The countdown is beginning

With only 3 more weeks to go, I am relieved. I am through the honeymoon stage with all of my class. This week, I cut back to only 3 classes instead of 4. I also have been even more stressed through the whole week, with the majority of that stress coming from my last class of the day. I bet you can guess who it is. That's right Ag Foundations with the freshman. It got to the point that one day after school, I said to my cop. teacher, that "I strongly dislike this class. I just keep telling myself that if these were my real students they would not act like this. They would know from the beginning how to act. Also they would know what it is like to have a real teacher." These students have gone through 4 teachers this year counting me. But I guess that is what happens when you have a baby before school starts. I have already talked to my cop. teacher about all of this and she kind of agrees with me. However, one suggestion she had was that when I started, I should not have been so easy with them. I should have started hard then lessened (yes, I know, I was told this before).

While still talking about the freshman, my action based research is in this class. The students have been complaining about the amount of notes they have to write. I replied back that if I just gave them the notes and they did not have to write them down then they would not take the time to go back and look at the notes. I stated that they would all do bad on the test. Well, guess what. I lessened the amount of notes that had to be handwritten - amount varied depending on lesson- and gave a test today. After all students sounding surprised that there was a test, I had to nicely state that this has been on the board since Monday and that we played a review game on Wednesday (which half did not pay attention to). Complaints came from everyone. I then stated that if you paid attention during the game then you would do great because every single question, I asked during the game is on the test. Well, half of the questions were not filled out and therefore, I do not think anyone got over an 75% on the test. But, what do I do? Do I give them a new test and in a way reward them for not studying and relooking at their notes or do I leave the grades as is? This is just goes to prove that my initial thought about note taking was right and students need to write information down in order to learn it.

Another interesting thing this week was finishing my unit on parasitology. On Thursday, I did another lab dealing with real stool this time. I had 4 stations set up. At each station, students were to either make a fecal smear, fecal centrifuge or fecal float and then look at it. I brought in dog stool from my dog at home. Since I am a veterinary technician, I have all my dogs on preventives for all internal parasites, so I was 100% positive that no parasites would be found. To my surprise, I was wrong. The first group to look at their smear, found whipworm eggs, and then it continued onto looking at the floats where eggs were present as well. I immediately made students disinfect everything that they possible could have touched. I do think that next time I do this I am going to have the stool checked at the veterinary before bringing it to school. However, I thought that it was a great thing for the kids to experience. I mean how many high school students can diagnosis a dog with whipworms.