First Week

The first week went really well. Earlier in the week I was a bit stressed, but the last few days have been pretty good. Most of the week was spent on rules and procedures (complete with students acting them out and even creating raps out of them). I was quite proactive in my rules, consequences, and management system and it paid off during the first week. Most will say that I was in my "honeymoon period," but I could tell many of the students were testing me in the last few days and I was able to effectively hand out consequences. I just need to keep these up next week. The week ended with a lesson on the scientific method (making predictions with money being lit on fire with various solution strengths of water/alcohol mixtures) along with a short NOVA video on epigenetics (our first unit is genetics).

Epigenetics is a subfield of genetics that I had never heard of until I saw the video. Essentially, we have another genetic structure that controls which of our genes is turned off or on. This structure can be influenced by the environment such as which foods the mother and father ate and agents in the environment during times such as pregnancy and puberty. The video spent a great deal of time discussing how identical twins can live different lives (such as one developing one type of genetic disease whereas the other does not). It showed how young twins had a similar genetic structure while older identical twins had substantially fewer genes in common. It was quite interesting to see the large effect of the environment on a person's genetic structure.

Tomorrow is another wonderful professional saturday in Helena. I get to drive 2 hours for more training. Lucky me. I am lucky that next week is planned, so I just have to get some papers ready to be copied.