Tues 8/12 The first day
of school.We make our impact in the first 30 seconds, so like most of the
kids I'm a little nervous. Today I had each kid complete an information
card. One of the important things I'm looking for is their birthday. I
try to give each person a birthday card card on their special day until
they graduate. Beth Kent did that for me and it meant a lot.
I handed out composition books to
use as journals. I gave them my web site URL: www.drwhitey.com. I suggested
that they examine the web site tonight. Our class motto is: A learning
place is a safe place. Our slogan is Think Global, Act Local. I explained
to the kids that we will operate our class as a microcosm of the natural
world. That means that we will follow the rules of ecology so that our
class is actually a small ecosystem.
I took them to the lab and showed them the meal
worm culture that was writhing in a container. I talked about how
the population grew or did not grow in response to the availability of
resources (bran meal and potatoes for moisture). Human populations, on
the other hand, grow even if resources are scarce. I had them feel the
warmth of the culture.
I wonder if using a thermometer would show a temperature
difference versus room air.
Wed 8/13 Today I gave my kids the quote:
We show our values but how we spend our time and money. For that reason
I spent the time to make a name sticker for each student's journal.
I looked at the kids' journals and for the most part they
were blank or just had my web URL. We need to spend time working on how
to create a journal. That's why this example. Apparently none of them thought
much about the meal worm culture or examine the web site.
I know that beetles have complete metamorphosis, but
I was doubting it in this case (mealworms) because I couldn't find pupa.
So, with the class, I searched for their life cycle on the web. I found
a site
that showed the cycle, including pupa. After we found the name Tenebrio
molitor, we discussed briefly the idea of genus and species names. This
will be a lead up to tomorrow's What's In A Name activity. I suggested
that a good project might be to examine our culture and find examples of
each stage of the life cycle and take a digital picture. I lectured briefly
on incomplete vs. complete metamorphosis. I wonder how many have read my
poem of reflection "Metaphormosis".
Then we went outside to find some milkweed bug nymphs as examples of incomplete
metamorphosis. No nymphs but a few adults. We also found aphids and brought
some in to look at. I talked about ants and honeydew. We saw a Monarch
butterfly and I told them about mimicry and the Viceroy. This morning I
brought in the insect collection so we were able to look at both the Monarch
and the Viceroy. I didn't see anyone drawing pictures.
In the room we did the water demo. Half the class got
bottled water and the other half was offered pond water to drink. The water
you get depends on where you were born - Luck! 80% of the resources are
used by 20% of the world's people - Europe and the US. This lead to the
class themes: Energy Disribution and Social Justice. We'll pick up there
tomorrow. I filtered the pond water with a micro fil;ter and we talked
about molecule size. I was able to tell that very few of the kids understand
osmosis or diiffusion. This is typical, so we will review.
--------------------------------
p.m. Rode out on the Bear Creek Road after school today. Spent the
entire 2hours thinking about this class, what had transpired today, and
how to go about helping them with their journals. This is the result.
At the turnaround jewelweed or touch-me-not was in full bloom.
This is one of the plants that we'll use in the ethnobotany unit. I was
thinking that I could pick some to take in to school but I recalled how
quickly it wilts. Last year we got some from the creekside in front of
the school, but this year the whole creek has been mowed, and it looks
like it's been sprayed. It's sad that we teach kids by our actions that
wildness is bad and must be controlled. There was black willow, elderberry,
jewelweed three plants with traditional uses. That reminds me - I need
to go upstream and see how the water cress is doing.
I wonder if the kids would get anything out of reading
excerpts fron the C.G. Jung book at the start of class - "Nature Has A
Soul". Maybe I'll try it and see if with some guidance, they can understand
the concepts of Jung.
Thur 8/14 - 5:30 a.m.- Everyday is different.
What I do depends on weather, the kids' reactions, what's going on in school,
what's in bloom - or what I saw the day before. The creativitiy of this
class energizes me. Today I'll try the Haiti sdlides and begin What's In
A Name. A little nature walk in between.
