My Students Need Help Seeing the Small Picture.

I am honored to teach in a rural school district in southern Mississippi. Although the students I teach have been told that Mississippi is at the bottom of most good lists and the top of most of the bad ones we do not let that discourage us from striving for excellence. Our school motto is “When better is attainable, good enough is unacceptable.” We acknowledge that there are problems in our state but we as a whole are good people who are working to bring Mississippi into a new and brighter era. I teach Biology I, Biology II and AP Biology. These classes are taken by students in the 9th through 12th grades. Our school has a majority of free and reduced lunch students. These students are exempt from all lab fees. While I agree that this concept makes sense it can make it very difficult to purchase necessities. Science classes were designed with labs because they help to bring home the topics that are introduced and without funds labs can be difficult and sometimes impossible to perform. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I need your help to bring home some of the abstract topics that we uncover in high school Biology. Many of these topics are hard to grasp for students because they have only seen illustrations in a book of mitosis or the cell wall of a plant. If we can give students another way of looking at these concepts we may help them to see things in a different way. By showing students prepared slides we can help them to see the topics that we discuss. This vision will help them to succeed and this success can help them to move forward towards becoming productive citizens of Mississippi.