Biology by Bradford
cramlyThe teaching notebook.
Tales from the teaching trenches and insights from my battle wounds. New entries when there's something worth writing down.
Vibe coding is not the interesting part.
“Made with AI” has quietly become a quality claim. It shouldn’t be: the same three words cover a teacher checking their own wording and a thousand questions published unread. What the vibe coding actually built on this site, what it didn’t, every check the 2,946 questions have to pass, and where the lines are.
read →How building my own classroom app unlocked student agency.
I built my students a flawless spaced-repetition app. They thanked me, then they ignored it. Then one quiet student asked me to add a button, and the whole thing became theirs. How vibe coding turned a teacher-forced tool into one my class co-authored, and what that did for motivation and grades.
read →Self-marking beats rereading. Every time.
A student can reread a chapter for two hours and still score four out of nine on it cold. Why practice testing beats rereading, why self-testing alone still isn't enough, and how marking your own paper against a real mark scheme finds the gaps nothing else will.
read →Papers that don't run out.
Past papers are the scarcest resource in IB Biology, and the 2025 syllabus made it worse. So I built a practice paper maker: original questions, real exam formats, markschemes included. Free, on this site, tab 08.
read →Uncertainty is not error.
In an IB Biology IA, uncertainty comes from your equipment, stated once in a column heading. Percentage error needs a genuine accepted value from the literature, which most IAs simply don't have.
read →The data booklet is a tell.
IB Biology's first-ever data booklet is half filler, half tell. Cut the peristalsis, keep the chi-squared table: the marks just moved from reciting a formula to knowing what to do with it.
read →Using AI to disconnect.
The TV moved to the corridor and the kids stopped fighting over it. The same logic applies in the classroom: use AI to generate printable, tactile resources, and put the devices away.
read →The slide deck is dead. Long live the slide deck.
Fifteen years in, the slide deck still earns its keep, not as a performance, but as a live lesson plan. Plus the WebSheet, the format I'm replacing decks with where it actually helps.
read →Internal Assessments in action: caffeine, lipase, and playing the game
A student's IA on caffeine and lipase. Why the messy endpoint isn't the problem you think it is, and why the IA rubric pays out for honest limitations, not tidy methods.
read →I sat IB Biology exams. It was humbling. You should do it too.
Parsimony. Sieve tubes. FACE experiments. Cocaine. And the gas that ripens a banana. What sitting the May 2026 papers reminded me to teach better.
read →The three-week loop
A three-week overlapping cycle built around the science of memory: preparation, application, assessment, running concurrently across topics.
read →Banter, bribery, belonging
The league, the snacks, the British sarcasm: the warm half of running a classroom, and why rapport sits on top of the three-week loop.
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