Skip to main content

A Good Week

This was a good week, but it didn't start out that way.

Monday afternoon I was teaching a class when I got a call from the principal.  She had gotten a phone call from a parent about the grades her son was getting in my class.  It seems as though this parent had poured over the online grade book with a calculator and had a few things to say about my grade book.  This wasn't the first time I had heard from this parent.  And I was really bummed that she had not talked to me about it but had gone right over my head to the principal.  This incident sparked in me one of those teaching crises of faith that I go through every now and again.  I love what I do but is it worth it? Why didn't I do something with my life that depended on my output alone rather than what I can get 150 13-year-olds to do in 40 minutes a day? I'll never get promoted. I 'll never get a bonus.  And on and on and on in my head.....

On Tuesday I came into school and I was still feeling the teaching blues.  So, I decided I needed to do something about it.  Complaining wasn't helping.  It was time to Just Be Nice.

(A note about Just Be Nice: One day, many years ago, my mom called me up and said she was starting a new religion.  She was going to call it the Church of Just Be Nice.  All you had to do to become a member was to be nice.  Brilliant! A little over 5 years ago my mom passed away.  Since then I have named the day she passed and her birthday as Just Be Nice Day and I share this with my students.)

So, back to being nice.  Being nice and doing nice things always makes my mood a little better.  So, to help combat the teaching blues I decided to send home some positive emails to parents.  It's always nice to hear that your kids are doing well.  It felt good to send the emails and the parents and kids that got the emails were over the moon about it.  One parent told me that her son was "beaming with pride" about the email.  Another sent me an email in response that was so fantastic it actually brought tears to my eyes. Teaching crisis of faith averted and all I had to do was Be Nice.

Then, to make the week even better I had an awesome teacher moment.  Part of my curriculum this year is physics.  But, here is everything I have to cover:

  • Opposite poles of magnets attract and same poles repel. Magnetic field lines show the magnetic force.
  • Sound travels through the vibration of molecules.  Sound can't travel through a vacuum. 
  • Conservation of energy means that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed and transferred.
  • One type of energy is called electromagnetic radiation.  The types of Em radiation differ in their wavelength. Light is a type of electromagnetic energy.
And that's about it. This is 2 weeks of lessons, max.  Much to my chagrin, there are no astronomy standards for me to cover this year.  So, I decided to create a space study to make the physics standards more interesting and to incorporate some space science (because everyone loves talking about space). And thus, the Journey to Mars unit was born.  I created stations to cover the physics standards and threw in a few things about Mars and how NASA plans to get astronauts to Mars safely and bring them home again. The final project was for the students to write a letter to NASA sharing their ideas to get astronauts safely to and from Mars based on the physics standards they had learned. I Tweeted NASA to find out where to send the letters.  They Tweeted back and I mailed the letters.

On Thursday, this happened:


AWESOME! My students were so excited to learn that NASA was reading their letters and that their ideas were being heard. Teaching victory!! 

All I want is for my students to learn and enjoy science, be their best selves and just be nice.  This week, mission accomplished.  This was a good week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Musings about Rubrics

If you are reading this you probably know what a rubric is. If you don't, here's the quick and dirty. A rubric is a grading guide that is available to students. It tells them how their work is going to be evaluated and allows them to evaluate themselves. Rubrics can take many forms. Here is one I recently used with my students: A rubric I used for a project. What I wrote in the 4 column is definitely a work in progress. As a science department we are struggling with what mastery with excellence really means. In our school, as of this year, we grade on mastery grading system. There are 4 "grades" a student can get: Mastery with Excellence = you understand it so well you can teach it to others Mastery = you get it exactly as well as you should Approaching Mastery = you are almost at mastery but not quite there Not Yet Mastered = New to a skill or no where near mastering it Now, I don't know if this is the case with all mastery schools, but in...
2 comments
Read more

A Teacher or an Educator?

I hope that I am an educator and not a teacher. Let me go back a few steps.   This past week I watched a very good friend of mine give her first TEDx talk on her experiences throwing out grades (and she rocked it!). This event also featured several student speakers.   All the students were fantastic – well spoken, poised and passionate in their delivery. They had a lot of great things to say but two of those things stood out for me.   One student talked about the experiences of students working hard to create projects that only the teacher sees.   This has sparked in me a tiny revolution but I am going to go into that further in another post.   This post focuses on the talk of a young man named Timmy, a senior in high school, who counted off the number of teachers he’d had over the years that he considered educators and not just teachers. As he went on to elaborate about what made a teacher an educator, I just kept thinking, “I wonder if he would call me an...
1 comment
Read more

Your Potential is Infinite

To my students, Life is all about choices. Who you are and will be has not been decided. YOU choose who you want to be. Yes, there are some things about you that you cannot change: your race, sex, sexuality. But there are so many things you can change. And if you don’t like them, change them. But keep in mind, being a complete person takes a life time. Don’t beat yourself up if you are not yet the person you want to be. Your journey has just begun. Who you are today is not who you will be a few years from now. You will change in countless ways.   And you can control the direction of those changes. When I was in middle school, I was shy and very awkward. I wasn’t cool at all . And sometimes that really sucked. I was sensitive, I cried a lot. I was overweight and had super frizzy hair, both of which were pointed out to me and thrown at me as weapons on a regular basis. I had friends but I was by no means popular. This continued for me through college. ...
1 comment
Read more