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Chemistry!

Getting ready for the next Trimester! Working out some of bugs from our awesome labs coming up!!

“Read often and read fast!”
–Dr. Scott Carroll,
Research Professor of Manuscript Studies and
the Biblical Tradition at Baylor University.



I have always been an avid reader. As long as I can remember I’ve read. I remember reading zoology picture books to my father on long weekend drives through Mid-West America. They were little three sentence explanations of the animals displayed in full color that took up the whole, glorious page; sometimes two.

Then in high school I became enthralled in science fiction and had to force myself in college to put away the Star Wars books because my regular studies began to flounder.

Now I’ve discovered how to balance personal reading with classroom reading…

I don’t read the classroom material!
It’s often boring and tedious.
It’s often not fun.

I skim and hunt for answers and blurbs about what I need to know and that’s it. I’m ashamed to say and proud to display my thousands of dollars of unopened text books that sit on my shelf in my small apartment. Then there is the stack of books that I have read recently and a stack of books that I plan to read. These are not literary light weight books and often very useful, sometimes they are easy reads that are fun. Sometimes they are difficult books about theology, or scientific theories, or whimsical education professional development.

I could not say exactly what draws me to a particular book.
I can tell you that I have found value in every single book I’ve read!

Why are we so determined to narrow our students’ choices in books to read?
Shouldn’t we be happy to just have them reading?

Gilmore wrote an exceptional article in the March 2011 periodical, Educational Leadership. He discusses the merits of having students read something they decide is interesting. He discusses the antiquated books that are force-fed down students’ gullets and how teachers and parents wonder why their kiddos don’t like to read.

I wonder!

When you put tens of thousands of words, thousands of sentences, and hundreds of paragraphs between two covers there is bound to be at least a few teachable moments found within.

The only issues I really see in using one of Gilmores strategies for varied book choices (found in “Making Choices in Reading Work) is the money and the skill of the teacher. Being a pre-service teacher I can’t honestly say that I would be able to effectively use this varied form of education. I do understand the importance of streamlining assignments and trying to grade 150-200 different book reports effectively, but I think it could be manageable.

Gilmore came up with these ideas to help make it work…

Making Choice[s] in Reading Work
Here are practical ways to incorporate choice into student reading:

• Pair a nontraditional text with a traditional one
o Link high-interest books thematically or by subject area with a required classic such as T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain with The Grapes of Wrath and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns with Pride and Prejudice.

• Use reading circles in place of one canonical text
o It’s overwhelming to revamp and entire course syllabus. Instead, replace a single classwide text with a list of, say, eight books students can choose from, and have students who are reading a common text work in small groups.

• Highlight outside reading choices
o Sometimes, getting students to read more broadly is simply a matter of suggesting the right works. Try suggesting high-interest, accessible titles such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games or Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It. If students return to talk about works like these, steer them toward further extracanonical reading. Ask students to share personal reading choices in classroom discussion, with lists on the board, and through casual conversation.

• Choose books that link to content areas and coordinate across departments
o Many novels, stories, and nonfiction works connect to history, science, or even math classes. Work with colleagues in other disciplines to have students discuss scenes and background information within such texts, link to learning activities, or read a text in class during both periods.

Ultimately I like Gilmore’s ideas of allowing students to choose what they feel like reading (within a certain but broad selection) in order to develop a love of reading.

We must remember the individuals’ Zone of Proximal Development, if they aren’t ready for advanced-dry-boring-literature to wade through, then they will fail, they will build a dislike for reading, it will cripple them for the remainder of life, and rob them of many joys that we educators find in our books.




“Learning is stealing and teaching is sharing”
This is my personal response to the article written by Barry Gilmore which posted in the March 2011 issue of Educational Leadership and should be taken as such. This response includes ideas as well as fully copied material from Barry Gilmore.

Gilmore, B. (2011). Worthy Texts: Who Decides? Educational Leadership, 68(6), 46-50.

“Students should prepare for adult life by studying subjects
that suit their talents, passions, and aspirations.”
-Grant Wiggins




The March edition of Educational Leadership is entirely devoted to what students need to take away from grade school. I was intrigued with the article A Diploma Worth Having. This article discusses the traditional curriculum of most high schools and how antiquated and off target it is. I agree. I’ve been in a good number of schools in the last couple of years as I move through my teacher ed. program and I am disheartened to see not only boring instruction but nearly dead asleep students as they struggle to stay in their chairs.

Wiggins makes a good point about how smart and high achieving students will deal well with any sort of instruction and will succeed in life regardless of what they are asked to suffer through. They can handle the ‘useless’ high level of detail about chemistry, math, literary prose, and other subject areas that do not come up in practical everyday life. What about our lower achieving students and the rest of the school population. My mother (a retired special education teacher of 30 years) always told me, “You have to do something with your life. Join the military, learn a trade, or go to college!” I’ve always kept this close to heart. College isn’t necessary, nor is it practical for every high school student. This isn’t to say that I’m against sending every one of my prospective students on to college, but I’d rather they be happy and eager to follow a successful path of their calling.

So, this begs the question:
How do we prepare our students for a life after high school, where they will be successful and inspired in their own personal way?

Wiggins proposes some key criterion he’d use for setting up a curriculum.

• Philosophy, including critical thinking and ethics
• Psychology, with special emphasis on mental health, child development, and family relations.
• Economics and business, with an emphasis on market forces, entrepreneurship, saving, borrowing and investing, and business start-ups.
• Woodworking or its equivalent; you should have to make something to graduate.
• Mathematics, focusing primarily on probability and statistics and math modeling.
• Language arts, with a major focus on oral proficiency) as well as the reading and writing of nonfiction).
• Multimedia, including game and web design.
• Science: human biology, anatomy, physiology (health-related content), and earth science (ecology).
• Civics, with an emphasis on civic action and how a bill really becomes law; lobbying.
• Modern U.S. and world history, taught backward chronologically from the most pressing current issues.

This core curriculum that Wiggins proposes isn’t an abolishment of the old core. His proposal adds new ones and tweaks old ones so they are more relevant for the world today. The advanced and highly detailed classes should still be offered for students who are interested in pursuing collegiate and post collegiate work in content areas; but let’s face it, not everyone needs to know trigonometry and how to find limiting reagents for reactions they’ll never see.

Coursework in these areas can still be rigorous and challenging, the only real difference is that students will be able to learn immediately relevant content and problem solving skills out of high school.
Who knows… They might even become interested!


“Learning is stealing and teaching is sharing”
This is my personal response to the article written by Grant Wiggins which posed in the March 2011 issue of Educational Leadership and should be taken as such. This response includes ideas as well as fully copied content from Grant Wiggins.

Wiggins, G. (2011). A Diploma Worth Having. Educational Leadership, 68(6), 28-33.

Re-entering the conversation

Read an interesting article in ASCD's Education Leadership. It discussed how European Schools are focused on content, like America once was. American school systems are moving towards thinking processes and integration, etc... This article seemed to indicate that in order for students to 'add-lib' as it were (approach problems with creative insight) they need a more extensive background in content. Knowledge. I thought this was interesting, I see both points of view. I was raised to stuff content between my ears. Now going through education courses in college, all I hear is less content more social constructivism and problem solving.

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