First off I showed the class the butterfly
alphabet. Ashley had asked about why butterflies were brightly colored
and had looked up some information that indicated it had to do with theeir
scales. Several years ago I ordered Ellen's name made with the letters
and gave it to her as a surprise.
We went over this sample journal and I read Metaphormosis.
I love reading that poem. It reminds that variation is to be treasured
in humans as well as in nature.
We did the Gregorc Learning Styles inventory. I should
be putting the quantitative results here but I forgot to record them. I'll
have to poll the class again tomorrow. I used the idea of deductive versus
inductive reasoning as an illustration of the concrete/abstract duality.
As usual, I used the God example because it leads into Blaise Pascal's
wager. I could see I was losing them at this point. I wonder how many of
them will find the Pascal's Wager web link and followup? I am always amazed
that other teachers don't discuss how to learn and principles of education
with their students. I want my kids to participate and to do that they
need to know why I teach like I do.
We started the What's In A Name. This was an opportunity
to introduce the idea of genus and species. They all got the set of David
Aurora's Latin terms and I gave them until October to put their name on
the desk top table.
Friday 8/15 - The internet is down at
school - became flexible. First we reviewed the Gregorc inventory and made
sure everybody had the class data in their journal so they would have quantitative
material for the first week.
|
1st Block
Concrete, Random, Sequential, Abstract |
2nd Block
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As usual I have a variety of self-assessed learning styles. This
is a lot like life - like nature in itself, in that variation is the staple
of progress. I also suggested to the kids they complete Abiator's
On-Line Learnign Stylers Inventory to determine if they were visual, auditory
or tactile/kinesthetic learners. They can then get a handout from me with
suggestions for how to accommodate their style.
I took 1st block outside and I picked (using a glove) some
poison ivy and laminated it in the library. Then we went to the lab and
everyone was given the assignment to draw the poison ivy or something else
from nature. Some used shells and others my insect collect. In 2nd block
some student sbegan to use the flex cam and make digital images from material
under the microscope. One student made a picture of the eye spots of a
Luna moth. She calls it butterfly kisses.
I have offered bonus points to whoever identifies a
mealworm pupa first. Personally, I think none
have developed yet - given the length of their life cycle. Oh well,
we'll just have to see. It's enjoyable to watch the students looking and
asking questions.
Most people stayed on task and it was a pleasant end to a
good week.
I've decided to put the slides on hold. Going along with
my theme of using technology, I think I'll have a CD-ROM made with jpg-images
of the slides. Then we can build a power point and I can let the students
write the script according to what it means to them!! Authentic learning.
Sat 8/16 - Several of the kids sketched
Tiger Swallowtail butterflies yesterday. Today I noticed three roadkills
with those butterflies on them - I guess gathering nutrients. The ones
in my collection are ones that were on horse manure. I wonder if the students
fully appreciate how often the beauty in the world arises from death and
dung heaps! :-) I truly think that's what I often see in my ecology class
- students who have not been successful in a traditional class coming alive.
Unfortunately, however, some have had the creativity squeezed out of them
and it takes great effort to pump life back in them.
Mon 8/18 - First thing today we studied
a target of opportunity. Those are when I find something interesting,
bring it to class and make a lesson on a topic that I have planned to cover
at some time.. Today I found a robber
fly in my garage. We looked it up on the web, got it's scientific name
and then went into the idea of taxonomy and the order of classification
fron Kingdom to species. Some of the kids asked some good questions, and
usually my first response was "write that in your journal". I hoped that
I helped them understand that it's not the memorization of an organisms
taxonomic classification that is important. The lesson is to understand
that organisims move in and out of taxa simply because taxa are constructs.
In other words, the are simply a means to organize life, "constructed"
by people. Lumpers focus on grouping into taxa and splitters focus on splitting
organisms out into different taxa.
One way of looking at this is how to you evaluate people
the first time you meet them? Do you look at how you are both similar or
do you notice differences first? People also move from friend to foe and
vice-versa.
Looking up the robber fly got me to a web site with great
insect picture. http://www.cirrusimage.com
We took some time to work on What's In A Name
and also for some kids to experiment with the mealworms some more. We separated
out the adults to make it easier to evaluate the life cycle.
