Spring Break
Banner days in the classroom
Anne Marie Merline
Issue date: 3/9/09 Section: Opinion
A week ago, I changed my Facebook status to read "Anne Marie Merline had two kick butt classes today. I love my students this semester." It was the same a week before that too.
These past two weeks have been full of "banner days," which to me are days that I leave class energized because the students truly engage themselves with the material. There is no better feeling that can come out of the classroom.
Two weeks ago my second semester students read a chapter out of the book "Collapse." This book by Jared Diamond explains his theory as to why some societies have collapsed over the course of human history.
Diamond's theory is that societies go belly up because the people in those societies wreak havoc on the environment in which they live; the environment in turn cannot support those humans and then the population ceases to thrive.
The idea that I had for a class activity was to take these perspectives on the end of whole societies and ask them to discuss this paradigm in terms of the few things that they have already learned this semester.
My morning section did a great job of discussing the ways that we are thinking about the issues that are due to over-consumerism and environmental harm. We started by thinking about the industrial revolution and ended the conversation with the Mountain pine beetle. All of these topics examine the human response protecting the environment.
This early morning section energizes me on a regular basis. Equal to their intellectual enthusiasm, is their humanity. They come to class early, greet me enthusiastically and go right to task to arrange the furniture in the way that makes us all feel comfortable. Great connections, both as humans and as students of the world, make my morning a joy.
I went into my afternoon section of a course I call "Got Affluenza?" intending on another great discussion. There were two students in this section who were scheduled to give their extemporaneous speeches.
These past two weeks have been full of "banner days," which to me are days that I leave class energized because the students truly engage themselves with the material. There is no better feeling that can come out of the classroom.
Two weeks ago my second semester students read a chapter out of the book "Collapse." This book by Jared Diamond explains his theory as to why some societies have collapsed over the course of human history.
Diamond's theory is that societies go belly up because the people in those societies wreak havoc on the environment in which they live; the environment in turn cannot support those humans and then the population ceases to thrive.
The idea that I had for a class activity was to take these perspectives on the end of whole societies and ask them to discuss this paradigm in terms of the few things that they have already learned this semester.
My morning section did a great job of discussing the ways that we are thinking about the issues that are due to over-consumerism and environmental harm. We started by thinking about the industrial revolution and ended the conversation with the Mountain pine beetle. All of these topics examine the human response protecting the environment.
This early morning section energizes me on a regular basis. Equal to their intellectual enthusiasm, is their humanity. They come to class early, greet me enthusiastically and go right to task to arrange the furniture in the way that makes us all feel comfortable. Great connections, both as humans and as students of the world, make my morning a joy.
I went into my afternoon section of a course I call "Got Affluenza?" intending on another great discussion. There were two students in this section who were scheduled to give their extemporaneous speeches.
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Sally
posted 3/12/09 @ 3:40 PM MST
I'm glad you've started your semester with those successful sessions, and that you had the flexibility to drop the lesson plan when you saw a more compelling teachable moment. (Continued…)
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