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Teaching with Passion

We wrapped up our biology unit last week with a lesson on competition within an environment and how everything within an ecosystem is dependent on each other.  I’m the first to admit that biology is not one of my favorite units in science.  I’m a geology and space guy.  I think the reason that I don’t like biology stems from the fact that cells really didn’t make that much sense to me while I was in school.  I couldn’t conceptualize them easily and I just didn’t get how it all worked together.  With that said, I’m beginning to have an appreciation for biology as the years go by.

ARIZONAFOODWEB21-300x260

Image from: Arizona Food Web | Ecoplexity.

I was standing up in front of my class today and we were looking at an image of an ecosystem similar to the one above.  As I’m teaching I’m thinking about how everything in this one picture can summarize my student’s 6th, 7th, and 8th grade biology units.  I started to get excited and went totally off script.  I got really passionate and talked about how amazing it is that every single organism plays some role in our world.  It was just this huge A-HA moment that I was having right in front of my students and the kids were totally feeding off of my passion.  I was standing on chairs talking about the circle of life and bringing relevance to it all by talking about the climate change debate, pollution, and our role in the ecosystem.  You could have heard a pin drop in my class if I stopped talking.  I hit every biology vocabulary word and concept that they have learned in the last 3  years in one 10-minute verbal explosion.   I rarely direct teach, but for those few minutes I was absolutely on fire.  It was infectious in my attitude throughout the rest of the day also.  When I stopped to take a deep breath at the end I had one student raise her hand and say, “Mr. Kesler, I learned something today.”  I laughed uncontrollably and also felt a little uneasy at the fact that other days I may not be connecting with her.  She went on to tell me that most days she is just kind of ho-hum about school, but that today was different.  That is what passion can do for your students.  That is why I am a teacher.

I was also reminded that it’s OK to direct teach every once in a while.  We’re scared in believing  that student-centered learning, or that inquiry based activities are the only way to achieve success.  Sometimes it’s OK to transfer you passions about your content to the students in a direct way.  We shouldn’t be afraid to do that every once in a while.

One more little anecdote from today was an interaction I had with one of my students.  I showed them an image similar to the one below.

phototropism-tree

Image from: The World’s newest photos of phototropism and tree – Flickr Hive Mind.

Here is how that conversation  played out.

Me: “So guys what do you think caused the tree to grow in this strange way?”

Student: <raises hand quicky> “The seed was planted sideways.”

I truly love teaching middle school because you never know what kind of answers you’re going to get, and most of the time they are more brilliant than the real answer.  I had a good Friday.

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