These are my confessions...

I'm starting to freak out here. I've been looking at Biology tests, and while Jess might have been a miracle worker, I'm starting to think she just had the touch.

There are only three practice tests to work off of, for the whole year. Many of the questions don't really fit into one of the categories that we'll be studying, but involve a synthesis of several of them, and I can't imagine how to prepare my kids for this year's combination questions- and there seem to be a slew of them on every test. How do I teach my kids to THINK when they don't even retain what I've taught them to begin with. I've tried everything I can think of, I'm going of off Jess's notes, and it feels like it's not sticking. Most of my kids ended up failing the scientific method test (they take their next unit test on Characteristics of life on Monday), and we went over dozens of examples, used group work, made index cards, put the words on the wall, did work sheets for homeworks and went over them, designed our own experiments, did a lab and wrote it up as a 60% grade, did a "what's in the box" activity and a group work problem-solving activity to get them thinking, did a broom dance to demonstrate observation and noticing patterns (don't ask, please), did an activity for "Story time with Aristotle", had the kids draw pictures of Redi's experiment, spent two days just reviewing, and probably did some other activities I'm just not thinking to include here. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG? !!!!! I know, I know, if my kids are failing, I'm failing. I think I need to realistically say that I may need help. I don't know what else to do. I call parents (lots of them). I enforce my consequences. I write kids up. I do spontaneous crazy things to get their attention. I am not being perfect, certainly, and there are plenty of things I still need to do differently, but I still feeling like I'm throwing paper air planes against a wall. I am not trying to complain. I am trying to do my job, and I think I suck at it, and I have 106 kids, give or take a couple by the day, that need to pass this test to graduate high school, and the state is coming in a couple of weeks (holy crap that assessment instrument is a brilliant work of frustration and nonsense). Really, if you have a suggestion, please give it to me. I think I need some professional help.

For this last unit, the kids read out of two different text books, took notes on both (for a grade), did a project of their choice where they could choose between writing a rap, song, or poem, inventing an organisms that they build or draw with a written paper describing how the organism had each of the characteristics of life, building a shoe-box model of an ecosystem (again with a matching paper), or doing a project of their choice, approved by me. We presented projects. We went over the important points from the text as a class, with each student having a packet that they highlighted or underlined as I told them exactly what to mark, with a homework assignment to take notes by writing all that stuff down. (That was after they'd already taken their own notes on the other book). After project presentations, I gave them notes to copy from the overhead, and assigned them homework for which they had to make index cards and study them. I told them exactly what to put on each index card, and how many they had to have. We did class questioning. I can't spend any more time on this. Two 60% grades plus warm-ups and participation. The second one is a test Monday. We'll see how that goes.