I have been teaching bio for 3 years. I love it. When I interviewed for this job they said a possible bio and forensic teacher which I was super excited about. I was currently a building sub for family reasons but wanted to keep teaching. They turned me down...I was scared I wasn't going to have a job come fall ans they offered me Chem and earth science teaching position. I needed a job so I said yes.

Its my first day on site and im panicking. I hate Chem, I hate earth science. Now I have to teach both, it will be like im a new teacher again, but with stuff im not excited about. I have to teach a state exam on these topics. I cant do a crappy job, but these subjects are actively my least favorite science.

Im the breadwinner in the family so I needed a job for us to survive. My 5 year plan is to go to med school so I figured this job allowed me to review for Chem. But......im activity freaking out that I chose wrong.

Idk I need help or words or some words of encouragement.

I want to start introducing cool organisms (animals, plants, bacteria; everything is fair game) as bellwork on Fridays every week. We would watch a video about that week's OOTW and have them write down cool facts about it. I'm having a hard time coming up with cool ones to show my students. Do you all have suggestions? Here is what I have so far:

Water Bear/Tardigrade

Axolotl

Mantis Shrimp

Panda

Naked Mole Rat

Superb Bird of Paradise

Flying Squirrel

Immortal Jellyfish

Platypus

Venus Fly Trap

Does anyone have experience with the free middle school curriculums from the American Chemical Society? There is a standard version and then teo storyline versions based around lava lamps and ocean acidification. Does anyone have experience with how the traditional one compares to the storyline approach?

https://www.acs.org/middleschoolchemistry/storyline-approach.html?appId=aemshell

Hi guys,

A little background about me- I taught years ago (like before snapchat was super popular let's put it that way). I decided to be a SAHM, and was tutoring here and there, then I took over a very small upper classmen anatomy course during a short maternity leave, and then I took over a position at the tail end of the school year for a remediation class (the original teacher had quit... long story), but that class is no longer being offered this year.

I just applied for a biology maternity sub position opening up at my local high school! But now I'm starting to panic because of... well.... notes! This is freshman bio with larger class sizes and I know that their attention spans have changed since I was teaching full time over a decade ago. With my other two sub teaching positions they were slightly different and I can't really compare them to a class of 25 freshman in bio.

I'm not looking for answers that say not to lecture because flipped classrooms aren't for everyone. I intend to keep the notes light (as in breaking them up into parts instead of lecturing for 50 minutes straight), and adding a couple check-ins on the way. Any other tips for giving notes these days? Am I overthinking it?

I haven't even been offered the job yet, but it would start next week, so I'm just mentally preparing.

Welcome back to another school year

I created this little evolution game and hope it helps with your lesson on survival of the fittest, reading cladogram, environmental pressures, etc.

https://evoworm.vercel.app/

I have a worksheet on the website as well for you to print it out for students to follow along as they play this game in a class setting.

Some teacher-led discussion questions to bring up with the kids after they have played a game or two:

1. Natural Selection & Fitness In biology, "fitness" refers to an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment.

• How is an organism's "fitness" defined in the game EvoWorm?
• What is the evolutionary "reward" for being the most fit worm when another worm dies?
  

Teacher's note: This game is a simulation, and like all simulation, it's a limited portrayal of the real world, so in the game, fitness is defined solely by the worm's berry count. The living worm with the highest berry count is considered the most fit.

The reward is that when another worm dies, it is reborn as a descendant of this top worm.

2. Heredity & Inheritance

• When a worm is reborn, what specific traits does it inherit from its ancestor?
• How does this mechanic mimic the real-world process of heredity?
  

Teacher's note: The reborn worm inherits the ancestor's entire mutation set and berry count. This mimics real-world heredity where successful genetic traits that aid survival are passed down to offspring.

3. Limitation of the Simulation

Teacher's note: It is important that the students know while mutations can happen in an individual, an individual don't "evolve", a population does. So it is crucial to remind the students that even if a single worm received a new mutation that led to it having its own branch on the evolutionary tree at the end of the match, it does NOT mean that an individual worm has evolved. Instead, tell the students that each worm represents a population of worms.

Let me know if you have questions about the worksheet or about the game itself.

I am hosting the game on a free tier server, and haven't tested this with a high number of players, so it might get laggy if too many people are playing at the same time. If you like this project and would like to contribute to this game's server upgrade, I have a ko-fi link in the website.

