Getting Ready for the New Year

I think I'm ready - not for school to start, but for getting-ready-for-school to start. I love the promise a new school year brings - the chance to start again, without mistakes. Each pre-school session is a way to extend that looking-forward-to-school time, a chance to make time stand almost still.
I'll attend staff meetings, plan the high school camping trip and the Terry Fox Run, move file folders into their new positions, update my course overviews, arrange for Foods 12 field trips, rearrange desks, put up bulletin boards, and look forward to welcoming my kids back.

I'm looking forward to Biology 11 and 12 this year, to changes I'm hoping to make for Chemistry 11, to Precalculus 11 and 12, to Foods 12 (especially if I can swing field trips to the farmers' market, an orchard, and a goat farm). I'm looking forward to NOT having the grade 10s in Bible. It will be lovely to just have a two grade (11/12) split.

This year will be the first time in a while that the grade 12 class will be bigger than the previous year's class. I think there will be 9. It isn't a huge number, but it is more than before. I firmly believe that the only way OKAA will thrive is to grow from the preschool up, but I'm looking forward to this little bump of growth. It is so much easier to teach, and probably to learn, in a traditional school setting when there are more than 3-5 students in any given class.

So I'm rested, rejuvenated, and ready to start getting ready. 2015-2016 will be a great year!

Excellence in Education Award

I thought I was just treading water for the past two years, and still think that I was very overwhelmed by the amount of teaching/mentoring that needed to be done, but I was very pleasantly surprised to be awarded a 2015 Excellence in Education award, one of  four given out across Canada this year by the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada. The award criteria include commitment to Adventist education, to life long learning, to community involvement, and to mentoring students and other teachers.

 One of my mentors presented the award and concluded her remarks with: "This year, one of Okanagan Adventist Academy's own has been chosen for this honour. This teacher has excelled in all the categories mentioned. She works tirelessly for her students, for Okanagan Adventist Academy, and for her church both local and conference. Anyone who has ever seen her in action at Orchard City Church Vacation Bible School, organizing events like International Supper and the Terry Fox Run, advising and teaching high school students, being the Grade 12 class sponsor, and leading out in Camp Meeting children's divisions for the last 25 years, knows there is no one more deserving of this award than our own Cherri Gerber!" 

It was so nice to be thanked publicly. 

Here are some pictures from this Spring/Summer VBS,camp meeting, and school groups. I'm saving this to remember when I'm tired, discouraged, and don't think the work I do matters.

OKAA high school students and staff posing after our sea kayaking excursion

Grade six and seven science students on our end-of-the-year geology field trip

We tested Mentos in Coke and Diet Coke to see which foamed higher. The VBS students (and volunteers) sure had fun!

I'm reading a story to a group of three-and four-year old children and their parents at camp meeting. I looked up to see a number of my high school students also listening in.

Try, try, again

Treading water was the best I could do for the past 2 years. I gave up blogging, asking my students to blog, revising my classroom wiki, even gave up contacting parents in a timely way. The best I could do was just hang on.
I'm going to try again. If I can get in the habit of staying in contact with my students, their parents, and the larger school community over the summer maybe I can keep it up next school year.

Professional - and Personal - Development

Some weeks I can't seem to keep up with myself or my students. This has been one of those weeks. My poor Math 11 students - all 5 of them in two different classes (which run simultaneously!)- deserved a teacher more prepared to differentiate instruction, but all I could do was go back and forth between the two groups  (pre-calculus and apprenticeship and workplace) with muddled explanations. Somehow I needed to explain the ambiguous case of the sine law and the usefulness of stacked bar graphs at the same time. Luckily we found one example of a useful stacked bar graph in biology 11. Unfortunately, I finished Friday afternoon knowing that neither of the pre-calculus students understood that there was an ambiguity much less why I cared. The physics 12 students who I check on couldn't understand the point of the game their teacher was using to help them understand parabolic motion, and I was of very limited help. Biology 11 students struggled with natural selection and variation, the math is going to get harder next week, the service class was disappointed that their plans didn't work out for the Terry Fox run, it seemed that the book of Romans wasn't captivating my religion 10-12 students, and I even struggled with the science 6/7 lab class.

