american international school of cape town

This is a post about my life at school.  I have a great job.  I teach all of grades 6-8 and half of grade 9 and have an average of 15 students per class.  AISCT adopts the California State Standards that are actually not currently in use in California as they just moved on to the Next Generation Standards year.  My classroom is outstanding compared to other middle school facilities I have seen and was actually equipped to teach AP chem when it was modified twelve years ago.  I have running gas, a hood vent, and running water in addition to tons of counter space.

Recently, I had to fight a war against sewer rats, which was bloody and included a few scary encounters.  In the end--this is actually difficult to determine-- I poisoned them, blocked two main entries, and kicked one in the face as he/she tried to escape my trash can.  The escape from the trash can, sadly, was successful and the rat took my kick to the face like Rocky takes a punch.  It then leapt to the ground and made it through a hole under my desk.  Since that encounter many rats were killed and the classroom environment stabilized.  Some of my more frightened students would actually keep their feet off of the ground when I would tell them stories about rats making it into the classroom.  I mostly told those stories to discourage eating in the room.

Besides rats there have been a lot of interesting labs.  I will add a few pictures that don't contain students so you can see some of the activities.

This was a building competition we had in my classes on the last day of school when finals were finished.

There is a swarm of bees in the tree at the top of the picture--that blob is made entirely of bees.  There was an earlier blog post that included links to the bee keeper transferring the bee swarm into a cardboard box.

This is a gecko one female student found in her locker--another adventurous student helped catch and release it in the courtyard.

This is the beautiful middle school courtyard.

A picture of our fountain that we don't run--I think we're saving electricity :).

This is the front of my classroom--the "Work Hard & Be Nice to People" is from a print work by Anthony Burrill that Jennifer purchased when we lived in Minneapolis.  I had my homeroom color in the letters, then all of my students signed the poster at the beginning of the year.

This is my lab, which features running gas and water.  And 5 telescopes that were purchased by a former science teacher.

This is the remnants of our volcanoes lab in which the sixth grade students used a syringe to inject red dye into a gelatin mold.  It allowed the students to visualize how a magma chamber forms and how pressure builds and is released in volcanoes.

This is my teaching schedule.  I have four different grade levels and six classes overall, but I actually see my students for 66% of the time that I did in South St. Paul, so the planning balances out pretty well.

This is a mitosis activity that the students completed in which bent copper wires to form different stages of mitosis.  I would quiz them about aspects of that stage and parts of the cell until they answered all of the questions correctly.  Eventually, when one group of students finished the students could quiz each other about the diagrams.

This is me explaining an aspect of the lab after I assigned one of the students to take pictures.  I like this picture because you can see my "I can" statement on the board behind me.  The "I can" statement is a learner objective that tells the students what they are supposed to be able to explain or do by the end of the lesson.  Under the "I can" statement is the Bell Ringer, which is a questions students complete at the beginning of class once the bell rings.  Behind me to the right you can see where I keep additional copies of worksheets and where students turn in their work.  Despite 5 months of class and the signs on the wall students will still ask me where to turn assignments in, ha ha, school stays the same in some ways.

This was a lab we modeled after Pasteur's experiments designed to refute the idea of spontaneous generation.  Spontaneous generation dictated that living things could arise from non-living matter, such as maggots arising from dead flesh.  However, we know now that maggots come from microscopic fly eggs--partly due to the microbiology that Pasteur and other scientists were doing at the time.

Both of these beakers of chicken broth were boiled, then one was immediately covered with plastic wrap, while the other remained uncovered.  Guess which beaker grew all of the mold?!