Blonde, but not dumb

I'm sure the day will come when one or more of my students succeeds in duping me, but so far I've tried to be two steps ahead of them. One young man insisted I had graded his test incorrectly and demanded more points for three of his answers to true/false questions. He had taken the exam in pencil, marking the answers "T", and then added a line in black ink to change them to "F," the correct answer. He then tried to convince me that those were his original answers. Riiiiight. I feel badly for reprimanding him in front of several other students, but it actually made me laugh. Do I look that obtuse? My mentor wanted to give him a zero. I probably should have.

I made a deliberate attempt today to comply with theory and change instruction every 15-20 minutes. Consequently, I think I overloaded my Earth Science students. Part of the problem is that they have become so accustomed to sitting and mindlessly copying notes for an entire hour or doing bookwork that they haven't learned how to transition efficiently (or at all!) from one activity to another. There's a part of me that wants to agree with my mentor and use whatever tactic keeps them calm, but busywork is so incredibly dull to me. In retrospect, I probably should have started by easing them into a new schedule slowly, not adding too many new things at once. I had to smile inwardly when I overheard one student say, "Is this, like, some modern way of teaching?" No, dear, it's more like a desperate attempt to keep you all awake.

I totally enjoyed seeing the Biology students' reactions as they checked their experiments today. Yesterday they dispersed throughout the school, culturing samples from various places onto petri dishes. I loved seeing their horrified faces today as they discovered just how ubiquitous bacteria are. "Eewww! You mean that was growing in the water fountain?" I can't wait for them to play with swamp water tomorrow.