42 Years in the Classroom (eBook)

Chapter 1

“42 Years in the Classroom?
Are You Crazy?”

People have asked me, “Joe, how did you manage to teach kids for forty-two years? What kept you going?” There were several things. First, I believe that for me, teaching wasn’t just a job, it was a calling. I LOVED teaching and the opportunities to inspire my students daily, sharing my passion for teaching with them as well as with fellow teachers. I think that’s the evidence that it was a calling. Was it hard work? Most definitely, but I found it fulfilling and rewarding. I am convinced that teaching is a noble profession because teachers have the opportunity to leave a small part of the world a little bit better than they found it. The words of the late Christa McAuliffe, teacher and astronaut, have always resonated with me: “I touch the future. I teach.”1 Whenever I walked into the school building on those dark, early mornings, even if I was dead-tired, I knew that what I was doing was important and that I was part of something much bigger than myself. If you are a teacher, please never forget that you are engaged in one of the most important professions on earth. When they’re honest, kids know this, even though they may not admit it publicly. Parents know this, and one of the painful lessons the world has learned over the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic with its school shutdowns and virtual at-home “learning,” is just how vital in-person learning with a professional educator is. I’ve heard adults say, “You’re a teacher? I could never do that.” And then I think to myself “You’re probably right because not just anybody can do it!” Teaching requires a unique mix of compassion and toughness or grit (The same is true of nurses—as we’ve seen during the pandemic.). Thinking adults know how important teachers are. Not long ago, I was standing in the check-out line at the grocery store and I struck up a conversation with a couple of total strangers behind me and in front of me. The guy behind me as it turned out, was an insurance agent, and the woman in front of me was a receptionist in one of the academic departments at nearby Purdue University. The woman asked me, “And what do you do when you’re not standing in line at the grocery store?” When I told them I was a teacher, I sensed in their words and their facial expressions a genuine respect for our work. I would even go so far as to say that I saw in their eyes not just respect for teachers, but a sense of reverence for the work that we do, because most thinking people really do have a heart for children. What else kept me going? I’m a biologist, and teaching my subject—biology—allowed me to engage in my passion—that is, to do biology and share that passion for biology and the natural world with my students every day. Teaching biology even provided me with professionally invigorating travel opportunities such as a grant funded trip to the Galapagos Islands located 600 miles west of Ecuador. This experience provided me with inspiration, photos, and videos that enabled me to make my lessons in ecology, botany, zoology, and evolution come alive for my students in a more personal way.

Figure 1-1 Teaching biology allowed me to do biology.

Figure 1-2 A Teacher Creativity Fellowship grant funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc. enabled me to travel to the Galapagos Islands.

As I’ve told numerous young teachers who are starting out, teaching will not make you rich financially, but it is one of the few professional careers that will allow you to be creative. Creative activity, for most of human history, has been reserved for the privileged few who had either inherited a fortune so they didn’t have to work, or who were able somehow, to carve out free time from the daily grind of work and busyness to engage in creating music, art, or literature. Creativity is a uniquely human, pleasurable, satisfying activity. (I’m sure that our Neanderthal ancestors must have had smiles on their faces when they created those cave paintings!) I derived a great deal of joy from creating nontraditional learning experiences that would get my students excited about biology. I was the beneficiary of that creative work because I found that when I created a learning activity that was unusual or unexpected (throw out the old “read the chapter and answer the questions at the end” approach!), the students really turned on, engaged, and even enjoyed the experience. When I saw the students respond like that, it gave me joy and a rich feeling of satisfaction, and that, in turn, motivated me even more. I found that the more I put into my teaching, the more I got out of it. I always loved the challenge and even made a game of it for myself whenever a ninth grader on the first day of school would express in words or body language, “I’ve never liked science and I’ve never been good at it.” I remember thinking to myself in those situations, “Okay, kid. Game on! Just wait!”

Sometimes, engaging students in out-of-the-ordinary kinds of learning strategies can create unexpected, positive responses from students that can be a real blessing to the tired spirit of a teacher. I have so many fond memories of those instances of serendipitous joy. One involved what I simply call the pond water lab. It was an activity that I had my ninth grade biology students do early in the school year, within the first week when they were expecting to hear about the usual hundreds of classroom rules, policies, and expectations like they had heard every year in mid-August. Instead, before the students arrived at school, I placed a few buckets of pond water that I had collected the weekend before on one of the lab tables, along with turkey basters, eye droppers, Petri dishes, copies of a guide for identifying pond water macroinvertebrates, and binocular dissecting microscopes on all the other lab tables. When the students arrived, I told them that since this is biology class, we’re going to start doing biology! I gave them simple instructions: “Pick a couple partners to work with. Take a turkey baster and suck up some pond water from one of the buckets, squirt it into a Petri dish, take the dish to your dissecting microscope, place the dish under your microscope, and find and draw four different creatures that you have discovered in your Petri dish. Then use the pond water guide to identify each of your four creatures and label each drawing with its common or scientific name.” To provide the students with an eye-popping experience, when I collected the buckets of pond water the Saturday before classes, I concentrated the tiny microscopic invertebrates hundreds of times above the population density that one would normally find in a pond water sample, so that the students wouldn’t miss the swarms of beautiful, strange, transparent, dancing creatures when they peered through their microscopes. If you’re a biology teacher and you want to do this activity, you’ll need a pair of waders, a few buckets, and access to a pond or swamp containing undisturbed still water (the murkier the better!), preferably with lots of aquatic weeds below the surface and duckweed covering the surface. The most important piece of your equipment will be an easy-to-construct Pour-Person plankton net made of a wooden embroidery hoop with screw tightening mechanism, and a sheet of heavy chiffon fabric or light-weight nylon. I got the idea for this tool from Dr. Charlie Drewes of Iowa State University and you can find the instructions for how to make this plankton net at https://www.eeob.iastate.edu/faculty/DrewesC/htdocs/toolbox-II.htm. As Charlie said, “To use this net in the field, water is collected from a dock or shoreline in a pail-sized container. The net is held by one person while another pours the water sample(s) through the net. The sieved materials (containing the tiny creatures collectively called plankton) are then back-flushed into a collection container. Alternatively, the net may be handheld vertically and guided through pond water using figure-eight motions. Then, the concentrated plankton are backflushed into a storage container.”2 The buckets of pond water in the classroom are then so concentrated with the tiny creatures that the students can’t miss them! When the students started looking through their microscopes, oh how much fun it was for me to hear their joyous expressions of amazement! Witnessing the thrill of discovery that they were experiencing made this teacher’s spirit soar! Oh, the joy of seeing a student grab the arm of their lab partner and enthusiastically exclaim, “Look in here! You’ve got to see this!” I just stood there and enjoyed the moment (actually, it was more like forty-five minutes) as every one of those twenty-five ninth graders was mesmerized for the entire class period. Of course, I didn’t just stand there and soak up the satisfaction for the entire period. I wandered around from group to group and responded to their questions: “I’ve never used a microscope like this. How do you make it focus?” “These little guys in my Petri dish look like little bumper cars. How do they move around?” “What is this creature? I can’t find it in the book.” Now that’s when real learning occurs. Just put the students into a situation where you create in them a need to know and then they will begin initiating the questions.

Figure 1-3 Put the...