Curriculum

I am really excited about the prospects of Ning. Thanks to everyone who contributed to making our class aware of it. I really like the idea of drawing in popular culture to teaching. At times, it seems daunting to fit popular culture in with all the standards we have to hit upon during our lessons. I am kind of worried that I will have to spend so much time teaching bits of information laid out by the standards that I won't be able to spend much time connecting what we have learned to the real world. In my subject, biology, there are so many terms and lower level concepts to learn. They are often hard to grasp for students because it can often seem like a foreign language. So, being able to creatively pull in all the standards and popular culture and high ordered thinking will be a major challenge. I wonder how much freedom teachers feel now with the standards reform and if they really are an explicit explanation of what has always been done or a an attempt to squeeze everything in during the year.  I am excited to see how everything can fit together in the classroom.