Experiences

I am always looking for new experiences for my students. In fact, I feel experiences are the ways that one's education is defined. As educators, we shouldn't be asking 

"What should my students know before they leave my class?"

Rather, we should be asking, 

"What should my students experience before they leave my class?"

Experiences impact us and we learn from them, but all learning and knowledge is not experiential. And it should be.

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My students recently finished Lord of the Flies and as they embarked on the writing of essays about famous philosophies on human nature and epistemological thinking, I wanted to have them experience something about the various ways that power and corruption and relationships can become intertwined.

Here's what transpired.

I placed, in the center of the room, a bowl of chocolates.

 

I handed each of my 17 students a marker.

I told them we would play a game. I would tell them how many chocolates were in the bowl.  Without speaking to one another, they would write the number of chocolates they wanted to have on their desk (whiteboard markers are awesome). As long as the total number of chocolates written on their desks didn't exceed the number of chocolates in the bowl, they would get the number they'd written. However, if the added number of requested candies exceeded the number in the bowl, nobody would get any.

The first round there were 16 chocolates.

The second round there were 9 chocolates.

The third round there were 9 chocolates, but students had to give their chocolate(s) to someone else.

The fourth round students voted for two people who would decide how the 17 chocolates would be divided.

The fifth round saw one student's name chosen at random; that student was the RULER who could decide how the 17 chocolates were distributed.

The sixth--and final--round invited students to discuss and vote on how the chocolates should be distributed.

(Then, of course, when we were done I made sure everyone had the number of chocolates they wanted)

It was fascinating and I am sure you can imagine how different groups of 8th graders responded.

They experienced something. They felt things. They learned stuff. 

I bet they won't forget it.

Submerged in the sunrise of wonder

“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.” 
-G.K. Chesterton


I think G.K. Chesterton would have made a terrific teacher...or at least he would have centered his educational experience around a pedagogy that possessed great value; the very object of education, after all, should be to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.

Shouldn't it?

I wonder, then, whether our spiritual and artistic selves--however we identify them--might actually be closely tied to our own identities as learners, too. I've always appreciated the word "learner" more than "student" because, while we're always learning, we don't always identify ourselves as "students."

For years, I had this Post-It note sitting on my desk:




This served as both my reminder to retain empathy for my students, while also ensuring that I didn't forget to be a learner, fueled by curiosity and an absolute sense of wonder at the "burst of astonishment" in my own mind.

Right now, my students are embarking on the "WHOA" Project, an assignment I created to invite them to study something that made them say Whoa!, but that we wouldn't be studying in world cultures this year. It's also an acronym for Worldly Histories, Oddities, & Anthropology. But the root of what I love about these two weeks of exploration is the chance I get to come alongside my students as research assistants. No matter what they are studying, I get to be just as curious and inspired as they are.

I feed off their energy.

I research with them the relationship to feet in various cultures.
...or the origins and interpretations of Santa Claus around the world... or the varying ways that children are named.

Side-by-side, I question the cultural appropriation of EPCOT's World Showcase with a student, and I listen to the stories of Argentinian corruption that another student learned from their parents the night before.

It is a magical ride, and all I've done is open a door.

And it is this that I love about middle school, about my students who are so fully children and so fully emerging into adulthood. They are fascinated and scholarly.

Their brains are awake. They are alive.
They are submerged in the sunrise of wonder.