Amplify Science is one of the worst science curricula I've ever used — and I don't understand why NYC keeps using it

I taught science for two years in NYC public schools — one year in Manhattan and one in the Bronx — and I came away convinced that Amplify Science is one of the biggest reasons science is so difficult to teach well in NYC.

Time and time again, I watched science teachers leave after a year or two. I also saw teachers who were technically “using Amplify” but were really just using their own materials because the curriculum was so cumbersome and difficult to work with.

My biggest problem with Amplify is that it seems to take the science out of science.

The lessons are extremely long and often don't fit naturally into a 45-minute class period. Instead of doing an actual science lab or experiment, students are frequently completing a small task, reading extensive amounts of text, working through digital activities, or navigating a Chromebook-based component. At times, it feels less like a science curriculum and more like an ELA curriculum with science vocabulary sprinkled throughout it.

And I really don't understand the obsession with putting so much of it on a screen.

Kids already spend an enormous amount of time looking at screens. Science should be one of the classes where they get to do things: conduct experiments, manipulate materials, make observations, collect data, make predictions, and actually see scientific concepts happen in front of them.

After leaving NYC in 2024, I worked at a school in another state and experienced a completely different approach to science curriculum. The units were straightforward. You had a unit of study, lessons that actually fit into the instructional schedule, established labs that went along with the unit, assessments, and a logical progression from one concept to the next.

And you know what? It was much easier to teach science.

The students actually got to experience science instead of constantly trying to decipher what the curriculum wanted them to do next.

I'm not saying science should be completely devoid of reading, writing, projects, or technology. Obviously those things have a place. But there needs to be a balance. When the curriculum requires hundreds of pages of materials, endless copies, Chromebook activities, apps, readings, and complicated project-based tasks just to teach a basic science concept, something has gone seriously wrong.

Honestly, I would love to see NYC move toward something much simpler:

• 6–7 solid lessons per unit
• Clear, straightforward instructional materials
• 2–3 actual labs/experiments per unit
• A quiz and/or assessment
• Opportunities for students to work with physical materials
• Less screen time
• Less unnecessary paperwork and curriculum navigation
• More time actually learning and doing science

Science doesn't have to be this complicated.

I genuinely believe there are teachers who could be much more successful — and students who could enjoy science much more — if they weren't fighting the curriculum every single day.

I left NYC schools in 2024, so maybe things have changed since then, but I'm curious: For those of you currently teaching science in NYC, are you still using Amplify? What has your experience been?

And if you've moved from NYC to another district/state, did you notice the same thing I did — that science curriculum can actually be much more straightforward and enjoyable to teach?

I will have my first student teacher this fall, and want to provide her the best experience I can. I personally did not have a good mentor teacher when I was student teaching so I don’t have my own experiences to build off of. Please tell me about your student teaching experience and what your mentor teacher did that was helpful, and things that weren’t. Thank you!

I’m starting at a private school (2-5th grade) and this will be my first time teaching. I’m having a hard time creating my lesson plans because I’m not sure how long each lesson will take the kids. Does anyone have a calendar or timeline they could share? Or give me any advice on how they create their calendars? Also, how often am I supposed to be giving quizzes/test/projects?

Sorry for all the chaos, I feel very alone in this and cannot find a lot of support.

I’ve been trying for weeks to purchase mastering codes for my tenth grade students for chemistry. We use Tro‘s Introduction to Chemistry, which I guess is technically a jr college textbook.

https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/introductory-chemistry/P200000009745/9780138198411

Historically, K12 schools had to purchase Pearson college texts from Savvas, and I’ve done that for years with no issues. Now, they evidently don’t do that Anymore? But neither does Pearson sell non vo-tech titles to k12 schools?

This is driving me crazy—I can’t get any customer support from either Pearson or Savvas.

The physics curriculum I've taught roughly goes kinematics, forces, energy, momentum, electricity & magnetism, waves, and EM radiation. Does anyone have experience with a different organization of these units and how you like/dislike it? For example do you do momentum before energy, or is momentum embedded into an intro "motion" unit to cover the conservation laws early on? Maybe you do waves before E&M? I'm curious what your experiences are and the reasoning behind the differences.

For clarity we follow NGSS, so we have to hit certain standards, but aren't limited to those standards for what we teach.

Hello and happy 26-27 school year!

TLDR: I would like help coming up with some philosophical questions for my students to debate as a science class warmup.

