Textbooks and Work loads...

How much work should students expect in AP Biology?
I tell students to plan on 1 hour per night.

I find that the biggest challenge is to get students to open up the dang textbook and read it! To that end, I switched last year from Campbell & Reece to Raven & Johnson. Yes, I know Campbell is commonly thought of as industry standard, but it does my students no good if they can't/won't read it. Campbell is a great reference manual, but it accentuates vocabulary a bit to much for my tastes and is written at a very high reading level and in a rather dense, dry academic style. My constituency is primarily from blue-collar, solid middle class families and they just found Campbell unapproachable. So I switched, and although Raven is not a panacea, I get more readers. It is a bit chattier style of writing and if I pick and choose my chapters carefully, we stay at a reasonable level of details. However, Raven is not without its flaws. My two major critiques:

• The writing is uneven from chapter to chapter. Some of the authors have targeted their writing and their depth to the right level and some dove into jargon waaaaay too much (Chapter 18 Control of Gene Expression -- someone really loves their motifs!). The book needs a heavy-handed editor to even it out across the board.
  
  
• I don't agree with the organization of a number of chapters. Who would start a discussion of macromolecules with proteins (Chapter 3)? Those are the hardest biomolecules to understand. Start with sugars and build from there, I say! pedagogical differences.

So the Holy Grail of the right textbook will remain out there. Just do the best with what you have.

AP stands for Auto-Pilot!

I have two large AP Biology classes this year. I'm excited to have built up the program at our school to this level but it will require me to change some of my teaching strategies in this course. In particular, I will have to manage essay grading differently (but more on that later).

I've decided this year that AP stands for Auto-Pilot. The Auto-Pilot regimen will be that students need to work more and more independently as the year progresses. My first AP initiative will be to start them cleaning up after themselves from Day One -- putting all labware, supplies, books, notebooks away neatly!

As a pleasant consequence of the AP audit (maybe the only one), I now have a day-to-day plan for the year. Although that was imagined in an ideal scenario, so we'll see if I can live up to it. But I hope this allows me to move to a more Auto-Pilot mode myself!


My "Intro" Powerpoint presentation can be found downloaded by clicking here. I emphasize how much work this class will be, what a student must to do to make it a success, and how much fun it will be. How can the science of life be boring, eh!?

A Survival Guide for Teaching Biology

It's the start of a new year of teaching AP Biology. My goal is to keep a teaching journal throughout the year to chronicle what's worked, what's not worked, my strategies, and my suggestions for next year.

So consider this a real-time teachers' guide — A Survival Guide for Teaching Biology.

I hope my musings help you!