Classes are over and Parent Night is Thursday

So all three of my graduate courses for the fall term are officially over and as much as I learned from them and enjoyed them, I am glad they are over. It will be nice to be able to put more of my focus on my internship and also on my new middle school placement and being able to put alot of the practices that we learned in these courses in place.
  Tomorrow night is the first day of parent teacher conferences. The first part is being help Thursday evening from 5-8 p.m. and the second part is Friday, 1-3 p.m. How it works is in order for the parents to get their students report cards early, they must come and physically pick them up at the high school. Once that happens they have the option of visiting any of their student's teachers to talk about their students progress. Teachers can also put a comment on the report card, that they request a parent conference to hopefully encourage those parents to attend a meeting with the teacher. The only problem is if the parent or guardian is unable to make it to pick up the report cards, then there is not an opportunity to meet and help the student. So I am hoping I have the opportunity to meet many of my students parent or guardians, to talk about their child's progress and enlist their help where applicable. To encourage my students as well as my mentors students, we decided that if our students attend the parent-teacher conferences, we will give them 3 points extra credit on their 2nd quarter average, which is quite an incentive for some of these students. To have these students come, will allow for a more productive conversation and to make sure everyone is on the same page for what is being done well and for any actions that need to take place. As you can see by the time I am spending writing this section, meeting with the families and my students about their classroom performance is really important to me.
  I forgot to mention, yesterday I met with the Middle School teacher I will be working with starting next week. He seems really nice and has selected two classes for me to observe and then we can decide which class will be the right fit for me to observe and eventually teach a bit. It was a little bit of an adventure to get to the middle school which is attached by a walkway to the high school. I had only been there twice which was the very beginning of the school year. So suffice to say, I walked the way I thought I needed to, took a little detour but eventually got there. The building is uniquely designed where the even number classrooms are on one side of the building, while the odd are on the other. So luckily the part of the building I walked into was the odd side. We chatted briefly, and discussed that he is currently covering Chemistry in his classes and will be moving to Physics after their holiday break. So I am looking forward to speaking with him more and getting to meet the students and see what the Middle School is all about.

2 Classes Down and 1 more to go

  So far I have finished with two classes for the term and the last one is over tomorrow evening. It will be a relief to have a little break from classes and be able to focus even more on my internship. I am meeting my Middle School mentor tomorrow and get to learn what it is like to teach in a Middle School. I found out I will either be teaching organic chemistry or nuclear reactions and most likely electricity, eek!! Not going to lie as a Biology major, even though I took chemistry classes, the idea of those topics scare me! So I have a feeling I will be spending a lot of my free time learning chemistry, hopefully some of it will be relearning, but I am sensing it will be like seeing it for the first time.
  I have registered for me classes for the winter time, most of which start in January except the seminar class. The seminar class starts the first week of December I believe which will run through the winter term, but will give us a class or two off over our internship breaks which will great. Also, the first week of December, we will meet to discuss our Projects. For the MAT program, students have the option to write a thesis paper, which is two terms in length, while the project is one term. I chose the Project because I do not have plans to go on for a PhD in Biology and the project is something that I can develop and actually hopefully implement in my classroom. The winter term is supposed to be the toughest, so let's hope I can grin and bear it and make it through with flying colors. One thing I would recommend if you have the opportunity, is to start taking classes before you start the summer program and doing your internship. I know some of my classmates did that and it means they only have to take two night classes a week or in the spring only have to take a seminar class. Basically the more  you can lighten your load when you are interning the better, so most of your focus is on your internship the less stressed you will feel and the better prepared you will be for your internship.
  This past Friday as I may have mentioned, we held the 2nd installment of our Urban Round Table Series. One of my classmates mentor's from Schenectady High School came to speak with us and did a wonderful job. We overall had a great turn out and hearing from this teacher was great! She was very animated and had some insightful information to share, so I think it was a success. Just booked the speaker for our third installment, so we are keeping the momentum which is great.
  Tomorrow, back to Troy, the 1st Quarter grades are due, so I have been calculating grades and trying to give my students an opportunity to get some points back by handing in late homework for half credit,which created more work for myself as the late assignments trickled in, but it is the 1st Quarter and I had a little leeway to do so. I did explain today that this will not continue this quarter. I also moved their seats today, to mix things up. As you can imagine there were a lot of groans and complaints, but I explained we were starting over and in the real world we may not like everyone we work with, but we have to find a way to get along and get through, so they need to start that adjustment.
  Well I am going to get back to work study. I will check back in again soon!

Can't believe the term is almost over....

