So, Lisa came for a visit today and one of the first questions she asked me was what and how I was incorporating my externship experience into my curriculum.  It’s an important question, but it’s one I have an issue describing as fully as I would like.  There is so much here I would like to incorporate and many ideas that my collaborators have given me, but a lot of it, I fear, is a bit too high level for my students.  Not that I don’t want to challenge them, but I don’t want do so without providing an adequate base, and I don’t want them to just say “this is too tough” and shut down.

Lisa, though, was pointing out that even some of the lab safety issues were things I could bring up – and I had just taken some pictures of some of the safety equipment and rules posted around the lab, so I definitely could incorporate that into lesson plans.

I think that the first lesson plan (which I called “An Analytical Chemist, a Biochemist, an Animal Scientist, and an Oncologist Walk into a Lab…No Joke”) was a fairly broad first piece.  I think on subsequent ones that I need to hone in on more specific topics (polarity, relative atomic mass, isotopes, bonding, bond dissociation energy, etc.).

I’m assuming that this blog post is supposed to be about the curricular pieces we develop from our Kenan experience.  However, as I’m typing this I have some other thoughts about curriculum and North Carolina’s ideas about it.  It’s looking like NC and the powers that be at the state level are going to remove us from associating with the Common Core.  Now, I wasn’t a big fan of how the Common Core was developed or implemented in the first place, but we (meaning the politicians in NC) don’t seem to have a much better plan in developing the NC Essential Standards either…and the Common Core is just standards – it’s not curriculum.  It’s objectives, standards and goals – not how things are taught, but what is to be accomplished.  I still think that people get confused about that.  The Next Gen Standards even make it a point to say that.  There’s still a lot of freedom for educators and also responsibilities on educators to develop meaningful curricular pieces and lesson plans…now, if we can just get the people making these decisions to see that we should have a large voice in what the new standards are going to be, then we should be heading in the right direction.