Thanks for the help

Thank you all for your help this week. The web sites provided in responses to my blog have really hit the mark this week. I've emailed them to my school account so I can access them next week at school. I started by looking into Jimmy's idea of teaching students to work in groups. While I may not have the time necessary to get students through this, I think I have a method that might work.
In the middle school, there is a 25 minute period of each day where students are exposed to a variety of social skills. It's a wide range of activities that students take part in. I intend to speak with committee that sets up the curriculum to see whether this can instituted early in the next school year. Just about every teacher utilizes groups and has the same issues. By having the entire school subjected to this system, many of the issues can be resolved.
I also forwarded the pages of the AIE site and the others designed to help students with their future choices. I think my guidance department will be happy to see other things that will help them. Thanks again Jimmy.
I've also reviewed the math pages and think that they'll be useful as well. Science and math are difficult to separate. I intend to work more closely with the math teacher on my team and use these pages develop more useful cross-curricular activities. At times math can be less than exciting for students, especially with our district's use of one program. These new ideas(at least to me) can help to bring the idea of how useful math actually is to a broad range of students and hopefully, catch many of those students that bail out on math at young age.