Outside we filtered the eggs in vinegar and found that
food coloring and methyl blue will go through egg mebrane but not the ceramic
filter. Methyl blue has an Atomic Mass Uit of 300 and water has 18. The
pore size must be between the two numbers. Then we calculated vinegar to
be an AMU of 84, and that narrowed the range some more. We talked about
how to determine the pore size and several of the class suggested using
more substances with known AMU's to narrow the range. A good idea and on
track as understanding a scientific process.
Tues 8/19 - Today
was Mr. Potter's birthday. We've been joking a lot about raod kills and
my skunk eradication project in my backyard. So when I caught a skunk last
night, I had to bring it in. My second block and I took it down to the
creek and they got to see how you release one. You shake it out of the
cage into the water and that way it splats instead of spits!! We left it
trying to find a hole in the rip rap. I half expected it to be on the raod
when school was over, but the road was clear so maybe sunky got away clean
- well, not clean but unhurt.
After the skunk release we went to
the computer lab and I had the kids do the Biome exercise on the VTT CD-ROM.
It worked well for them. Sort of a low key activity.
Tonight I set a trap to see if I can
get 1st Block their own skunk.
I cleaned the mealwork box and put in new
bran and new potato slices. It was stared to get a 'strong' amonia odor.
Wed 8/20 - I brought
in another skunk for 1st Block. After we dumped
it, we watched it hightail across the road successfully. They also got
to see the trap and have it explained. We discussed
an important idea, What effect does transplanting organisms have on the
new environment. Do they bring disease, upset the predator-prey relationship,
force other niche dwellers out, etc? It's somethin to think about. For
sure, having dumped about 10 skunks in off the same bridge into Poplar
Creek, I have most likely changed the population dynamics in that small
area. I'll start spreading it around some more. BUT, this is number 17
wehich is a lot of skunks in one year. They seem to like the sawdust path
I have. They dig in it for grubs.
John Byrd had a Hickory
Horn Devil caterpillar today that I passed around the class. It's the
larva of the Royal Walnut Moth and likes sweetgum, beech, persimmon &
ash. I offered bonus points if anyone brings one in. They look viscious
but you can hold them in your hand. It was another opportunity to explore
the ideas of defense mechanisms.
The kids started on graphic organizers
as concept maps of Biomes. They can use the biomes off the VTT, EO Wilson's
Biodiversity, or the old textbook insert. As we got starated, and kids
got involved, I saw more and more ways to do it. Why not have one student
do "Environmental Concerns" for each Biome. Another could do "challenges",
and another could do Temperature/mositure. Many possibilities to class
examine biomes.
I'm enjoying this semester.
These are good classes and the kids are great. They seem to take to the
ideas and the vatious ways of learning.
Thur 8/21 - I
gave them time to finish their Biome graphic organizers. Some of
them are going with the basic design like I started out showing them. Others
are expanding out in creative ways. I'll take pictures of some tomorrow.
This will be as authentic assessment as I can get from the VTT CD-ROM lesson
we did in the lab. It is certainly working for this group.
I'm still hoping some of the kids will
bring a container of oatmeal and take home some mealworms. There are so
many I'm going to have to start eating them soon - which isn't a bad idea.
Maybe I'll get some butter at Food City in the morning and we'll saute
some to reduce the population. A good way to talk about hunting limts,
population control. Thought: I could start another culture some time in
the future and we could graph the population. I'll just have to see when
we get adults. If we separate and count tomorrow, then we can have a quantitative
entry in the journals for the week. Maybe I should do that at the start
of tomorrows class. Have to buy some oatmeal.......
The larval stage is about six
months, so we ought to get pupae before the end of the term. I'm going
to try to find them before the kids do.
Fri 8/22 - Picked
up journals at the end of class. Today was sort of a pot pourri. Went out
to the garden and picked some milkweed bug nymphs and
got a little culture started in the lab. Using pumpkin seeds for food.
