Letter to a Biology Student

To whom it may concern:

Hello, my name is Joshua Lei and I am a 15-year old Freshman at Saratoga High School.  During my Freshman year, I took the mandatory Health/Drivers-Ed and World Geography, English 9 MAP, Biology, Chinese, PE, Engineering, and Geometry.  Before I came to Saratoga High, I went to Redwood Middle School and Saratoga Elementary.  I like various topics in school such as math and science.  Outside of school, I am a fencer and I train almost every day of the week.  This takes a lot of time and balancing school and sports may be difficult.  On the first day of Biology class, I did not know what to expect with each teacher because they are so new to me.  As any student would, I payed attention to what Mr. Orre had to say and tried to understand what this class might feel like.

Mr. Orre designed a class known as "Flipped Classroom".  This means that you will be listening to his vodcast lectures for homework and then bringing in your questions for the next day to ask Mr. Orre.  The idea is to learn as much as you can at home and bring all the difficult topics to school to discuss with the teacher.  As the school year progresses, you can start to see a pattern for his classes.  On a typical day, you begin your DO NOW, an activity to get you thinking about last night's vodcast.  After Mr. Orre gets around to check all the vodcasts, you will recap the vodcast and then ask Mr. Orre about any lingering thoughts about the vodcast.  After all this, we normally do a project, lab, or write up.  It is essential to get a good quality notebook before the semester starts.  The notebook be a good chunk of your grade and it is imperative to keep your notebook tidy or else you will lose a lot of points during the notebook check before each test.

One of Mr. Orre's biggest Pet Peeves is definitely not cleaning up after completing a lab.  I had third period, the period right before lunch.  He would not let us go for lunch until we cleaned everything up.  This made the whole class work together to clean up the classroom so we could go eat lunch.  The tests, in my opinion, are fairly difficult.  My advice for studying for the tests is to obviously know the vodcast and also do the CFU's, the mini tests after each vodcast.

I thought this class was fun because of the 'Flipped Classroom" design.  It was definitely different from any other class I enrolled in.  The biggest piece of advice would be to keep a tidy notebook, submit the Blogger posts on time (especially second semester), and take the CFU's to get a deeper understanding for the vodcast.


Sincerely,

-Joshua Lei