Unit 5 Review and Biology v. Chemistry

Last September in our final modeling workshop, one of the university professors helping out with the event had another fabulous quote:  biology requires students to understand more advanced chemistry than the students actually learn in general chemistry.

As someone who teaches both biology and chemistry, this quote rocked me to the core-- because it is absolutely true!  The state of Tennessee is going to test my students at the end of the year on topics such as hydrogen bonding, polarity of molecules, and the structure of organic molecules.  When will these students see these topics again?  Hydrogen bonding and polarity are glossed over in high school chemistry.  Many of them will never see organic chemistry ever again and do quite well for themselves regardless.

This observation does make a good argument for inverted curriculum, which I had previously been rather indifferent about.  I spent this entire unit wishing my students had a stronger background in chemistry.  When you are trying to teach a student something like how a phospholipid works, a former chemistry student would at least have some prior knowledge of polarity to fall back on.  When they are trying to predict whether or not ions will diffuse through the cell membrane, at least they would understand something about ionization.  The list of benefits are endless.  Instead, I'm forcing my students to memorize concepts when they don't have the background to fully understand these concepts.  I definitely talk about chemistry more in biology than I talk about biology in chemistry!

Anyway...

Today was review day, since our unit 5 test will be tomorrow.  There were a lot of wonderful activities in this unit that I just flat out didn't have time to do, like "The case of the Somalian Ivory Poachers" and the gel electrophoresis simulation.  Both looked like fun and both had great real world connections.  I'm bummed we didn't get to do them.

What we did do:

-Modified introduction to cells/microscopes with prepared plant cell slides, cheek cell wet mounts, and pond water wet mounts.

-Modified Diffusion/Osmosis Lab activity with dialysis tubing, as well as demos with scented body spray and food coloring in water.

-Notes on Cell Membranes/Passive Transport*

-Exercise 1 with associated textbook reading

-Osmosis in hypertonic/hypotonic/isotonic solutions rubber egg lab

-Exercise 2, modified to match lab

-Active Transport textbook reading

-Notes on Active Transport*

-Documentary on Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of DNA's structure (in place of DNA Webquest since we couldn't access the computers this day)

-Nucleic Acid Article Reading/Notes on Nucleic Acids*

-What is a protein? Group research paper activity

-Protein Synthesis with Words lab activity

-Webquest:  Protein Synthesis

-Notes on Transcription/Translation/Mutations*

-Exercise 3 Transcription/Translation

-"Little Mito:  The story of where he came from" and associated writing assignment

-Enzymes Notes*

-Toothpickase Enzyme Lab

-How does a cell function as a whole?  Cell Analogy activity

* instead of having a "model," I have fallen back to using PowerPoints for notes.  How can I get back to the concept of a model for each topic, instead of just dictated notes?  Is it a problem to keep falling back on these PowerPoint presentations?  I'm not sure.

I really, really, REALLY liked the cell analogy activity as a review before the test tomorrow.  I know this is not an activity unique to modeling, but I had never done it before.  Plus, I was feeling like despite this unit being called "Cell Structure and Function," we talked very little about the cell on the whole.  This brought it all back together and really made the students think about ALL the organelles working with each other.  I have to say, the biology modeling curriculum is organized in such a way that it builds upon itself near flawlessly.

My first two blocks were pretty boring with their analogies, mainly sticking with easy analogies like factory or school...

My last block went wild.  They were doing things like Star Wars, Football Teams, iPhones... and then this wildly inappropriate, yet absolutely hilarious analogy comparing a cell to "da hood."

I would have been more concerned about this if it hadn't been created by a bunch of suburban kids who have only seen this stuff on TV.  Instead, we all had a good laugh as they tried to explain to us how "da hood" works.