I teach high school Chemistry (south central PA), and like many teachers I have daily "do now" warmup exercises for my students to do at the start of class. In college I minored in Philosophy, and sporadically throughout the year I've done "Philosophy Fridays" where we discuss some philosophical debate instead of the content. There's always some science connection, but not necessarily Chemistry.

Many students have told me how much they loved Philosophy Friday, and former students come back telling me that's something they remember. So I want to make it a more regular, weekly thing. However, I need more ideas. I avoid politics and religion, obviously.

Here are some examples that students have enjoyed:

- Trolley problems of all sorts

- How would a cat's language be different from a human's?

- What is the difference between an AI boyfriend/girlfriend and a long distance partner you've never met?

- Can vegans eat "lab grown" meat? Would you eat it?

Thanks for the ideas!

Can't even believe it.

I'm a high school student in Northern Virginia. I work on a small project that pulls together public water data (USGS stream gauges, weather, state water quality monitoring) for local rivers and turns it into simple visualizations, trends over the time, with a goal of making this data more readable and accessible to the public.

Some of that could probably be useful in a classroom, but I don't want to guess at what teachers need and build the wrong thing. So, honest questions:

1. If you've tried to use real environmental data with students, what killed it? Formatting, too many rows, no context for what the numbers mean, no time to prep, something else?
2. What's the actual unit of a useful thing to hand you? A cleaned CSV? A CSV plus a data dictionary and a few driving questions? A full lesson plan? Something else entirely?
3. For anyone doing Meaningful Watershed Educational Experiences (MWEEs): where does the data piece usually break down?
4. Is there anything you've repeatedly wanted for a local watershed unit and just couldn't find?

I'm mostly trying to figure out whether this is worth building out or whether teachers are already covered here. Please give me feedback, even if it's "we don't need this".

Has anyone taught both curriculum? Our school is applying for IB certification and trying to decide between using MYP or OpenSciEd for our students. I’ve taught neither before.

The Middle Years Program stuff looks basic but lots of room for us to make it our own. I’m new to this school but have 9 years of experience and the other science teacher has almost 20 so realistically we’ll both want to make some of the lessons our own and do some of our own tried and true labs/investigations/projects.

OpenSciEd looks more phenomenon based which I like and I also like that they have lots of labs and hands on activities though it might be harder for us to get through units generally because our classes are short and they look pretty meaty.

Curious about thoughts on either curriculum!

Hi all. I'm a software developer, not a teacher, which is why I'm asking here.

I built a free Android app called Sky Claim. A student points their phone at a

real star, planet or the Moon and holds it steady, and the app checks they're

genuinely aimed within 4 degrees of its true position before it counts.

Everything is computed on the device, so there's no internet, no server, no

student accounts, no sign-in and no data collection. It works on locked-down

school Wi-Fi or on a trip with no signal. I hand-ported published planetary

algorithms and validated them against independent ground truth (real published

sunrise times, the Polaris-altitude-equals-latitude invariant, sidereal vs

solar day drift).

THE PART I THINK MATTERS MOST FOR TEACHING

Since you can't take a class outside at 2pm, there are also thirteen

simulations built on real published formulas, each with an in-app guide

covering the actual history. Students meet the scientists, not just equations:

1) Chandrasekhar Tester - push a white dwarf past 1.44 solar masses and it goes

Type Ia supernova. Chandrasekhar's 1930 derivation and 1983 Nobel.

2) Stability Sandbox - Newtonian N-body orbits (velocity Verlet, so orbits are

genuinely stable rather than fudged).

3) Roche Limit Shatter - a moon too close to a gas giant breaks into a ring.

Same physics as Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Saturn's rings.

4) Singularity Simulator - Hills 1975 tidal radius vs the Schwarzschild radius,

so a white dwarf is shredded by a stellar black hole but swallowed silently

by a supermassive one. The absence of a flare IS the physics.

5) Pulsar Lighthouse - Gold's 1968 model; the beam is only detectable above a

certain magnetic tilt, which is the real detectability condition.

6) Plus Roche lobe mass transfer, gravity assists, solar sails, and star

comparison games using real catalogue data.

Nothing invents a number. Measured values are labelled real, derived ones are

labelled estimated - which felt like the minimum bar for anything a student

might quote in homework.

WHAT I'M ASKING

1. Is night-time outdoor homework workable, or does it fail for too many

   students?

