Thoughts on becoming a hermit
I’m starting to experience what I think middle school teachers would term “biting off more than you can chew”.
In the past week I’ve attempted to do a juggling act with 4 different AP classes, tennis matches and practices, auditions for the school’s fall show, studying for PSATs/SATs, a cold to top it all off.
So that basically leaves no room for being social and maintaining proper bodily hygiene.
Don’t worry, I don’t look like a sleep-deprived hermit who hasn’t washed her floor-length hair in weeks. Yet.
But even though my life isn’t an idiomatic expression, it could literally be raining cats and dogs and I wouldn’t notice.
The only class that has given me some reprieve from the mindless note-writing and information-absorbing mode that I’ve been in has been my Design Thinking class.
Even though I have it the last period of the day, I have oddly high energy levels and I find myself wishing the period was longer. I guess it’s because the class is structured so differently from my other lecture-based classes - it doesn’t require me to be in that completely-focused learning mindset.
We start off each day with a ritual (Mindful Mondays, What-bugs-me Wednesdays, Sketch it Thursday, etc), which gives me a huge brain break and lets me enter the period with a refreshed feeling. Before the rituals…. Well, let’s just say that I’m usually a bit cranky.
So OF COURSE my Wednesday journal entry looked like this:
What BUGS Me
That technology works… until suddenly it doesn’t.
Ants. I HATE ANTS.
That AP English teachers think that we, the sleep-deprived population of PV High School, can write a decent essay discussing the political statements of Grapes of Wrath - that also fits AP English requirements - in under 40 minutes.
The girl’s locker room and the amount of freshman crowding it. Nothing against freshman, but please don’t stand right in the middle of the corridor. Seriously, did you all agree to block my way simultaneously? Move.
I’m okay with getting up early in the morning for school. But when school is the reason I couldn’t go to sleep last night until 11:30, school has officialy decided to become a major pain in my life.
And the list goes on….. I think I talked about environmental issues somewhere in there, but I mostly complained. The sketch-it prompt for Thursday was just fun to do, a great team-building exercise because we can laugh at Mr. Heidt’s funny-looking balloon people.
Anyway, we dove into classroom redesign this week, writing down what we prefer to have in a classroom setting… and what we don’t prefer.
This helped us dispel the stereotypes of a ‘place for learning’ so that we could truly be creative and think outside the box for solutions to the challenge we were given:
How might we design a space that biases learners towards thinking and doing?
We began doing some research on how we could respond to this challenge. Thursday night we were given the assignment to read an article from Steelcase 360. Mine was called “Making Way for Making”, and it focused on why makerspaces in school were important and how they could be created in any classroom.
I won’t go into detail about the Maker Movement now, though I might post separately about it in the future (winkwinknudgenudge).
So makerspaces are designed for student empowerment - showing kids that they can change the world. They include hands-on learning that is combined with innovation labs, and it “brings kids out of the iCloud and back down to Earth”.
This is important because it’s teaching the children to move from mindless absorption of fact towards a more active, generative, creative learning process. In a world where technology has desensitized us to the natural world and the real problems within it, learning how to collaborate and physically make a solution to a problem that you yourself detect is an important skill to have.
Well, that’s all for today. Going to go steel myself for the cold plunge I’ll be taking into the new week.
Bye!
