Welcome!

Greetings! Maybe you're one of the loyal Ansarino in Argentina followers from the blog I kept during my participation in the Fulbright DAT program, maybe not. Either way, I am thrilled that you found your way to this site.

 My hope is to be able to use this blog to give back to the online teaching community. I don't necessarily mean those who deliver teach science and math from a distance, but rather the dedicated group of teachers who share their experiences (both good and bad) in the hope that others can improve their own teaching, or at least start a discussion to that end!

This year I'm trying some new techniques, not the least of which is Standards-Based Grading. I borrowed ideas from lots of other bloggers.... Shawn (here too), Kate, Kelly (again here and here), Frank, Brian, Jason, etc. To be honest, I started looking into SBG last winter. I read a lot and finally ended up with something that I think will work for both my students and me. Without the resources these folks took the time to share I would be left grading as I always have and hating it, mostly because all that the students worry about is their test scores rather than understanding the material I want them to learn.

I'm rolling this out with my AP Physics students with the help of BlueHarvest. Students are going to have an assessment every Wednesday. I think... we're still discussing this as a class. Every "C" day (we have a 6-day cycle, A-F days, lab meets twice every cycle, periods are 38 minutes long) the students will have either one or two periods to work on their independent experiments. These are probably the highlight of my class. Anyway, I decided to go with a grading scale from 0-5. My syllabus explains a lot of it in more depth. You can see it and a rough draft of my learning targets (aka standards) here: AP Physics homepage.

I am not sure if the kids have bought into it yet. When I was explaining it I told the kids that theirs is a science class which inherently involves experiments. This is just another experiment, and as the class progresses it is very likely that my grading scheme and practices will evolve. I think that they interpreted this as "if we ignore it, he will abandon this crazy notion and go back to the way things have always been." I hope that this doesn't happen and that they start to buy into it. I created a practice standard for students to see the different types of feedback they can receive on Blue Harvest. this started some neat conversations, and I finally got all the kids to change their profile pictures. Well, one simply downloaded the default image, mirrored it 180 degrees, and uploaded it again. it's a different image. Another had issues trying to get a file small enough. He sent me feedback on other standards (which I haven't even assessed yet) to show he can log in. I changed his profile picture for him, though I gave him a picture of a truck, and he loves Cadillacs. I am hoping that it pushes him to change it himself. p.s. he just changed it to a basketball player.


Regents Physics will still be graded using the old system. I could have gone whole-hog, but my time is limited this year as never before, and I didn't want to get in over my head. I consoled myself that if SBG goes really well I can always adopt it partway through the year. The only big change I made is that I gave kids an out for their formal lab reports. I've always struggled requiring them anyway. The out is that once they've mastered the skill of writing them, they no longer have to do them, just an informal writeup. I think it will make them try harder, I just hope they don't give up when they shoot for the bar I set and fail the first time around.