HW 42 - Significance

The challenge of how to get a whole classroom of kids to be involved in whatever is being taught is what I want to explore. I started looking up descriptions of National Teachers of the Year because I thought these teachers might have something to say about techniques that work for a whole group. I notice that a lot of these teachers are history teachers and that maybe I should focus on ways history teachers have found projects that make history come alive and get kids excited and want to understand more.

The worst thing in a classroom is to have a lot of bored kids. The bored kids are useless contributers and the non-bored kids can feel self-conscious and overly animated in a room of the living dead. When I think back to my middle school years, classroom memories that stand out are times when we had big group projects like creating a walk-in Egyptian tomb. The great thing about the project was that it used the skills of every kid in the class. The tomb was so amazing that the whole school came to visit it including some outsiders from the community. There wasn't a single kid in that class who wasn't proud of the tomb and the work he or she did on it.


A classroom should act more like a team rather than like a group of individuals fending for themselves. When you're on a team, the pressure not to let your team down is much stronger than the pressure not to let yourself down. A team is always stronger than its individual parts. We learn from interaction with each other just as we learn from our coach or teacher. The ability not to let your partners down is not only a tool that can be used at school, but a tool to be used your entire life. School should be preparation for life in society. Group experience with shared humanity early in life can lead to taking responsibility to contribute to society in positive ways as a grownup. This is how we grow as individuals and create our own essence, as existentialists would say.