Decomposing Classroom
A high tolerance for chaos
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- Seventh grade boy 1: [musing] Do you ever get tired of being so random?
- Seventh grade boy 2: [thinks for a moment] Nah, not really.
- Seventh grade boy 1: [happily] Yeah, me neither
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This photo was bouncing around tumblr last month, and I decided to use it as a morning warm-up with my 8th graders one day. I projected it up front and had them start by just looking at it in silence and jotting some notes about how they interpreted it. We talked about it briefly as a class, and then I asked them: “Does it have to be like this? How could we make our school paint buckets look more like the life ones? How could we redesign schools to make them more “life-like” and real?”
I had them work with the lab table groups as “design teams” to rethink schools as we know them. To my dismay, there didn’t seem to be much talk or excitement at first. The students looked confused. Paper remained blank. I wasn’t sure whether my directions had been unclear or whether they just had no ideas.
“This shouldn’t necessarily be easy,” I said. “I’m asking you to do something challenging — totally reinvent school! What type of classes would you take? Would you even take classes? Where would it be? How would the learning environment reflect the outside world? This is the time to use your imagination and think big!”
Once they were given this official go-ahead, they started scribbling brainstorms. One group made a list of all the classes they wanted to have offered:
- self-defense
- basic math
- finance
- car repair
- how to shoot
- cooking
- conversation/social skills
- art
- P.E.
- sky diving
- medicine
- health
- home improvement
- creativity
- petting zoo
- magic
- misc.
- potion making
- history
- geography
- herbology
- sports
- language
- culture
- travel
- defense against the dark arts
- how to spot a killer cyborg
- strength training
- science
- leadership class
- drama
- how to seduce an angry walrus
Another group drew a school that was in the middle of the forest, with walls of windows.
Some groups mentioned the importance of a lot of offerings and variety, so students could start to pursue what they are passionate about.
…but my favorite page:
Ideal stuff:
- cooking
- field trips
- career day
- Principal: Abraham Lincoln
- Vice-principal: Yoda
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- Odie (7th grade): [Looking up from a poster he's making on Newton's Laws of Motion] Ms. Leah, I'm disappointed.
- Me: Why is that, Odie?
- O: Well, if you think about, our country is known for things like hamburgers, hot dogs, apple pie. But now it seems like other countries are taking that away from us!
- Me: What do you mean?
- O: I read an article this weekend about how in the Middle East, which is really far away, they started making pizzas with hamburgers as the crust!
- Me: Oh my, so, like, beating us at our own game.
- O: And in some other place, I think China, they have little hotdogs baked into the crust.
- Me: Wow, we're really slacking here. How does this make you feel?
- O: I just feel deeply, deeply disappointed in my country. We really have to step it up.
- http: //www.newsareweird.com/pizza-hut-middle-east-debuts-pizza-with-12-hamburgers
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The 8th grade boys have discovered that if you blow through a pen cap a certain way, it makes a super-high pitched whine that is, apparently, inaudible to people over the age of 30. This brings out the ages of all the middle school teachers quite well: the math teacher is completely oblivious to the drone, the humanities teacher thinks she hears something weird, and I hear it loud and clear. And obnoxious. The pen-cap sound has been officially banned from my classroom.
One of the students was telling me that she heard of some malls that produce that high-pitched buzz outside their entrances to prevent young hooligans from lingering, without bothering the older shoppers. It reminds me of this brilliant pedestrian tunnel I knew of in Germany that used this weird blue/green/gold light that made acne look particularly horrible, thus deterring a good deal of that young generations of rapscallions. [Of course, this raises so many other questions — like, how to empower youth with a voice and place of their own? Why does it have to be the “youth” vs. the rest?]
UPDATE: Adventures in Learning is right: This can be a great learning opportunity! It reminds me a bit of when I was student teaching in a 4th grade classroom that had a problem with always shooting rubber bands at each other. The teacher did something that I thought was so brilliant: she planned an entire math lesson around graphing how far each student could flick the band! I love this sneaky way of taking a growing conflict and turning it into something positive: a teachable moment. Taking the class’s energy and running with it!I found some interesting sites that explain the sound phenomena; I think I might spend a bit of time on Monday having a mini-discussion with the class.But here’s another thing: while I love all those suggestions for Sound lessons/units, I think there’s also something to be said for when someone (teacher or otherwise) tells you “Please stop; it’s annoying,” to stop. -
- Hooligans
- Rapscallions
- Hoodlums
- Whippersnappers
Does this make me sound like an old British curmudgeon or what?
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- [overheard in my 6th grade class during art]
- Teacher: So, what's 'suburbia'? Who knows what 'suburbia' is?
- Brandon: Ooh! Ooh! It's a place that's very cold and pretty barren. Nothing grows there.
- Kyle: No! You're thinking of SIBERIA!
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I’m routinely astonished by what crappy handshakers some of my middle-schoolers are! Mostly limp, dead fish all around. But then I remember — wait, they’ve probably never really learned how to give a good handshake! And this is what education is all about, right?
During homeroom, sometimes I’ll have them do a morning greeting that involves a handshake. I make a big deal about what a good handshake looks and feels like, and we sometimes vote on Top Shakes, and have those people go around and shake everyone’s hand. I say, even if they learn nothing about photosynthesis or the lithosphere this year, let them at least develop a decent handshake!
I’m excited to show them this site and have us practice all the bad handshakes before doing good ones.
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1. Tell them to stand on their chair and “get high” so they can see the demo going on.
2. Over enunciate “quantitative” when we’re talking about quantitative and qualitative observations.
3. In bringing in trash to make conclusions and deductions, bring in an empty cardboard container from a women’s multivitamin that promises, in big letters, “Increased bone and breast health.”
