It is one of my more cherished delusions, for realz. But there are things that make me happy and I like to share with people. However, this week, I have been reminded that 'people' and 'students' can be a mutually exclusive group, for values of 'people' which mean 'people who will appreciate the happymaking of the things'.
Here are some examples.
My students said "why would anyone go to the trouble of making food look that good when all you're going to do is eat it?". My students are philistines.
<
My students said "What? Why is this even funny? What is this song? Why are you laughing?" My students are young and do not recognise the juxtaposition.
Okay, yeah, I do have a thing for them. I love the first moment, where you boggle and wonder how the two things will ever, ever fit together. Then I love the actual product, which can be hilarious, powerful, or just entertaining. Then I love the way I can appreciate someone else's creativity and lateral thinking, because I never would have thought of juxtaposing those two things.
Today's case in point:
It's brilliant. I showed it to some of my colleagues (only the ones under 35) and we all loved it. It's like... Rick Astley is the Jonas Brothers of 1987! And Nirvana is the epitome of our teenage angst and hormone fog! And we squoosh them together to make something that is nostalgic and wince-worthy, and also bizarrely addictive.
I know that a lot of my colleagues have issues with mash-ups and other remixing endeavours. It's the same reason why they object to fanfiction and other pursuits of this nature. They get all het up about intellectual property and creativity and all sorts of guff that I really don't get.
Look, I would love to write the early 21st century's definitive novel, but I don't buy in to the myth of high genius being a rare and precious thing that is somehow only available to a select few. What I love about mash-ups, mixes, and other remix and remodel endeavours is the way that it makes creativity and artistry something that we all do. It's something that comes from all around us, from using the things that we find in creative and innovative ways. It's the embodiment of constructivism in everyday life, making sense of the world around us.
And I think that's something we should be encouraging in our kids.
I am going to come back to this later, with some ideas for mash-ups and remixes in the classroom, and ways that teachers can encourage creativity. Because I think it's important.
I'm teaching physics at four different levels right now. What a mission! I'm getting all tangled up in which ones are doing rotational motion and which ones are doing basic energy transformations.
But this is my favourite thing to teach, hands down. For the Y10s, we've decided to make Rube Goldberg machines a focus of how we explore energy and forces. We're going to start with how real people make them....
I found this amazing game for the students to use, just to embed the idea in their heads. And then, I am going to get them to play Fantastic Contraption. My Y13s got completely addicted to this game last year, it was so awesome.
Then I'm thinking that I might get them to make their own design for a Rube Goldberg machine. We don't have the time or space to really do it justice, so I'm thinking that we might ask the students to make the machine using small teams, using their own bodies and maybe two or three reusable props. Then we can take their designa nd analyse it for energy transformations and then for forces. I think it could be really awesome.
Next year, in the new scheme, I think I might expand on this, and actually have a two week block on making a Rube Goldberg machine. Wouldn't that be cool?
I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....
Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.
Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it
Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen
So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.
Nearly every day, I am grateful for youtube. Today, it was the turn of my Y10s to benefit from the fact that people worldwide have waaay too much time on their hands.
We're studying electricity, and my class is up to generating electricity. We did a little thing yesterday on turbines and the main types of generation. Today I wanted to ease them into a reading activity on wind power, so we watched a video on youtube. I backed it up with a little worksheet, of course.
The video was a parody of NIMBYs and their complaints about wind farms. I thought it was hilarious. The students just thought it was odd. The worksheet asked students to tick the reasons against windpower that actually appeared in the video, and cross those that did not appear or had nothing to do with the video. Then there were a couple of more probing questions for the more advanced students - I see this class right after lunch on Wednesdays, so I didn't want anything too complicated.
It worked really well, was quick, simple, and made the students laugh (although they claimed that he wasn't funny, just annoying). What's not to love? If you need to have a laugh, just watch it and giggle
