It's Not Magic, It's Science!

When I was young I had a recurring dream/nightmare. In the dream I would go swimming and when I tried to surface I would find that I was trapped under the water. I would wake with my heart pounding and breathing fast. As I got older the dream happened with less frequency but proved to have some lingering effects. To this day I can't deal with being held under water. Just the other day day I was swimming with my son and he was trying to push me under the water and I had a mini-freak out. I put the kibosh on that game from now until forever. These days I recognize that dream for what it was - an anxiety dream. The reason I stopped having the dream wasn't because I stopped experiencing anxiety (quite the opposite in fact). The dream hasn't stopped, it has just changed into different anxiety-inducing experiences, ones more apropos to my present-day life. Since becoming an adult the  anxiety dream I've had most frequently is one that I've found is very common among my fr...

It's August 2021 and I'm knee deep in summer vacation. After a month of my boy being in summer camp, we are spending the rest of vacation at the beach...and loving every second of it. But, in the back of my mind, I am always thinking about the coming school year (which starts on my birthday no less). And now that it's August, the thoughts that were hanging out in the back of my mind have started to creep forward. I'm trying hard to enjoy what is left of the care free dog days of summer but the teacher part of my brain can't be quieted. So here I am at 10pm, in the bottom bunk of my son's bed, getting some of those thoughts down on virtual paper so maybe they will quiet the heck down! Here is where my brain jumble is right now as a neatly organized, bulleted list: I haven't stepped foot into a classroom since March 12, 2020 (except for two days in September when I wasn't sure if I would get a medical accommodation for the 2020-2021 school year). For the l...

Where has all the vocational training gone? Years ago, teaching in the Bronx in a building that was built in the middle of last century, the school needed more classroom space. There was a large room available on the first floor. The only catch was that the available room was a shop room, complete with tools and kilns. Fast forward a few months and all shop equipment had been ripped out and it had become a standard classroom (in more recent years I think it has been turned into 2 classrooms). My current building is new and was built with an art room. No kilns, but work stations with vices and cabinets specialized for tools. It is being used as an english classroom. I would love to teach the science of cooking but there are no ovens anywhere in the building and no space or funding for them. There are absolutely no shop rooms in the building. In NYC, it seems shop class is dead and vocational schools are few and far between. For many years, the push in NYC schools and in much of the ...

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. ...

I love teaching. Truly the most special part of teaching is the students. So, I thought I would share just a few of the many amazing moments I have had with students. Students like to share food with me. Several years ago, a very young colleague of mine passed away. The school community was devastated. Many of us, including staff and students, attended the funeral. At the funeral I got to talk to several students I rarely had the opportunity to chat with. While I was chatting with one that I had never taught, we somehow got on the subject of figs and how much we loved them. He mentioned that his grandparents had a fig tree and that season they had a lot of figs. He asked if I wanted some and I definitely did! So, the next day he shows up in my classroom with a big container of figs which took me about 2 periods to devour. At lunch he came back to eat a couple. Oops. They had been devoured hours before by this fig loving educator. He didn't have to share his grandparents preciuo...

This is the story of the best project I have ever done! I loved and the kids loved it. And it was the Plan B after I realized that Plan A wasn't going to happen. So, plan A. For the past several years I have taught circuits. I would always do the standard circuit building with circuit kits. Yipee. The kids liked it but I wanted to up the wow factor. So, I had the big idea that we would learn circuits in December and the kids would make light up holiday shirts! Brilliant! And , we would do a fashion show on the day before winter break. Amazing! I told everyone about it and everyone was super excited. Fast forward to November of this year when I started the nitty gritty of the planning...and figuring out what supplies I needed. And all my brilliant plans came to a screeching halt. This was going to be WAY too expensive and it was too late to fundraise. So, my co-teacher and I spent the next week desperately trying to come up with something circuits based that was fun, challenging...

As I work my way through year number 15 of teaching, I feel like I have finally reached a place where I can impart some wisdom to the new teachers that are just trying to tread water until summer and hope they can make it to the next year. So, here it is. My words of wisdom. 1. It gets better. I cried most days my first year teaching. Some times I had someone cover my class so I could go in the hall and cry. On Fridays I taught 6 classes with a double period at the end of the day. Whenever I needed a mental health day, it was always on a Friday. When I didn't take a mental health day on Fridays, I would often take a nap in my car after I got home because I didn't have the stamina to walk to my house after my exhausting day. For several months in my second year I could never turn my back on one of my classes because whenever I did, shenanigans would ensue. I even got hit in the back of the head with a paper airplane (though they swore they weren't aiming for me). This ...

I recently completed one of my favorite units of all time. It was also one I was teaching for the first time. The topics we covered were kinetic and potential energy, conservation of energy and simple machines. For kinetic and potential energy we used the anchoring phenomena of a skateboarder on a halfpipe.  We analyzed her energy as she moved through the half pipe. Students used an amazing  skate park simulator  to explore the skaters energy changes.  We learned about simple machines through a station rotation and trebuchets. The culminating project was construction of a trebuchet that was built in groups with the goal of launching a marshmallow two meters. I have rarely seen student engagement like I saw in this unit. They were excited to come to class and wanted to stay after to continue working. But, being that it was a unit I had never taught before, I knew that it could be better. So, I thought, who better to help me make it better than the students? I knew i...

"Ms. Cimini, you're one of the most real teachers I have ever had". At the end of this school year, when a student said this to me, I took a moment to digest it. Then I realized it was one of the best compliments I had ever gotten as an educator. If you have ever read my blog, you know that I teach middle school and I love it (I even wrote a post about how much I love teaching middle school - you can check it out  here ). I spent several years teaching high school as well, but middle school is my happy place for several reasons. I won't go into them all again, save one. Middle school is not just about what you are teaching. Most importantly it is about who and how you are teaching. Middle school kids are in the throes of becoming people and, as a middle school educator, I can help them to become who they are going to be. This aspect of the job is more important than any content knowledge I can teach them. When they leave my room at the end of the year, it is more ...

