What causes many new teachers the most stress is the class management side of a course like this.  I won’t sugar coat it here.  Many of these students are unruly, have been in trouble in the past, may have been suspended or truant.    To me, it doesn’t matter what their home life is like, or how rough a night they had, these are things I cannot change.  I can only control what occurs in my classroom and how they behave when they are with me that hour of the day.   I also maintain that many of these kids have been unsuccessful because they just don’t know what simple behaviors can improve their chances of success.  Let me illustrate further…

I walk into my Advance Placement Biology class and I’m a couple minutes late because the principal stopped me outside the door to discuss the science fair.   When I finally open the door and walk in, the students have their notebooks out and are comparing their homework assignments to check for the right answers, some are even writing down tonight’s assignment.

The same situation occurs, but instead I walk in late to an intro physics class.   You can probably imagine a scene quite different.  Students are tossing around someone’s backpack, many of them aren’t ready to work; a few of them ambush me at the door because they’ve forgotten something very important in their locker or desperately need to go to the bathroom.   You try to get everyone settled, but a few of them don’t have pencils or paper, only one of them has their homework finished and most of the others didn’t even know there was homework.   If you’re a veteran teacher,  this scene is probably familiar to you.

If you’re a new teacher fresh out of college you might read this and think I am misguided.  You might recall how your college professors told you that every child can learn and its all about how the teacher motivates the student and what expectations the teacher has.  You might have heard some parable about a new teacher who came into a room full of kids who she thought was an advanced class. She taught them calculus and they were the brightest most intelligent kids she could have imagined.  At the end of the story she found out that they’d mixed up the class label and these were actually the low-track kids who were supposed to learn basic math. The moral is supposed to be that kids will do what is expected of them.  If you have high expectations, you will get better results than if you have low expectations.   This is true, expectations matter, even if the story itself is only a fable.

I absolutely have high expectations for every class I teach, but I don’t expect my basic math students to whip out calculus in 3 weeks.   If I did that, not only would I set my students up for failure, but I may set myself up for a nervous breakdown.  My point here is that for many students, they just don’t know what an honor student has figured out.  They don’t get the connection between  having a notebook and pen out and getting focused and ready to learn.  I had  a  student who constantly lay his head down on the desk, and I would say “John, sit up and listen” and he’d respond “but I am listening”.    Honor students know the difference. Honor students have learned good habits which have enabled them to be successful in school.  Notice I didn’t even say honor students are smarter, because that may not be the case.  Entire books have been written about habits and success, it may have even been required reading: “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”  (though I prefer the teen version).

To that end, with an intro level class it is important to set the tone right off the bat and begin establishing good habits.   If that first day, you assign them seats and then tell them they can visit with their friends the rest of the time , well then you’ve basically given them the idea that “visiting friends” is an activity they can expect for the rest of the year.   You are really better off keeping them busy, even if it’s something not even related to the subject you teach.  I’ve compiled a list of First Day Activities if you need some inspiration.

The other thing I enact with classes that need to improve their habits is a daily grade based on habits and class participation.   I use a type of grid with names and a check system.  Each student starts with 10 pts per day and then gets deductions based on bad habits, such as forgetting a pencil or not paying attention.

Sample below:  Full blank template can be viewed at:  Behavior Checklist

The only drawback of this method is potential grade inflation, so their participation grade only counts for 15% of their overall grade (computer system does those calculations).   This also has the benefit of students knowing exactly what they should be doing and there is an immediate specific consequence for doing the wrong thing.   Unfortunately, this method can be unwieldy, and requires a commitment from the instructor to keep accurate behavior notes the entire class period every day.  As you can see in the sample above, some students may have more checks than others, but many kids will earn the entire 10 pts every day with no incident.  If you are going to adopt a system similar to this, always keep in mind that the end goal is to change the habits of the student, not necessarily use grades to punish the students.  Grades are used because for high school students, it’s the only currency they really have – they just aren’t motivated by those gold stars any more.  It’s also important that you convert this to a small percentage of their grade, a student’s grade should be based in the end on how much they understand the concepts of the course, not on whether they behaved all semester.

A few days ago, I found out that my AP Biology class would be returning in the fall.  (We had cancelled this class last year due to low enrollment.)   I was thrilled to have this class open up for the 2010-11 school year.  I didn’t panic, since I had all of the resources for the class from past years, all I would really need to do is check the pages, check the documents and make sure everything was updated and no links were broken.   Should be an easy task and then I could get back to working on the physics site.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it turns out, using tables as a layout tool for web design is wrong.  The pages I made in 1996 are using tags and features that are now deprecated (meaning that browsers should continue to support these tags and attributes, but eventually they are likely to become obsolete.)   Tags like <center>  and <p align left> are deprecated tags.    Since I made the majority of the site’s pages in the late 90′s, they need a major overhaul to fix.   It reminds me of when I took my  old ford ranger to the shop to get an air conditioner recharge – 500 dollars later, we have recharge, new hoses, brakes …etc.

I started on the AP biology pages, labeled in the menu as Bio 3A and Bio 4A .  Even the name of the course is wrong because I got AP certified last year (ironically, for a class that was cancelled).   I’ve now spent the last few days, redesigning this section of the website.  It has been a painful process, mainly due to my lack of familiarity with cascading style sheets.

