Week 10: Rat Dissection, 8th Grade, and distractions

If you have paid any attention to social media, the radio, or news, you have heard of the new virus spreading across the world: COVID-19, or coronavirus. Through my student teaching experience, I am experiencing firsthand how outside topics can affect in-school behaviors. Despite many distractions around the coronavirus, my animal science class continued with a pregnant rat dissection and eighth grade learned about the computer game Journey 2050 and sustainability.

The coronavirus is causing issues in human health, college campuses, the stock market, and much more. In our high school classrooms, students and teachers can easily get distracted by this new pandemic. I will be the first to admit that my teaching and focus has been off this week due to the impact and information of COVID-19. By the end of the week, I noticed a decline in student interest and an increase in panic. As a student teacher, it is difficult to exactly know what to do in this situation. I am trying to work through this class by class, but this is a truly unprecedented event. We are all working to learn how to react together.

In animal science, we got to dissect pregnant rats! At first, students were disgusted by the specimen. I must admit, I was not a huge fan of the rat dissection at the beginning of our unit. Throughout the week, the rat grew on me. When students opened up the rat to babies, the interest grew. I spent the first two days of our dissection clearly leading students through dissecting their rats. On the last day of the dissection, I allowed for student autonomy with the assistance of their lab packets. Check out some of the students' work:

In addition to animal science, I was teaching two sections of 8th grade introduction to agriculture. Journey 2050 is an online computer game for students to work with sustainability, limiting factors, and ripple effects to farm with maximum outputs. Students will complete the computer game next week in class. Before allowing students to complete the computer game, I started with a few selected lessons provided by Journey 2050. A big focus of this week's instruction was on food waste and working to prevent food waste. Students had some great ideas on how the middle school could work to decrease their food waste. I am excited to see how students react to the computer game next week!

This week has been a test of my patience, but I am happy to have experienced it. Throughout the mist of distractions, students were able to learn more about various agricultural topics. My questions this week are difficult to answer, but I would appreciate your input:

How do you work to limit student fear and stress of a circumstance if the teacher doesn't know much about it themselves?

If many of the neighboring school districts are closing, how can you motivate students to continue coming to school and work?