant that something I have created has been seen by a truly incredible number of people (north of 145 thousand), more folks than have ever looked at anything that I have ever made.  Yippee for me.  

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AP Bio- Cells 3: Structure & Support on Prezi

I think I have finally cracked a particularly difficult technological stumbling block in my teaching this year:  Moving most student work submissions to a worthwhile online format.  I’ve tried doing this in several different flavors for pretty much every year that I have taught, but I never really felt like I had a good system that organically worked with my process.  This year, I think I have finally nailed it (in AP Bio, at least), and it’s almost entirely the result of building a class blog.

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