Thursday, March 19, 2015

You're Gonna Get Stomped

It's two days until Spring Break, and we've made it through two weeks of Project Land.  We're at a tough part of the project now where the kids are proposing solutions to their global problems, and the teacher's job is to say, "Dig deeper.  Be more specific.  Are there any organizations trying that?  You need a global solution.  I'm not sure."  And then, the kids roll their eyes at you and sigh deeply.

Yesterday, I was trying to encourage a class to slow down and think a little more.  "You might not come up with it this week," I said.  "Just keep it in the back of your mind, and mull it over on Spring Break. Do you know what 'mull' means?"

"But you can't assign homework on Spring Break!" one kid said.

"I'm not assigning homework," I said.  "I'm saying, you'll have your project in the back of your mind..."

"But we're not supposed to do school work on Spring Break!" another one chimed in.

"I don't want you to do ANY work," I tried again.  "I'm talking about when you just put a problem away for awhile, and your brain is  working on it without you knowing it."

"So, if we're behind, we have to work on SPRING BREAK?!" Another outraged sixer blurted.

"NO!" I said.  "Haven't you ever had that thing where you can't figure something out, and then you take a break, and all of a sudden, you figure it out?"  They looked at me blankly.  I rolled my eyes and sighed deeply.  "There is no homework over Spring Break," I said, definitively.  They turned back to their computers, but I could tell they were suspicious.

2 comments:

LH said...

I love these sixers. So focused.

mm said...

I hope they inadvertently spend all break thinking about their projects!