As the weekend is wrapping up, this is my last week for two of my classes and next week the last class will be finished. The term has been so busy, but I can hardly believe 10 weeks have come and gone. This weekend I spent quite a bit of time on my final lab for Biological demonstrations. I ended up selected a lab on enzymes, where students test different juices with jello as well as canned, fresh and frozen pineapple in jello. The reason for doing this is certain fruits have enzymes in them, proteases to be exact that actually can act as a meat tenderizer as well as have various properties that can be used for medicinal purposes. Pineapples for example, have an enzyme, bromelain, that has been used to treat third degree burns, arthritis, autoimmune diseases and various other ailments. The enzyme is predominantly found in the stem of the pineapple. Kiwi and papaya have their own enzymes as well. When the juices or fruits with active enzymes interact with jello the jello will not solidify as usually due to the enzymatic activity, really kind of cool. I have practiced it a few times and hope all goes well during the actual lab in class. This week marks the end of the 1st quarter, so it will be my first time fully calculating grades and next week we have parent teacher conferences, where parents can come in, get their students report cards and meet with their teachers. If the parents/guardians do not come in, the grades will be mailed one week later. Also this week is Veterans Day, so I will have Wednesday off, which will be a nice break in the middle of the week. So this week will be really busy graduate class-wise and I am sure a little chaotic in my internship with a day off and it being the end of the quarter.

Below I have included pictures from the egg demonstration I did right before Halloween so you can see what the students saw. So the brief background, eggs have a semi-permeable membrane under the shell, so in all of the below pictures, the egg shell has been removed and has been tested with different substances to show diffusion to the students (molecules moving from high to low concentration). The first two photos, the egg expands and turns orange. The second  photos were not in any solution, but show the nude color egg (nude color is their membrane). The next photo is of an egg in water, it expanded, the next photo is a different angle of an egg not in solution and the last photo is an egg in corn syrup, it shriveled.

The below picture is of an egg w/o it's shell in water with orange food coloring

Same as photo above, at a different angle.












The below photo is of an egg w/o it's shell.

The above photo is of the egg w/o it's shell in water.^

The next photo is an aerial view of an egg w/o it's shell.

 The photo the left is of an egg w/o its shell in corn syrup

Oh how I love days off!

   Hello, hope everyone is having a good week so far and a great Halloween weekend. Today, I had the day off from my internship because it was voting day and Troy was holding a Professional Development day which turns out to be review of information I learned in my Wednesday evening seminar class. It was nice to wake up a little later, get work done and then head into my work study job before class.
   Let's see where I left off last. This past Friday, I had probably one of my best days in my internship so far. I was teaching new information which the students seem to get and I felt I explained it really well and students who don't usually, asked questions and answered questions. My favorite part of Friday was I did a lab demonstration for my students, since it was the Friday before Halloween and my mentor did not want us to start the lab before the weekend. I did a lab demo of an egg. This was something I did in my Methods class over the summer and my fellow classmates really liked, so I was excited to see what my students thought. I set everything up ahead of time. I first soaked 4 eggs in vinegar overnight to remove the egg shell. Once this was done, the next day I put one egg in water, another egg in corn syrup and one egg in water with orange food coloring (in honor of Halloween) overnight. The last egg I kept separate so that I could show the students what the egg looked like without the shell. The reason for doing this activity, is to start getting them to think about permeability and diffusion, prior to the NYS lab on diffusion that they have to do. I created a worksheet so they could follow along and I asked  them a bunch of questions to get them thinking about what might happen and to start to build some suspense. I must say the students were engaged and the most focused and enthused I have seem them in class. It was so great to have their attention, have them guessing what might happen and to have them excited, it truly was an rewarding experience. So Friday, was a great day all around for myself and I hope too for my students.
   Monday on the other hand, was a tough day. The students were coming off of a weekend, it had just been Halloween, they knew they had Tuesday off and the end of the 1st quarter is approaching. Suffice to say, the students were not nearly as attentive and were a little more unruly than usual. They have a test tomorrow so I created a review activity of Jeopardy to make it fun as well as provide them the opportunity to review two units. Due to the fact they were broken into two teams, one team took the lead really early on, which meant the other team gave up, which made for interesting classroom management. Thus, I ended the game early and just did straight review, but ended the class a little frustrated. So I am hoping the rest of the week will go a little better than the beginning.
   This past weekend, on a fun note, was my friend's birthday so we went to the Parting Glass to hear Hair of the Dog in downtown Saratoga. They are a local Irish group, that are absolutely phenomenal and so much fun to listen to. So great food, great company and great music, was a nice way to wrap up the week.
   Things are coming up quickly.... I cannot believe the term is over in two weeks. I will be wrapping up classes and starting my middle school experience, with Thanksgiving in between followed by Christmas. Our second Urban Roundtable Series is next week, in which we have a teacher from Schenectady High School and I am very excited to hear what she has to say. I will also be taking my next teaching exam in December (have to remember to sign up for that this week), which I am not looking forward to, but I am trying to space them out and give myself time to retake one, in case the unthinkable happens.
  Well that is more than enough for now. Please feel free to post a comment, ask a question, or anything, I would be happy to help and hear from those that are taking the time to follow my journey with me.

 I will try and post pictures of my egg demo later this week, so you can see what I was talking about!

 Have a great week!!!