For years I talked about writing a Fund for Teachers grant. I hemmed and hawed about where I would go and what I would do. Then, in late 2017, I learned about the first annual Space Port Area Conference for Educators (SPACE) to be held at the Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 2018 by the Astronauts Memorial Fund. The stars aligned (pun intended) and I knew I needed to go to this event. And I would write a FFT grant proposal to get me there. I currently teach at an Expeditionary Learning School and EL has a long history of helping teachers write FFT proposals. So, with the help of an EL educator that is very experienced in helping teachers write successful proposals (THANK YOU a million times Aurora), I wrote my proposal to attend the SPACE conference. In April, while at a NYC STEM workshop, I found out I had been awarded the grant! Fund for Teachers was going to pay for this amazing opportunity. Little did I know then how truly awesome it would be. Fast forward to July. Gidd...

You can't win if you don't play. True in lotto and true in teaching. A few weeks ago I became a Fund for Teachers (FFT) fellow. This means that I have been awarded a grant for travel that will further the work I am doing in my classroom. When I started talking about this with other educators, I found many that many had never heard of FFT. This summer, through my grant, I will be attending the first ever SPACE conference for educators at the Kennedy Space Center run by the Astronauts Memorial Foundation. I also recently applied to be a social media correspondant for a NASA launch (though I think maybe I need a few more followers....@sciencecimini on Insta and Twitter). I heard of the conference and social media opportunity through a NASA email and FFT from other teachers. Three years ago I became part of Math for America (MfA) as a Master Teacher. This amazing organization supports science and math teachers in NYC (and other cities throughout the US) with excellent professio...

What if I fall? Oh, but my darling. What if you fly? - Erin Hanson By this point we all know that "effective" teaching involves less of the teacher teaching and more of the students doing. But letting go of control in the classroom can be scary. This is a tale of how I faced my fear of loosing the reins, how it paid off in spades and how you can do the same. My educational experience growing up was chalk and talk. I learned everything I was supposed to pretty well. So did my friends (likely because they were just like me). So, why change something if it isn't broken? In my first several years of teaching, chalk and talk was my default mode. When in doubt, just deliver the content. But, I knew all the research. This isn't really the way it should be done. Kids learn better when they do, when they are more engaged in the lesson, when they have more ownership, blah blah blah. But chalk and talk was working. So, why change the system? And what if I let go a little, ...

I teach middle school. Yes, I chose to teach middle school. I have taught every grade from 6 through 12 and middle school is my happy place. When I moved and had to find a new job, the first places I looked were middle schools. In middle school the kids are old enough to have serious, adult-like conversations. But sometimes, they forget that they are trying to be all adulty and they act like kids. It's the best of both worlds. Yes, they can be moody and difficult as they try to navigate their way through the roller coaster ride that is puberty. But it is an awesome privilege to be a part of their lives as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to be. Having fun with my students at Frost Valley. My first formal teaching job was in a middle school. We were a new school with very green teachers. There were four classrooms, 6 teachers and a whole lot of sixth graders. I went in on the first day nervous and excited. I love science, love teaching science and I love wo...

I love space. I love to learn about space and to teach about space. And kids love space. When I taught earth science I spent waaaay longer than I needed to on the space unit.  Our current seventh grade curriculum doesn't include space.  So, I found a way to include it. In the spring I teach the physics unit. This includes magnets, electricity, sound and electromagnetic energy. On it's own, without a "hook", this can be fun unit. It's very hands on. But I wanted to kick it up a notch and I am always looking for ways to integrate space science into the curriculum. This seemed like the perfect unit for space integration. Thus, my NASA unit was born. For the past 2 years I have taught this unit through the lens of space exploration - specifically the Journey to Mars. I begin the unit with the history of space exploration and the introduction of the unit project. By the end of the unit, students will design a ship that gets astronauts safely to Mars and they will...

For six weeks my students were engaged in a physics unit. The culminating project was to design a ship that will get astronauts safely to Mars.  They worked on it in bits and pieces since the unit began, completing one task at a time. Part of the project has been to engage in peer review. Today, after sharing his work with a peer, one student said to me "Ms. Cimini, the peer review so useful". Um, yeah. That's why we do it! He is starting to see the power of the hive mind. For many years I planned on an island. I was the sole teacher of my subject in my school. We were all the sole teachers of our subjects. We retreated to our rooms, planned and executed our lessons and that was that. We never planned together. We rarely exchanged ideas. If you were friends with another teacher you might share ideas with her but that was the extent of it. Now I am at a school where department meetings are a regular thing. We regularly share ideas and I LOVE it! Five heads are so much ...

For almost as long I have been teaching I have wanted to go to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) national conference. Finally, I've made it!! Every year I asked to go and every year I was told the school didn't have the money to send me. Fast forward to 2017. Thanks to a grant from Math for America and a generous principal that supports my professional growth, I have made it to my first NSTA national conference. Woo Hoo!!! Day 1 - I arrive in Los Angeles It's March and I live in New Jersey. So, it's cold. Two weeks ago we had a major snow storm. Cue the California sunshine. As soon as I stepped out of the airport terminal in LA I began to peel off the layers and whipped out the sunglasses. Sandal season is on! After arriving at the hotel I was able to sit outside and get some work done. In March. So nice....After that, an unexpected dinner with a friend and then off to the conference. Tomorrow is the first official day of the conference but tonight t...