Week 22 was another exciting, awesome week @ManorNewTech. This time the fun could not be contained within the school week; it spilled over into Sunday and Saturday. This week I got to go on a field trip, attend region-wide instructional coaching training, facilitate PLC sessions for novice and veteran teachers, mentor Robotics students and observe a lot of cool things in many classrooms.
On Sunday, freshmen and juniors in Mr. Beckett’s, Mr. Foster’s, Ms. Davis’, and Mrs. Schimel’s 9th grade and 11th grade Physics / Engineering classes went to the Circuit of the Americas to learn about the physics of racing. The students got to see race cars up close in the bays and on the track. They listened to an excellent lecture on the physics of racing from a race car driving instructor. They visited the race control room and heard about the data that is collected and monitored to keep drivers safe. They daydreamed about being successful enough to own beautiful fast cars and to drive them on race tracks. Some already started talking about saving the $50,000/day rental fee for the Circuit of the Americas race track. It was cool to see student experience physics in an exciting setting and to see them dream Big Dreams.
On Monday, I attended a Instructional Coaches Network meeting at Region 13 on Teacher Motivation. The training was organized around stations with phrases that made up the acronym ROCK STAR that related to teacher motivation. I liked the stations on empathy, growth mindset, productive (or not) conversations, and gratitude. At the gratitude station, we got to play with a craft center in which I made this card for the Manor New Tech staff because they are awesome:
On Monday, I saw several seniors decorating their Book Drive collection boxes. They will be collecting children’s and young adults’ books in the Humanities classes of Manor New Tech. I really like how their boxes capture the mood of the books they are trying to collect.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I subbed for Mr. Ray’s senior Environmental Science class. During those two days, the students conducted 3 labs that investigated the effects of acid rain on soil, water, and leaves. Some students got surprising results; some of the leaves thrived when exposed to acetic acid. We hypothesized that this occurred because some plants prefer lower pH’s than others.
Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Merced and I met with the novice teachers for pizza and a discussion about the importance of aligning scaffolding and assessments to TEKS (state standards). The discussion reminded me of my early teaching years when I struggled to select the right way to express certain standards because I was able to see too many content connections because I had studied WAY TOO MUCH Physics in my past. Learning how to analyze standards really helped me to focus my objectives and to present content in ways that were age appropriate and vertically aligned. Learning how to analyze standards in Kilgo trainings was one of the most important skills I’ve acquired in my teaching career.
On Wednesday, I watched freshmen and sophomores in Mr. Fishman’s electronics classes complete work on the final stretch of the You Got the Power project. In this project, they used calculations and knowledge of DC and digital circuits to build working keyboards. On Wednesday, they were using oscilloscopes to take a closer look at the outputs and inputs of their keyboard circuits. They were also preparing lab reflections and presentation visuals. Mr. Fishman helped the lower-classmen navigate through all the moving parts of this complex project by providing students with template Google docs for their lab reflections and Presentation slides. I like how these templates helped the students focus on key conclusions and summarize key content information.
On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Merced and I co-facilitated PLC groups on Action Planning. Teachers either worked on their STAAR Remediation Plan or on their TTESS lesson plan. As a warmup for the PLCs, we used mentimeter.com to gather words that describe their TTESS goal and summarize their words in a staff-wide word cloud. If we interpret this graphic literally, the staff needs training on how to develop engaging, student-centered, and differentiated activities.
On Thursday, I observed students working on their Truth about Microorganisms projects in Mr. Adeboyejo’s Biology Applications class. They were working on creating brochures and lab reports about microorganisms. They were also creating models of viruses that they will use to demo how viruses attach to and penetrate cells in their presentations next week.
On Thursday, I observed students gathering data in a friction lab in Ms. Davis’ and Mrs. Schimel’s Physics Engineering class. The students were measuring the static and kinetic coefficients of friction between car wheels and various surfaces (turf, cement, wood, etc.). I liked how students conducted those measurements both inside and outside thanks to Ms. Davis’ resourcefulness. During class Mrs. Fain-Jackson stopped by and we got to have a Holly Squared photo-op.
Thursday afternoon, I observed freshmen presenting in Ms. Castro’s and Mr. Humphrey’s class. The students created a persuasive speech about an issue of their choice. I heard speeches about gun control, programming, cat-calling, and the importance of completing high school. After each speech, the audience got to discuss the quality and content of the argument with the presenter. I enjoyed hearing the speeches and related discussions. It was cool to see students advocate for issues that are meaningful to them.