Stephen found some monarch caterpillars and we
started two of them in a cage with some butterfly weed foliage in a glass
of water. Jansen brought in a caterpillar that looks sort of like a Luna
moth and I took a picture of it along with
a caterpillar Garrett brought in that looks like a silver-fringed fritillary,
but they are a west coast species. This is most likely a fritillary though.
Too similar not to be. Maybe they'll make cocoons which will help. Austin
brought in a drowned coon that he got out of a turtle
trap he's checking as part of a research project with CRESO. I put it out
back of my house with a wire cage over it. I hope to get a skeleton out
of this one but I might not because it looks like a baby - it's small and
has "milk" teeth. If so, then there will be a lot of cartilage which will
decompose. Garrett also is catching a lot of insects and brought in a nice
stag beetle. We put a plate of mealworms in his container. All in all the
kids are doing a good job of bringing in "targets of opportunity". That
sort of stuff makes nice journals.Some of the kids do a good job taking
field notes.
I showed them the dodder in the
garden and explained about it being a parasite and a non-photosynthetic
plant. It's neat how signals from the host plant via chemical tell it to
germinate. I don't mind having it as a teaching tool, but it got out of
hand this year. Two years ago I planted goldenrod and now it's all gone.
The stuff is working on my Joe Pye now.
Some cat is living in amongst the vegetation of the
garden. I hope it hasn't eaten the birds - We've had sparrows and this
year, for the first time, I've seen goldfinches in there. It was a time
to tell the students about the negative role of cats in the decrease of
song bird populations.
A number of kids
turned in Biome graphic organizers. They've
done a good job. I like this as an assessment tool.
This was a good week.
Mon 8/25 - Today,
I wanted to move the students into the concepts of biodiversity and introduce
the question "how many species are there?" One student asked the very important
question "Why would we want to know how many species there are?" That was
a good start to the question and the class had a lot of thoughts about
what defines "species". Even I had a difficult time addressing the question
of why we study the number of species. I can answer it easily to people
who are naturalists or biologists because we share common experiences.
Explaining why to a beginning student is more difficult. Another student
asked why we should want to know about an insect's behavior. I guess there
are many ways to address those questions, but I began by contrasting basic
and applied research and the ongoing arguments about the relative merits
of each vis-a-vis funding issues.
As usual I arrived
at the quote ( I can't remember the author) "Education is not about getting
a job, but enriching the soul". Then I spoke to Chet Raymo's idea of spirituality
being our personal response to the cosmos (which is different from the
practice of religion which is the public expression of that response).
So, "The only thing I know for certain about myself is that somehow I have
been created". Therefore, to engage in creative ventures (learning) and
to interact with creation is to know my creator in an intimate way. Ther
study of nature has spiritual values. Annie Dillard tells us that!
A student brought in a dead female
ruby-throated humming bird she found. Another brought several insects
they had caught for their collection. We made a garden nature trip
and one student found what turned out to be a tortoise beetle
larva. See this
web site about the species I think we have.Fascinating. Another, discovered
a monarch butterfly egg on a milkweed plant.
We practiced pressing plants
and also did an exercise on "How Many Species are There?". It depends
on who we ask, but in using E.O. Wilson's CD-ROM and the VTT CD we come
up with between 10-100 million with maybe 1.6 million so far described.
Tomorrow we'll do an exericse to further investigate this.
Tues 8/26 -
We finsihed the idea of How Many Species are there and I assigned the Species
Scape project, due Tuesday. I brought my Zoom 2000 stereomicroscope
and got some much better digital pictures from the flex cam. Unfortunately
the school server has been out since last week, so I'm having a hard time
getting everything updated since I can't FTP from school.
We went out to the garden and
found several more monarch caterpillars and also our first Tiger Swallowtail
caterpillar. I showed the kids how the retractable orange scent glands
work and we got a picture of it. The gland is called an 'osmeterium'.
Joe brought in a Target of Opportunity
(TOO) which was a bunch of Fall
Webworms. This link points out that they are from Yugoslavia originally.
They are usually found on boxelder trees although Joe's were on what appeared
to be on an ornamental pear.We put them in an old aquarium and covered
the top. I explained the difference between tent
caterpillars and the webworms.