Is it worth it?   I haven’t decided.   I think for new pages, I will try to make them W3C Compliant.  Which means, that the AP Biology pages that I’m redesigning will be using css styled floating elements rather than tables.   Dreamweaver is making this process a little easier, and most of my time was spent learning how to do things that were normally pretty simple.  I spent a whole day learning the difference between an ID and a CLASS.   And how to use these tags to do simple operations like change the font or the alignment of the text.   This further  illustrates perfectly why I do not recommend new teachers try to create websites from scratch.  Once you get under the hood to try to create something, the job inevitably ends up much bigger than you expect.

If you are however, already the owner of an aging website and you also need to fix your deprecation problems, I do recommend Adobe Dreamweaver, and you can even get an educator discount for it.  Don’t waste time trying to play with it to figure stuff out right when you open the box, it’s not that user friendly, so go straight to the tutorials.  I found “Designing with CSS” by Adrian Senior very helpful for teaching me some of the basics (like the difference between #tags  and .tags).

Also, I should mention that last year, I turned the main part of biologycorner.com  into a wordpress themed site.  This is still working great,  for styling my pages and organizing menus and galleries.  I still use dreamweaver for styling the individual pages that students (and other teachers) can access and print.    While I could alternatively paste these pages into content pages of wordpress, I prefer to have them stand alone:  they load faster and are easier to print and edit.   I love wordpress, but it has its limitations.  Taking all of the /worksheets I have and making them into wordpress content pages would probably be more painful that learning how to use stylesheets and leaving them as simple html documents in their own folder.

***As if to really reinforce my decision to have the pages stand-alone, while I was writing this article, my entire database attached to wordpress became nonfunctional.  The site wouldn’t load and all that you could see when loading biologycorner.com was a text sentence that said: DATABASE ERROR.  It was quite intimidating and the database isn’t really something I have delved into.  I put in a ticket to my hosting service to fix it.   Luckily, while the site’s index page and wordpress files were nonfunctional. I could still go into other directories not tied to wordpress like the intro physics page and still access files there and in other directories.    In other words, I don’t like having all of my resources tied to a database I don’t understand and cannot fix without outside help.  HTML (with or without cascading style sheets) is a beast I understand. ***

To summarize:

1.  Old websites will need a major overhaul to remove deprecated tags and become W3C standards compliant and valid

2.  Bio 3A and 4A is an old website that is non compliant

3.  Learning Dreamweaver and cascading style sheets is time consuming and headache-making, but a necessary evil

4.  Advanced Placement  Biology (its own mini-site) will be unveiled within the next couple of weeks

5.  Over the next few months, worksheets will be given minor tweaking to make them compliant also

6.  The engine running the whole of biologycorner.com is wordpress, which manages menus and galleries and links.  Individual worksheet pages (lessons) will remain separate .html documents.

flickr cc licence: monkeyc.net

As I’ve continued to work on the physics portion of this site, I’ve encountered some difficulties with finding images.  Back when I first started biologycorner.com, clip art sites and image resources were everywhere.  It was almost as if the internet of 1996 existed solely to supply clipart to the masses.   In fact, many of the images on biologycorner.com came from sites that no longer exist.

Now, when I look for clip art, I find myself consistently looped back to sites that require pay subscriptions, or in some cases a single fee to license an image for a site.   There are still some places out there that only require a link back if you use their images, but they seem to be hidden in the massive amount of pay sites that google has top rankings on.    I’ve listed a few of my favorite sources in the Images Section of this site.

Another source I’ve found is flickr, though you do need to be cautious about using images there.  Not all of them are licensed as CC (creative commons).  To get the little images on the physics page that go with the topics, I used a flickr search tool to help locate only those images that are CC licensed.  As an aside, you can also license your own work with this method.   The Creative Commons website has information on how the license works and what kinds of licenses you can choose for your own work.  Incidentally, this site’s resources are licensed under this type of copyright.

The tool I use to search for images for the new physics site is Compfight, though you must choose to only search for images with a CC license.   What type of images you are looking for should guide your search terms, but this can also be a difficult and time consuming process.  For the next section of my site, a chapter on work and energy, I started with a search for tools.  Apparently, not many people take pictures of their tools and the ones that I did find were boring, static images.  Since I want the physics site to illustrate the dynamic and exciting world of physics, I need to find images that “move”.   I had to think of what type of tools qualify and decided to look under heavy equipment.  This yielded images of tractors and cranes more exciting images.  I chose a picture of a crane from the image list, and a click took me to the photographers flickr site where I could get his information. I need his name and photostream address to properly attribute the photograph when I post it.  It is also considered a courtesy within the Flickr community to let the photographer know that you are using the image.  Here’s a tip for images you download from flickr. Once you have the image on your computer, right click and go to properties;  in the “comments” tab, paste the photographer’s flickr link.    I made the mistake of not doing this at first, and ended up with a pile of photos that I could not find their photographer information to give them credit.

Now if you go to the biologycorner.com/physics/ you can see that each of the photographs I’ve used has a flickr credit underneath it.   I’ve uploaded a few pictures of my own to flickr, you can view my photostream to see random pictures of classrooms, labs, students, and of course, my dog.  If you are going to use flickr as an image source, I encourage you to post a few of your own to share with others, even if you think its a silly picture, post it anyway.  I am constantly looking for the obscure image to go along with some weird worksheet or resource.