Slam poet Taylor Mali spends 3 mins convincing you that teachers make a difference. If you’re a teacher attending a party, and you’ve ever been asked “What do you make?” then here are some hints on how you can respond.
If you’re into student-centred learning, you’re going to love this. I picked this up from Morgan Daly at http://twitter.com/urbangrind Indian teacher Kiran Bir Sethi decided to develop a school that focused on the expression ‘I Can’. This goes for 9 mins, and it’s worth every second. Watch for the world’s first child-friendly Zebra crossing.
Always an interesting time of the year for teachers, is it not?? Lights at the end of the tunnel, and all of that stuff.
I remember reading some research indicating that the school office would be sent the most number of ‘troublemakers’ from classrooms in the 2nd last week of any term. And even moreso in the 2nd last week of the year.
Why not the last week, I thought to myself? And yet it probably makes a lot of sense. Somehow, when the end is nigh in that final week, we tend to summon up our last reserves of resilience, and cope with everything as well as possible. As well, kids will remember the last few things that were said and done, and so, we’d obviously prefer those memories to be more positive.
This following narrative has application at any time of the year; and yet I suspect that it applies even more directly to this specific time. Goes like this:
A teacher was once talking with her class, and told them about the two monsters that were always fighting inside their heads.
“So what are the two monsters?” asked one student.
“Well, one of them always looks for the best in your life, and encourages you to think about what is going well in the world around you.”
“And the other?”
“ Ah, well, that’s the monster that always looks for the worst in your life, and hassles you to think about what is going badly in the world around you.”
One student asked: “So which one wins?”
And the teacher responded: ‘The one that you feed.”
Like most people who are a little techno-proficient, I’m into the TED talks. Some are great; some are just so-so. Yet now and again, a pretty special talk comes along. I put this one in that category. Kevin Kelly points out that the internet is now 5000 days old; and so he conjectures on what the next 5000 days may bring. Some fascinating possibilities offered here. Worth spending the next 19.34 hanging in on this.
School Aid in Haiti
So help me, if just one person complains to me in the next two weeks about having to go back to work, I’ll dropkick them. If ever there has been an issue that has challenged us to appreciate just how lucky most of us are (well, most of us in the ‘Western’ world), then surely the Haiti earthquake has been the definitive one.
Trying to sort through the media scrum in their reporting of this disaster is always problematic, yet it’s pretty obvious that the magnitude of this event is as momentous as any that has occurred in the past fifty years on Earth.
And so, we each have a choice. We can express our sympathies at the next coffee club meeting, and roll our eyes at the misery being faced by so many of our fellow citizens (and they are our fellow citizens. They’re just in another country. Which happens to be on the same planet).
Or, we can each really do something about this.
So here’s at least one thing you can do. If you’re reading this, then you’re probably involved in education. If you are, then get involved in the School Aid appeal. School Aid have teamed up with Plan Australia and Save the Children to launch a co-ordinated appeal to all school students. A guaranteed 90% of all funds raised will be directly spent on the kids who are still alive in Haiti. If you encourage your students to raise funds for this cause, it will essentially be a case of Kids Helping Kids. And that’s just the sort of world we all want to see being created up ahead.
Get your students involved. It’s good for them; and it’s good for the planet. At the very least, it might go a small way towards helping lots of kids who desperately need it right now.