Cool Moments in Teaching

One great thing about my job(s) is that every day is a new adventure.  Sometimes the adventure is the “sit on the deck of a cruise ship sipping something naughty from a pineapple” type and sometimes it’s the “root canal while drinking ice water without the good happy gas” type.  Fortunately, I spend more days sipping from proverbial pineapples than getting root canals but I sure wouldn’t turn down a thank-you tank of happy gas now and then!

Today was one of those cruise ship days.  Rather exhausting but full of little moments that make you want to hum on your way home.  During science class, some students spun orbit simulators over their heads to investigate how weight effects orbit while others used latex sheets and water balloons to investigate orbital pathways using a marble.  No one was injured, nothing got broke, and they all looked ridiculous wearing the safety goggles.  It’s always a good day when goggles are involved. 

As a service learning project, all 58 of my students are learning to knit.  Yep, even the boys.  The Needle Arts Mentoring Project donated all the  needles and some start-up yarn.  I just had to be brave enough to give pointy sticks to 12 year olds!  Their mission is to knit at least one 6×9 inch rectangle to be sent to the Afghan Project: an organization that assembles rectangles into afghans for wounded soldiers recovering in the hospital.  One of the boys has become so addicted to knitting that he has challenged himself to knit a continuous narrow scarf that will go around the mile track.  He’s got 30 feet done.  Only 5000+ to go!  Two of the girls came to me today and needed advice on basketweave and stripe patterns.  They only learned to knit 10 weeks ago.  At least 20 of the students carry their knitting everywhere throughout the day.  It’s a great feeling knowing that I’ve helped others to learn that knitting can give you a sense of accomplishment and peace.  They’ll have 30 more years to enjoy it than I will.

I just returned from teaching my college class.  It looks like I’ll be teaching two next semester!  If the details can be worked out, I’ll be teaching Technology in Education along with my Intro to Scientific Inquiry course.  Tonight I watched as 16 adults measured things using toothpicks, learned about the reproductive habits of bees, and played with prisms and laser pointers.  Everything was new and exciting and I learned that college students still want to make laser pointer swirlies on the ceiling.  Not much changes from sixth grade! 

Whether the students are 12 or 22 seems to make little difference.  They all remind me of why I have chalk dust on my butt and overhead marker on my face.  Because of what I do, there are dozens of people home tonight talking about the cool thing that spun, the new stitch they learned, or how many sparkles an engagement ring produces when a laser pointer hits it.  Not one could say they answered questions in a text book and I’m not the least bit upset by that.  

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Bioeyes at Notre Dame

In my never-ending quest to prove teachers do not “have the summer off”, I have spent the week in labs at Notre Dame’s Jordan Hall of Science learning about embryonic development and genetics in zebra fish.  The goal is to borrow the equipment from Notre Dame and bring the lab activities to my sixth grade science students next spring.   The only words to describe the week are “WAY COOL!” 

While I really enjoyed using all the snazzy equipment and watching the embryos develop, one of the best parts of the week was being captivated by the presenter.  There were actually many presenters but the one who guided us through the zebra fish labs, DS, was AMAZING.  It didn’t matter what she was telling us, her energy, sense of humor, and enthusiasm made you want to listen.  “We’re going to pippette fish poop!”  “YAYHOO DS, I wanna go first!”  And, unlike many inservices/trainings/seminars/classes I’ve attended, I did not once hypothesize as to how many times it would take dragging the Bic pen cap across my wrists to slit them.  In fact, I walked away from this week a little slower than I usually do.  I’ll miss you DS.  Hope our paths cross again.

I also got to work with an amazing lab partner which rarely happens.  Last year I had to partner with a woman (for two looong agonizing weeks) who made it perfectly clear that she resented me because I worked at the Academy (translated by her into “they get everything and take all the smart kids and I teach with crap”).  Yep, she actually said it.  On the first day.  Comfy fortnight that was!  Or I get stuck with the teacher who either does nothing, has no sense of humor, and whines or the one who hogs everything and won’t shut up during the final presentation because no one has anything more important to say than she does.  Yes, I’m scarred.  Playing nice with other grown-ups is a skill I’m still working on!  But back to the cool lab partner…..she just got hired to teach at my school, in my grade level, the same subjects I teach!  She’s fun and competent and creative (sigh)!  What a great hiring decision Madam Principal!

But back to the fish……….We have a great document camera in the science lab I teach in and I learned how to line it up with the microscope eyepiece so I could display the image from a slide onto the large screen or tv.  Remembering that, I showed my lab partner how we could use the digital cameras to focus through the eyepieces and take pictures and video of what we were seeing.  So for your viewing pleasure, here are some of the pictures taken this week.  (I tried to upload the video of a twitching embryo but I haven’t figured out how to save it in an acceptable format yet.)

On the first day, we selected our cross of fish to breed.  Here are Fred and Ethel:

After lowering the lights and playing some romantic mood music……….nothing happened.  I don’t believe Ehtel (albino female) was terribly interested in the ever-so-eager Fred (hetero wild….aren’t they all).  But in the morning, low and behold…………fertilized eggs.  It’s my firm belief that Ethel gave in just to shut him up.

 I won’t bore you with pictures of us sucking fish poop or bad eggs (I’ll just let your minds run with that one!).  

The cool thing about zebra fish is that they develop quickly.  The students can use them to learn everything from embryonic stages to genetics in a very short amount of time by studying them.   So by day three, some of our 138 eggs (Ethel seems to have pelted Fred with eggs when he wouldn’t take no for an answer) were twitching with life.

    

Both of these embryos are Albino and the size of a straight pin head.  The large circle in the middle is the yolk and that will get smaller as the embryos develop.  By day four, a few had hatched.  See, WAY COOL!

I can’t wait to spend a week doing this with my students!  If you are interested in learning more about the BioEyes program, they have a great website:  http://www.jefferson.edu/bioeyes/  It takes a minute to do its thing but there is no special password or login.  Once it loads, you can click on “teacher entry” then scroll down to curriculum.  Clicking on the grade levels you’re interested in will take you to links to pdf’s of the curriculum!  Anyone with a microscope, medicine dropper, and a local pet store can conduct many of these activities. 

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