Microscopes!

I'm pretty excited; 23 microscopes in an old, beat-up, carved-up, tagged-up, sagging wood cabinet showed up without warning in the still uncompleted science lab next door to my classroom. I checked them all out and 17 are usable, 3 are missing key parts (and I can't figure out how to cannibalize them to be able to make 2 of them usable), 1 is an old mirror-operated microscope with no light source (pre War model!) and 1 is a super-dooper, brand new snazzy digital/analog research microscope with a camera that can be attached to a projector or a computer...but there's no power cord or anything that will make it "go". But, still I'm excited because my students can use real scientific instruments to study and learn about life.

I was out all day Wednesday at an all-day Science department meeting, so I gave the students a homework assignment instructing them to label all of the parts of a microscope and paraphrase the steps in using one (from the Appendix in the back of their textbook). I let them know that there would be a quiz on that information the following day and if they didn't do the homework or do well on the quiz, they wouldn't be able to use the microscopes. Only about half of the students bothered to do the homework, and so, of course only about half of them got to do the Introductory lab. I took the students who scored the highest and completed the homework next door to the lab so they could begin work. It was cool! I gave them each a transparency "slide" with some text on it and had them look at a letter "e" in the 'scope and draw it. This is a good one because if they really are able to focus and see it correctly, the "e" is upside down and backwards. Only one student drew it as a normal letter, so I helped her figure out what she did wrong and how to correct it. Then, they got to choose one of the 10 slides I have of human tissue: brain cells, kidney cells, heart muscle cells, bone cells, etc. and practice drawing what they see. They really enjoyed this because they had really learned how to use the scopes and were seeing what their own cells looked like.

I was going a little bonkers because I kept having to go leave the students in the lab to go back and check on the students still in the classroom. I told them as they finished that they could bring their completed homework and corrected quiz to the lab and, as scopes were available, begin the lab. My second period class has 35 students in it, so half of the class didn't actually get to use a scope; they had to stay in the room and work on other homework. I had one student, who has difficulty following any kind of directions, get upset with me because he didn't get to use a microscope...because the last scope was taken by a kid who did follow directions and got the last one. I wound up having to escort the upset student to another teacher's classroom so he would not continue to be a disruption in my own classroom.

Tomorrow and Monday I'll be gone again for Professional Development (the district requires us to take so many classes per year) and now, because of the lack of prepared students, instead of doing more interesting microscope work (seeing cells at the various stages of mitosis and looking at their own cheek cells!) they have to do worksheets on the textbook chapter. Yuk, but not a complete loss because they need to practice reading and comprehension.

I'm waaay behind schedule, and will be getting further behind because of the arrival of the microscopes, but I'm not too concerned. These are important skills and truly engaging tools that are important in the overall scheme of things. I just learned that our district's chief administrators visited our main campus on Wednesday and went into 3 different science classrooms where Biology was being taught. This administrator was "gravely concerned" when 2 of the teachers were behind where the should have been on the pacing plan and the third teacher was teaching something that was not even in the standards (mitosis, which isn't in our standards, but we cover anyway because our students need to know it to learn about meiosis which is in our standards; mitosis is a middle school standard but very few of our students remember anything about it). I can only imagine what the administrator would say if he came to my classroom.

Sorry for the long delay since the last blog. November was really a challenge. On top of all of the usual unexpected urgencies that appear nearly daily in my teaching life, my car was broken into and my "life" was stolen within the space of the 5 minutes it took me to return books to the public library. Even though I am usually very vigilant about leaving stuff visible in the car, I was so preoccupied that day that I left my purse in the passenger footwell, along with a bag of recycling. I lost my purse with my wallet, a good amount of cash, all my cards and ID, my cellphone, my PDA (with all of my contact info for all of you!) and my flash drive with all of my teaching, personal, photos and business files. Fortunately, I filed a Police Report and cancelled/froze all of the accounts before the thieves could use anything, but I'm still mourning my loss. Each day some new file loss comes to mind and I just get irritated. Oh well, time for chocolate pudding with toast for dinner; Okie self-medication.