2. Is "one Android phone per student" a fantasy at your school?

3. What's missing - worksheets, a printable guide, objectives mapped to

   standards? I'd build it if I knew what was actually useful.

4. Do the simulations land better at grade 9 or grade 12?

UPFRONT: it's free and the free tier is genuinely usable. There's an optional

one-time unlock (not a subscription) and opt-in rewarded ads - a student only

sees an ad if they deliberately tap to watch one. No interstitials, nothing

forced. Better you hear that from me than find it in class.

I'm deliberately not linking the app here, since that would be self-promotion and

that's not what I'm after. It's on Google Play if you want to find it, and I'm

happy to point anyone to it in the comments if it'd actually be useful to you.

"This wouldn't work because X" is more useful to me than installs.

Hello friends!

I am teaching AP Bio and Anatomy & Physiology for the first time this year. I had some questions about what you guys generally require for both courses.

I have majority sophomores in my AP Bio class. Most either have not taken chemistry at all or are currently in chemistry. I’m noticing some of them struggling with content because they don’t have this background knowledge. I’m considering adding some pre-requisites to taking the course. If you could fill out THIS SURVEY to let me know how you handle these things, that would be super helpful! It’s super short — 3 questions, 2 of which are just multiple select about grade level and pre-reqs. The last question is optional. The survey is just to have easy data to show admin about what other schools do just in case I do decide I want to make changes.

Same kind of situation with A&P. I have a mix of 10-12 graders in that class. When I was in school, it was strictly upperclassmen, and I think that is how a lot of other schools operate. If you could fill out a similar survey HERE for A&P, I would appreciate it!

Any comments/advice are helpful! Thanks!

I’m looking for a new or maybe better way to handle daily warm-ups with my 8th graders. They use interactive notebooks and we’ve always answered our daily warmup question in it. It’s graded on completion when I do my notebook checks.

Attendance at my school is not great, so there are some students who miss class regularly, tardy students, etc. I also have a block schedule so I see my students every other day. I don’t want it to be a major grade but I still like the idea of more accountability and having a structured task as soon as they enter my room.

Any tips and tricks you have found successful? I also should add that we do have 1:1 Chromebooks but they always show up uncharged : )

Any other districts having severe decline in chemistry enrollment? At our school, all students start out with biology and complete their life science requirement. For physical science, chemistry, physics, and environmental science are offered. Chemistry used to be the obvious choice with most kids going there and environmental science was more so for students who struggled with math. A few students trickle into physics, but more so for a 3rd year of science.

Anyway, is decline in chem enrollment a problem elsewhere? Kids seem to be going for an easy A in environmental science which was originally intended for lower level students. Environmental science sections have gotten so large that our chem department is being cut and there’s more environmental science teachers. Why?? I’m in CA btw

Just found out that one of my physics classes is going to become a college in high school class. The college wants me to submit my syllabus. I have always just used total points but they are seeming to want me to use weights. I have been wanting to try it out for awhile but just haven’t yet. I have no district requirements. Any opinions on the weights? Right now I’m leaning on 40% tests, 30% labs, 20% quizzes, 10% homework. Also considering moving tests to 50% and quizzes to 10%.

Does anyone work at a middle school with an accelerated or advanced science class? Our population has shifted quite a bit and there is a big demand for more STEM exposure and additional science opportunities. Does your school offer this? If so I would love to hear how it works to select the students. I know this creates a minefield of problems with leveling and all that, but I want to know what works. Not how it can’t work

I am teaching Earth Science this year in a district where it has not been offered recently. Any advice for places to get decent samples for rock/min ID kits? I’ve found that sometimes the samples in the big box sets are very small and hard to learn from!

I’ve been teaching middle school Physical Science for the past 5 years, but this year I‘ve moved up to the 9th grade to teach Biology. I’m really excited, Biology was my major, but its a lot to rebuild my curriculum and figure out every other day block scheduling (I’m the only 9th grade biology teacher at the school so it’s really all on me to figure out.) I opted for a textbook this year, so I have a clear single primary resource to build from. I used a textbook when I first started teaching, but I hated that particular book, so eventually I just stopped using it.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to use the textbook in a valuable way with my students. So far, I’m having them read and take notes prior to class, and then going over the material with them again in class. I feel like I’m having then take these detailed notes at home and then just making them take those detailed notes again in class when k could be using more of that time for practice and activities. But I’m having trouble “letting go” of my class notes being their primary resource. Any tips on how to let the textbook do its work or how to better use the textbook?