Thursday afternoon, I observed students in Mrs. Garner’s Art class give each other written Critical Friends critique on their planning sketches. I like how the critique sheets required students to write what they thought was the artistic message in the work, I likes, I Wonders, and Next Steps. The students are appropriating non-copyrighted images to create new works of art. After students had time to write their critiques, the students got their feedback sheets and got to study feedback from 3 other students. They used that feedback to start planning the design of their final products.
Friday morning, Mr. Merced and I helped solve the Valentine’s Day dilemma. Some of our newer teachers didn’t have mailboxes yet so students were having trouble delivering Valentines to them. Our school experienced a lot of shuffling and turn around at the start of 2016 and our mailboxes hadn’t caught up yet. Mr. Merced and I did a rough shuffling of mailbox labels. Later, Mrs. Lopez cleaned up our draft job. She replaced our temporary labels with pretty new labels. I thought she was going to add labels just on the new boxes, but she ended up replacing all the labels so everything looks pretty and integrated. Symbolically, I like how the new labels acknowledge how well the new teachers and new teacher teams have synced themselves into the wonderful weird planet that is Manor New Tech.
Friday morning, I watched junior students in Ms. Tillson’s and Ms. Thompson’s Humanities class give critical friends feedback on drafts of lyrics on the Cold War. I like how the students used critique sheets that included a checklist of key rubric items to give each other feedback. The students on the right are going to create a parody of a Spice Girls song for their Cold War song. They seemed pretty psyched about their choice in their draft presentation.
Friday morning, I watched Mr. Ray deliver a college-style lecture on the biochemistry of nutrition based off of students’ Need-to-Knows that they posted on the Sticky Request board. Because the workshop was so dense, Mr. Ray used our new Swvl cam to record the entire lecture. During the lecture, I learned that fast carbs are broken down to simple sugars in our mouths; this quick process is why they are called fast carbs. We can verify this process by leaving a piece of bread in our mouths; eventually it will taste sweet due to the fast-carb digestive interactions.
Friday, I observed sophomores in Mr. Chamber’s and Mrs. Fain-Jackson’s Humanities class reading/listening to a chapter of Frankenstein. They are reading Frankenstein through the lens of the Scientific Revolution. They occasionally paused the audiobook to discuss reflection questions and key quotes in the reading. While reading, they were recording new Need-to-Konws and completing a Frankenstein Reading log about the chapter. At the end of each chapter, student facilitators led discussions on the chapter that are guided by their reading logs..
Friday afternoon, I observed presentations in Ms. Valderrama’s AV class. The students used editing and green screen effects to create a video in which they had a conversation with a clone of themselves. It seemed like the greatest challenge of this project was to get the timing of the spoken lines right so that the edited videos came together to make a cohesive dialogue.
Friday afternoon, Mr. Deidebahn’s and Mrs. Pedroza’s Precalculus students took their Gallery presentations outside because it was such a beautiful day. The students learned about vectors by using them to plot and analyze sea routes for dream vacations. During the gallery presentations, they presented their routes, results, and reasons to visit their dream destinations.
Friday afternoon, I observed students in Mr. Rodriguez’s class creating album covers in Adobe Illustrator. Some of the students were far along enough in the project to learn about typography and how different fonts could be used to convey different moods on their album covers. I really liked the album cover that had the goldfish looking at the people swimming in the fishbowl. It reminded me of the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” which has the lyrics, “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.”
On Saturday, I worked with the Robotics students. Rumor has it that our mill (top left) was repaired on Friday. This means we can start churning out high quality parts this coming week. In the meantime, the mechanical team were testing the viability of an idea that woke up Chris at 2 in the morning that relates to how our pneumatic systems manipulate one of our mechanisms. They will test that idea on a prototype of the mechanism. I like how the mechanical team is powering forward even in the absence of our mechanical mentor, Dr. Erickson, who is out of town this weekend for work. The programming and electrical teams worked with Mr. Timm on the electrical systems and code for our robot all day Saturday – hooray for all day 10 am to 5 pm meetings.
In closing, here’s a picture for my moment of zen. The seniors are starting to get sentimental enough to take time out of their lunches to take pictures like this: 😃.