Looking ahead to the Ethnobotany
project, yesterday I showed the kids how to use the plant presses and dryer
in the lab. Today we found some jewel weed down by the pond - which is
about dried up. Some of the group caught a couple of Buckeye butterflies
and two damselflies. I showed them ragweed which is wind pollinated and
goldenrod which is insect pollinated.
4th Block I weeded the Eco-Garden.
Mostly I pulled lots of dodder and grass that I had not tended to porperly
this summer. We still have several fall blooming plants that we need
to care for. It's super hot right now.
We got the pump working and cleaned
out the water feature in the Eco-Garden during 2nd Block. The fish probably
appreciated that! Hot water doesn't contain as much oxygen.
Wed
8/27 - Terry brought in
a mealworm pupa. I had promised bonus points
to whoever found one first. He had made a small culture from our class
"tub" and taken it home. After he found it, others looked in our "tub"
and began to find a number of them. We should have adults when we return
from labor day.
I got an e-mail from
The Voyages Through Time office - the curriculum I field tested last year.
Nina Jablonski, noted anthropologist is speaking at the NABT meeting in
Portland on October 9 and there will be a luncheon reception for her with
the VTT teachers invited. I'm looking forward to attending. She's done
extensive research on evolution
of skin color. Here is a link
to her curriculum vita.
The kids brought in a number of caterpillars
#1
#2 #3
#4. We also caught some creatures down by the pond and looked
at them
Tonight Paul Droz called me about 9:00 p.m.
and he had a Polyphemus
moth on his porch. I went over and caught it and put it in the freezer.
Thurs 8/28 -I
received my August copy of Natural
History. I read to my class the piece about the garden spiders males
dying as a means of plugging the female. We have a picture from a previous
class of a praying mantis
apparantly
plugging the female post-copulation.
We discussed Simpson's Index briefly
and then collected awhile. Two kids caught monarchs which we have
been attracting.
Amber brought in an adult Tomato
Hormworm moth and we talked about parasite-host relationships and how
the parasite has to keep the host alive long enough for itself to become
adult and reproduce. Sort of like our own body parasites making us sick
but not killing us.
I hope one of the kids will bring in a
parasitized hornworm like we had last year. We put that one in a cage
and captured the emerging wasps.
I told the class about the cyclops
Polyphemus in the Odyssey.
Found some sites:
Stinging caterpillars; Caterpillars
of Estern Forests;
Costa Rican Rainforest caterpillars, Social
caterpillars,
Fri 8/29 - See if the praying
mantis will eat a mealworm. Remember, it will dry out fast
Student (SAM) found "pod" of metallic
eggs, not quite sure what they are. Found on the very top of a milkweed
plant. I would like to find out what they are. The same student is raising
a preying mantis he caught. SAM gave the mantis both
milkweed bugs and mealworms to eat. We hypothesize that the bugs will not
be eaten because of the toxicity of the milkweed, but it never hurts to
"inquire" yourself! A very active student, SAM also has a rearing
cage with monarch caterpillars in it. Today Joe, in first period, notciced
the monarch was getting ready to pupate, we believe. He's hanging
and curled.
One of the kids brought in a parasitized hornworm and
put it in a jar to try and capture emrging wasps. Maybe on Tuesday he'll
have some. This brought up a discussion about how parasites have to keep
their hosts alive long enough.
We examined the sex difference indicators
in milkweed bugs. Females have a line and two spots on the abdomen
and the males have two black stripes. We noticed too that the females are
larger.
Class was spent pinning, sorting and identifying insects
for the collections. The kids are getting some very neat things and as
we go along I explain the ecology to them.
This morning I found a site on eco-literacy.
I shared it with the class and put a link on the main Ecology page. It
has very good examples of tying ecology concept to reflections of one's
personal life. I hope some of the kids read it - especially those in creative
writing.
At 3:30 SAM came in to get a sweep net
and found the monarch had formed its chrysalis.
Apparently it's a fast proces sbecause I had checked only about 2 hours
earlier. We'll have to be aware of the next one that pupates and see if
we can set the video camera to record it. Pretty neat.
END OF FIRST THREE WEEKS
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