Unit 6 Woes...

Here are words I thought I'd never say:  I wish I had more time to spend on mitosis and meiosis because we're all truly enjoying it.

Usually mitosis and meiosis are one of those "ugh" topics for me to teach-- let's just get through it as quickly as possible so the students are capable of answering EOC questions about it.  Seriously, no 15 year old needs to be able to distinguish between prophase and telophase to be successful in life.

But the activities are SO incredibly good for this unit.  Exercise 3 has students analyzing an experiment on weed killer that disrupts mitosis in weed roots.  Talk about applicable real life connections!  And Exercise 4 is a really informative cancer WebQuest that breaks it down extremely well.  Again, another great connection.  Alas, no time to do either...

So it's onward ho... my students will be taking the state EOC exam on December 11th.  That may sound like it's sufficiently far away, but it's truly not.  Next week we only have two class periods due to the Thanksgiving holiday.  Then we have one week of class before the exams begin.  On December 8th, 9th, and 10th, the majority of my students will be taking EOC exams for other courses like english and math, so I likely won't see them.  When you account for that, I only have 9 more class periods to cover meiosis and all of the genetics in unit 7.  Oy vey.  I always end up with little time for genetics-- I really need to shuffle it to the front end of my curriculum one semester.

On a side note-- I spoke somewhat disparagingly of the Genome, Chromosomes, and DNA WebQuest in my previous post.  I mentioned I wish I had not planned to do it today because my students never get anything from them.  Well... wrong again, or at least that is my impression after today.  They truly enjoyed this one.  Since we'd already kicked around the concept of chromosomes and mutations a lot, it was a good reinforcement activity.  And some of them took The DNA Game a little too seriously...