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Friday, July 8, 2011

More blackberries and the garage!

Sue Neal and I picked blackberries yesterday morning again.  There are tons of the them on our 3 acre blackberry plot.  The Vernons are coming over to pick this morning if they are not rained out.  Sue Neal make blackberry jelly and a cobbler afterwards.  Blackberry cobbler and vanilla ice cream is about as good as it gets.

The berry set is huge in our patch and I am attributing it to the bees we keep.  They were pretty busy there when blooming!

Yesterday I wrestled with the garage.  It has not been cleaned in a while and since I have the Elantra running again and out of the garage it was time.  I hope to finish today.  The bright side is I found a lot of things I forgot I had or I thought was lost.

I got our scores back from last Spring's AP Bio test.  Most of the people I thought would pass did and most of the people I knew would make a one did.  It is difficult to squeeze that course into a single semester and last year we missed a lot of school because of snow and interruptions (jostens and et al).  Even with that, some students dug in and did well on the test.  The biggest problem behind time restraints and the massive content load is that students are just not serious enough to prepare for an AP Exam ... Learning the content and how it connects is a serious commitment.  It is not about the 4.0 and handing in assignments, it is about understanding and application which is a level above where most of our students operate ...

The new AP Bio curriculum in 2013 will cut back the content load but understanding how concepts are connected and application will still be a big part of the course.

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