During my first year at Meridian High school, I would mostly just use the resources I had gotten from the 2nd years. By April I was so fatigued and ready for the year to be over and I had gotten super lazy. Most morning I was rushing in at 7:45 am to convert the keynotes to powerpoint and projecting it on the screen without even reviewing the slides. A few times I even forgot to take off "Ms. McCarthy or Ms. Diltz". The students were so apathetic by this time sometimes, they didn't even notice; but when they did, boy, was I in for it.
Once the much needed summer finally came I took full advantage of it. I used summer school to take risks and bask in the glow of all the compliments from my TEAM teacher, peers, and first year students. I actually read Teach Like a Champion and Tools for Teaching (which I recommend Mississippi Teacher Corps to purchase for first year students) cover to cover. I attend professional development meetings with The American Society of Materials, The National Association of Science Teachers, and Google Classroom. Besides getting my classroom management on point, I wanted to make science more fun. I wanted to do more than just notes. I wanted to present the material to my students in a way that was relevant and meaningful. I wanted a normal day in Mrs. Bamber's class to be organized chaos of learning and growing.
By my second year, I started to take a lot more risks with how I presented the content. I started tweaking the power points to my own style. Including videos I thought were funny. One of my favorite ways to present the content this year were to present videos dealing with animal sex. If there is one way to get a high school student's attention it is with sex. Being a biology teacher, it is easy to sneak it in the curriculum if I make it about animals. When teaching about evolution this year, I showed the students a video about how the difference in mammals and how they give birth. The video kept their interest because it focused on a baby whale drinking liters of thick milk a day, a kangaroo's 3 vaginas, and a duck-billed platypus defecating and mating through the same orifice! All the while the kids are totally engrossed in the different ways mammals give birth, they are absorbing key vocabulary terms, making connections about habitats, and seeing a phylogenetic tree in action.
When it was time to learn about symbiotic relationships and competition, I introduced them a protandrous hermaphrodite that paratizes its host and en utero cannibalism. All wonderfully weird, but mostly importantly real ways that these foreign words can have a memorable visual experience to hold on to.
Below is a scaffolded worksheet that goes along with the Three Different Ways that Mammals Give Birth Video.