Saturday, February 02, 2008

One good day


I finally got my office organized at work..something I have been trying to do since August. Next task is the prep room, but that is quite the daunting task. Yesterday was a pretty good day at school-well, at least 1st period. My honors class has been talking about crystal structures and on Monday I had them make Alum crystals (Alum is in deodorant) and yesterday we looked at them under the microscopes along with some other types of crystals. I didn't give them an assignment about it and I think that was a good decision because they just took the opportunity to be curious. They were really excited about their crystals- they all turned out differently which was weird, but a lot of them wanted to take theirs home...a couple even want to come in after school and work on setting it up so that their crystals will keep growing. Then, after they'd looked at their crystals, they started looking at other stuff under the scopes. The boys were going about trying to find blood samples ( I had to keep taking away forceps from them) and the girls became fascinated with looking at their hair under the scopes. Typical!

Parent teacher conferences are at the end of the month- I just LOVE those.... March will be a long month, but at the end we have spring break- no plans which isn't a good thing for me, but I do have a few weeks. The AP exam is in May, and my kids don't realize how much left they have to learn so they really haven't kicked it into gear yet. (I have a couple of lazy guys-but the girls are on top of things) I am hearing a lot of talk about kids wanting to take AP next year, which is exciting for me, especially since it won't be my first year with AP next year, and I'll have a much better idea of how to teach the class. Also, I am drawing the line. NO more Saturday labs. Either they take the AP science lab as part of their school schedule or they register for the course at the U and take it there (unfortunately having to pay tuition) Saturday labs are just too much.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

Ahh, I don't know how you handle teaching high schoolers every day. That would drive me totally nuts! It sounds like you're a fabulous teacher.

Jessica said...

Awesome! I glad your class had a good time--fun with Chem! Do you remember how much fun (or at least laughs) we had in our AP Chem class. Good choice to reclaim your Saturdays!