Spring Break 2009

This is my fifth year in first grade and the first year that in 10 that I haven’t assigned homework to my students over the holiday.  I, of course, brought work home. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it sits on my desk (and the floor around my desk) staring at me, reminding me that I am being a slacker.

I am trying to work out why my kids got of scott free. There are two trains of thought. One is that I am worn down this year and couldn’t have faced the creating, assigning and then grading of a math packet and a reading packet. I’ll be honest, the whole thing would have been chucked into the recycling bucket the moment I arrived home with the stacks to be graded.  The other possibility is that I made an intentional decision to give the students the space and time to be kids outside.  Which one is true? I am not sure.  I have high hopes that the kids are outside experiencing life (and therefore science) and that they are reading self chosen books from the library each and every day. Hopefully, I am not delusional.

Meanwhile, I am pretending to work. I have started gathering artifacts for the forest unit.  This involves picking up leaves, pine cones and other realia on walks through the urban forests around my town.  Choosing these items is always fun.  I try to think like a 6 year old.  What is going to cause me to think about the urban forest?  What is going to spark  an investigable question? Is that pine cone better than this one because it is flawless?  My dogs (and neighbors) are mystified to see me gathering eco-trash, but I think these will be real assets in the classroom.

I received from friends some unidentified eggs.  R is going to love these. I have no idea what they are, but I am hoping for snakes.  Right now, they are in some sand/dirt in a box on my front porch. I hope that they hatch. Then, feeding them will be another matter. I am going to get worms and possibly snails as well as butterflies and praying mantis to have in the room.  The forest unit has many more touchable things than the desert unit did.

I have also been listening to the Science Friday Podcasts. (Go to http://tinyurl.com/dgjmyj for a snippet if you’ve not listened before.) I have learned so much about what’s going on right now in the scientific community.  There were some interesting podcasts on the state of science in education as well as my favorite so far: a podcast about a butterfly larva that convinces ants that it is the ant colony’s next queen. The ants then feed and protect it at the expense of their own young.  Did you know that ants make noise?

I digress, back to the classroom tie-in.  It’s always nice to hear what’s being studied or tried in classrooms in other states.  For instance, there was a study out of Ohio comparing the scientific reasoning of Chinese High School students (and college freshman) to American High School students (and college freshman.)  The Chinese students, against whom we are always comparing our students, are great at spitting out facts on tests. However, in college programs, they a step behind our students in scientific reasoning. There is speculation as to the length of time needed for those students to catch up to ours (longer than a matter of mere years.) The sponsors of the study hypothesize that our students can learn all the facts they need to compete with Chinese students in a matter of years. The implications are very interesting: there is a need to balance scientific literacy with scientific reasoning in classrooms.  

My reading list for the summer into the fall has been completed.  I am going to start with a book called “Not in our Classrooms”, which sounds like a treatise against mean spirited behavior in a classroom.  In reality (http://tinyurl.com/cjdkga) it is a book explaining why Intelligent Design is wrong for American schools.  To me, this must be a binary decision: 1= science guided by scientific principles in classrooms so that our students can compete in a future that none of us can imagine. 0=science guided by religious ideology in classrooms so that our students are left out of future careers in biology, chemistry, geology and space exploration.  Also,”Intelligent Design” and its corollary, “Strengths and Weaknesses”, allow me to teach the theology of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (http://www.venganza.org/) as a valid scientific possibility. (I am not serious, yet, but I can see the writing on the wall.) Since I can’t say, “You people are living in a cave believing that the shadows are reality” in the midst of a faculty meeting, this book should be a great tool. A tool that I can then wield like a fiery sword of righteousness.

Otherwise, there is not much school happening this week.  I revel in that.  Enjoy your spring everyone!