Things MIS has taught me

-Learn how to expand and contract your lesson plans, some classes will have more time some classes will have less time. You have to be prepared for both. Pick out the key components of a lesson and make sure that no matter what you cover those. Students can learn content on their own at home, but the hands on piece is practical and should always be kept to the full length.

- Always have twice the amount of materials that you think you will need. Someone will mess up a set of test tubes, something WILL be dropped, things WILL get spilled, and something WILL go wrong. Always have more materials than you need just to be sure.

- The kid who does not like to participate WILL have his/her niche, you just have to find it. The kid who is always disrupting class or not participating has to like something. It may not be your class, but try to incorporate what they like into your lesson/lab. The kid that doodles instead of paying attention could make your posters and illustrate concepts that you cannot do yourself, or the kid that is constantly singing could make a cool podcast rap/song that can be shared with everyone to help remember a hard topic. Get kids involved in new ways

- Inquiry is a great way to teach science. Continuously doing science experiments with known outcomes is not the way to teach science to our students. We want them to come up with their own questions and their own personal interest in science. When students have a personal connection to their experiments, or if they understand why an experiment is practical in real life, then they will want to learn more about it.

- Science is not a lecture topic, as much as we pretend it is. Science is hands on, and practical, and questioning, and figuring things out. We must always question our students for more information, rather than spoon feeding them vocabulary and boring facts.

- Science is life. Science should not be a class where you memorize facts for a test and then forget them two days later, it should be a continual learning process. What they learned ten minutes ago, should be practical in tomorrows lesson, or months or years alter. They should be able to draw onto that knowledge and build upon it.

-Every school district is different. Questioning and answering questions comes with an entirely different classroom etiquette and participation than schools that do not make their students answer questions. If students are not open to being wrong or giving all sorts of different answers than they are not fully participating in their learning.

-Teachers behavior plays a large part in student behavior. Although we should be teaching our students good behavior, things we model in the classroom have a bigger effect on students than we think. Our participation, or questioning, or want to learn should be just as great our students. They should be our teachers as well.