So my classes have finally reached the end of our March (ok most of April) Madness. Drumroll....... and the winners are Alexander Graham Bell for our Most Influential American and Gandhi for our Most Powerful World Leader. Overall I think the experience was a real hit. The students loved it, I had teachers telling me how the kids were talking about their match-ups and who won and lost in their classes, and teachers were even coming by to check out the giant brackets I had up to see how the tournament was progressing. In the end I had four really good students make the finals and make some really good and persuasive arguments for their figures. So I'll have to make a quick stop to Subway for the winners tomorrow, and it'll be a nice reward for a long project that took us literally right up to our spring break. I think next year I'll look to condense things a bit, and I'll definitely need to seed the participants. For instance, we're learning about Napoleon now with my 7th graders and a lot of them are saying that he's a guy that would have gone far in our tournament but he was unfortunately matched up against Gandhi in the first round. But it was nice to hear my students say things like "are we going to do any more projects like this, this was really good!" It was also great to see some of my students that might not normally consider themselves smart make it deep in the tournament and surprise themselves and their classmates. It was a big hit, and I've got my work cut out for me these last 6 weeks to come up with some good and exciting things to do. Thankfully, when I mapped out our curriculum for the year, I purposefully saved all of the wars for our last 6 week unit. Hopefully my hunch will pay off and we'll have some very high engagement and lots of fun too.
Also, as we're gearing up for end of grade testing now and as I sat through our latest school improvement team meeting, I got to thinking about our new Common Core Essential Standards. Now before you assume this is just another rant about how awful the Common Core is, I'll assure you it isn't. It's more of a question that I have for you educators, especially those that teach history and social studies. I'd love to know what you think. For our standards, I'll be honest, they're incredibly vague. An example is that students need to understand how individuals and groups have brought about change in NC and the USA. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of ways that I can show and teach that. It creates a double-edged sword. I as a teacher have the autonomy to teach this standard how I want really. I can explain it though the founding fathers, the early settlers, the civil rights movement, leaders of industry, you name it. I have the power in my classroom (and my school since I'm the dept chair) to pick and emphasize which examples through history I want to teach. As a teacher it's great because it allows me to play to my strengths and teach maybe something I'm more passionate about that something I'm not, as long as the standard is taught, it doesn't really matter. But that's the problem, what if what I choose to focus on isn't what the people drawing up these tests focus on. Yes, we'd love to live in a world where our students will get the big picture ideas and carry the big idea throughout historical events, understanding how all of these events are similar because they were led by individuals or groups changing and impacting society. But that's rarely the case. And when my students move on to the next level, their teachers aren't asking them if they know the standards, they wondering why they don't know certain key events or people. I have 8th graders that don't remember or swear they never learned about Gandhi. For me, teaching Gandhi when teaching colonialism and imperialism is a no-brainer, but that obviously wasn't the case for my students' previous teachers. It is a paradox to me. How can I get all of this freedom to teach within a standard (and yes the state gives us examples or hints for topics and events for these standards but it is hard to turn three examples into an entire unit) but then have expectations that the students need to meet knowing certain specific topics and events? I don't have the answer, I know that much. But as I said, I'm interested to know what you think. Would love to discuss this more, so please comment or track me down on twitter.
Thanks for reading, one more day until spring break and 3 days until my first edcamp. I'm excited about that and will share my edcamp experience with you all next week. Until then, have a great one!