So why do I love teaching?
I think it is the promise that next week just might be better - maybe I'll see the light come on in a student's eyes. Maybe one of my students will understand the connection between the quadratic equations I help them learn and the population biology or the physics that they are learning.

Maybe something we do in class will be the bridge between where they are now and the place they want to go - or maybe it will just be an interesting detour. Either way, I want to help my students explore the possibilities. So I keep trying, keep learning, keep struggling to become a more effective teacher.

This week I started another online course - Inquiry Through Science & Engineering Practices - from Montana State University. I'm hopeful that some of what I learn I'll be able to use to shape the way I teach - and by extension - the way my students learn.

(I should probably take Physics 12 next!)

Back to School - It's New Year's Eve

Labor Day marks the end of summer holidays for most British Columbia students - there are a few who have already started the 2013-2014 school year, and some university students who won't start classes until a little later in September - but for most students today is New Year's Eve. New clothes, pencils, markers, backpacks, and routines.

We teachers have been working for at least a couple of weeks to ready our selves and our classrooms. Tomorrow we'll tell our students a little about our own summer, but mostly listen as students describe theirs. We'll hand out text books and course outlines, talk about expectations, and try to keep a little of that feeling of anticipation alive. I expect that my students will be endearing, entertaining, and even challenging - at least I hope they will be.

This year I hope to showcase student work on one  of my chalkboards, and student artwork on the back wall. Right now my classroom looks a little bare because there are two great big spaces just waiting for someone's - or several someone's - masterpieces.

In the meantime - this is how I spent part of my Labor Day weekend:

 (The description below is from the geocaching website with my editorial comments bolded and italicized.)

Library shelf is a cache located in Scenic Canyon Park. Fairly rugged terrain, but a great cache to combine with Cake Topper, Pillar Assault, and Crevasse Rock. (We did all four, plus hid one or more new caches.) The cache is located on the edge of a cliff and is not suitable for children.(I'm quite certain that I would never have done this on my own, but I had a great time with other "responsible" adults - and one soon-to-be 8th grader!)

The cache is a larger sized lock n lock (camoed of course), with a book theme ....bring a book along to trade when you come! (I forgot to bring a book, but I would be willing to go back to trade books. Luckily the Rutland branch of the Okanagan Regional Library is much more convenient!)
 
There are many ways you can access the cache, depending if you are hiking up from the bottom or top. The park has recently expanded, but the new area isn't very clearly marked yet, but some newer maps do already have the new part on it. If you enter via Gallagers Road just go through the gate next to the private property, (that is what we did) and if you're coming up from Pillar Assault there are several shoots to make your way up. (That's how we got back up - walking back along the Greenway would have been the easier way out, but life is full of challenges.)
 
IF you are comfortable with a bit of rock climbing the cache isn't too hard to get to, but it sits in a very precarious position on the edge of a cliff where there is a lot of loose/unstable rock ...PLEASE be EXTREMELY careful ...if you are the least bit unsure bring a rope incase the rocks below you slide or break away ...you DON'T want to fall off this cliff ...it's a long ways down!! (We did not use safety ropes, and at least one person was heard saying "Jordan, don't tell your mom!")
 
There is a small ledge that if you're so inclined you could relax and read and take a break. (We just took pictures.)
 
Please be careful when removing and re-hiding the cache ...it's hiding spot is designed so the cache doesn't itself fall victim to a rock slide ...please re-hide it carefully ...Thanks :) (You are welcome)

(The view from back up from "Pillar Assault" - the one cache we found near the bottom of the canyon.)


This was exactly what I needed to do before school starts tomorrow - face a challenge, work really hard, and remember that there is life outside my classroom. 

