Donate Now I’m three for seven on dwarfs whose names describe me today. I was actually looking forward to work this morning, since Fridays are my lightest teaching load – every other day I have three classes for a single period and one for a double, but since I only have four classes I get…

Donate Now Half day today for afternoon parent-teacher conferences, yay! There was a pretty good turnout, including the parents of some of my most problematic students. It’s kind of awkward explaining to a parent that their kid deliberately farts in other kids’ faces, or goes to the water fountain and walks around the room seeing…

Assembling the foam cell models at lunch today was every bit as glorious as I had been anticipating. It was almost as good as assembling all my IKEA furniture when I moved to New York! Ms. L and I stayed until 5:00 again unpacking the rest of the first shipment of boxes. Apparently I misunderstood…

Remember the $25,000 Ms. L and I got to go nuts on science education catalogs with? Today we got all the goodies we ordered! Well, not all the goodies, just the first installment of 15 boxes. Yes, that’s right, the first installment alone was 15 boxes. The total that we’re expecting is 41. That’s 41…

Going back to work after a week off is always a soul-crushing experience, and that’s pretty much all I have to say about today. Also, Alexander tied his jacket around his neck like a cape and refused to take it off, declaring “I am the king of table 6!” When I got back I had…

I’m a TFA Amgen Fellow, which basically means that every now and then Amgen gives me several hundred dollars to spend on something science-y for my classroom. I have until the first week of March to figure out what to do with the current grade they’ve given me (anyone have any good ideas for how…

Is that, at my school at least, they require practice runs along the way. The next big test for NYC educators to worry about is the math test in March, and my administration decided to administer a practice one today to figure out what areas the students are weakest in and therefore how to make…

Today was the 100th day of the school year. That’s 100 mornings getting up while it’s still dark outside to get to school early enough to make copies and prepare lab materials, 100 nights of going to bed with a pit in my stomach – sometimes smaller than others, but always there – thinking about…

Community Word is an organization that sends hippies, (excuse me, “teaching artists”), into NYC public schools to teach the kids how to write poems about their feelings. I’m not exactly sure how our school got mixed up with them, but they come every Tuesday to listen to music and free write with each seventh grade…

I feel much better after spending the weekend doing very little, but I have completely lost my voice. It’s very annoying because I sounded fine when I actually felt crappy, and it’s only now that I feel better that I sound pathetic enough to earn sympathy. Anyway, since I literally could not talk above a…

I have developed yet another in my ongoing series of disgusting colds, it’s a lovely side effect of spending all day knee-deep in germ-infested children. No entry yesterday because I stayed home sick, and today I wasn’t really feeling the whole “try to yell over 30 screaming kids” thing, so I gave a pop quiz.…

I have a hard time even describing Marvin. He is one of my most difficult students to handle in class, despite the fact that he almost never engages in extreme misbehaviors like Tareque or Yenesy. I don’t know what it is exactly that he does to the other kids, but no matter who I sit…

I can tell you one thing that the internet is NOT for: taking videos of you and your seventh grade friends goofing off in class, and then posting them on youtube. However, when I was clicking around the network of linked youtube videos of my students dancing, I discovered that one student had posted not…

Let’s go shopping! Actually, teaching math is way harder than teaching science. Not that I’m a great science teacher, but I think I’m a terrible math teacher. Middle school science is all conceptual, so if a kid doesn’t get something it’s easy to come up with another  example, or metaphor, or story to help them…