More Tuesday questions

1. Still a bear.
2. It is kind of a "Duh" when you think about it, but Robin's point that most of your students will go through your class merely to get through it stuck with me. My students won't all come out biology majors. I have to remind myself that most of the football players I coach do not take the game as seriously as myself and the other coaches. To most of them it is a way to have fun with their friends. By the same token, high school biology is basically a required course. The students do it because they have to. That doesn't mean they shouldn't get something out of it or that standards should be lower. It means that I cannot address the subject in ways that only make sense to science people.
3. How has/is the the new technology we have access to making its way into curriculum? I don't have any experience at this point with adopted curriculum by districts except from the word of other teachers I know. One middle level science teacher in a larger district wants to leave because he is tire of teaching curriculum that is district wide adopted and he has little room to add or take away as he sees necessary. I understand the need for districts to have the same curriculum from all teachers in a subject area, but what do you do if the curriculum is lagging behind the technology?
4. Something I have wanted to do for a while now, and I would have to break from sub plans to do it, would be the following.
a. break students into groups, each with at least one student with a phone/camera.
b. send them around the school to take 5 pictures of items they consider to be living and 5 things they consider to be dead. Groups should try to avoid using same things as each other.
c. Put photos together in a slide show. Describe why they chose the items, what about them makes them consider them living.
d. Present whole thing to class as video about characteristics of living and non living things.