Now I wonder what amazing things my students did over the summer.

Happy New Year!

 

Holey Moley! and other connections

One day in Chemistry 11 class Last school year I mentioned an earthcache I would like to find – Holey Moley! http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=23a88c4a-698b-4399-a753-0294dfbbe5f5

This cache is located in Scenic Canyon Regional Park not too far from Okanagan Adventist Academy, and features some interesting geology – the canyon was formed by water flowing quickly downstream when Glacial Lake Penticton drained. The rock banks contain cobbles imbedded in a matrix of calcite or quartz (Okanagan Geology, MA Roed & JD Greenough, eds., 2004, pp. 92, 184-185).

Our class discussion revolved around the chemical reactions which we would expect calcium carbonate, CaCO₃ to undergo. Calcite is one form of CaCO₃, and students remembered that limestone is also made of CaCO_3. We discussed stalactite and stalagmite formation in caves, and then moved on to predict a reversible chemical reaction. We first came up with a word equation:

Calcium carbonate in the presence of dissolved acid reacts to form the most common oxide of carbon and water.

and then filled in the chemical symbols they had learned:

CaCO_3(s) + H⁺_(aq) -> CO_2(g) + H₂O_(l)

When students attempted to balance this equation they realized that they needed to account for the calcium ion:

CaCO_3(s) + H⁺_(aq) -> CO_2(g) + Ca²⁺ _(aq) + H₂O_(l)

They also needed to balance the hydrogen ions on each side of the equation and to document the observation that this reaction is reversible:

CaCO_3(s) + 2H⁺_(aq) <-> CO_2(g) + Ca²⁺ _(aq) + H₂O_(l)

I was quite happy with the way our discussion had helped students make some real world connections to the work we were doing in class. However, the connections don’t end there. One of my students, W, came to me some time later to tell me that he had been to the earthcache site, and was disappointed to find out that the nearby rocks didn’t bubble like he thought they would when he moistened them with acid. I wasn’t sure why and had to search through one of my resource books (Okanagan Geology, p.184) to discover that the rock matrix which isn’t soluble in acid is quartz. 

This last week I finally found time to go to ground zero myself, and was able to fulfill the requirements given by the cache owner:

1)      Take a picture of you and your gps at the site of the cache. Instead of including a picture of myself or my GPS I took a picture of my bottle of acid.

     

2) Answer the following via e-mail:
A) Why do you think there is more calcite in the rock at this area in particular and what does this tell you?
The rocks around this area in particular contain calcite that either crystalized from calcium rich lava or was deposited there by water with a high mineral content. Once this area became exposed to weathering after the river cut through the ground creating the canyon, exposing the rock to a totally new environment, acid rain dissolved the calcite within the rocks and they would simply crumble and fall from the rock face into the creek causing the unique holes you see now. This is known as dissolution due to chemical weathering. Chemical weathering is most common in areas that have large concentrations of limestone and acidic water whether acidic water from pollution or naturally occurring. This is because limestone is largely composed of calcite which is a reactive compound.
B) Chemical weathering is not the only process at work that is carving this rock face, name one other process you think is breaking the rock face down. 
You are able to see veins and deposits of calcite in many of the rocks you can pick up from the ground. This is testable by applying a drop of hydrochloric acid and seeing the calcite within the rock effervesce (not that you carry acid around with you...). 

 Oh, but I do carry 0.1M HCl_(aq) with me, at least when I’m forewarned!

When I posted pictures and an abbreviated story of my adventure on Facebook W commented that he had just found a chunk of crystal clear calcite. Besides dissolving it with acid how could he know?

The connections continue. . .the opportunities for adventure multiply. . . I just love my job!

Oh, one more thing. . . what caused the layers on Layer Cake Mountain? 

Well, two more things . . . why are the deposits by Angel Warm Springs orange? Is that like the orange color at Yellowstone?

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