Today I took my students to the computer lab to do a
webquest on the Industrial Revolution. They had to look up inventors or
inventions and create either resumes or advertisements as they chose. While
they worked, we heard a loud series of thuds and then a lot of shouting. People
seemed to be rioting in the corridor, screaming and running and then pushed in
one direction by security guards’ piercing whistles. It was my third block, so
in a wholly unreal moment they all looked up, said, “oh, a fight,” shrugged,
and turned back to crafting Alexander Graham Bell’s resume so he can get another job if the whole telephone thing doesn't pan out. My fourth block
would have gotten up to watch; my second block probably would have joined in
(did I tell you about the kid who punched a computer? Yeah, my second block isn’t
visiting the computer lab any more).
Only half of my fourth block arrived to the computer lab, so
I looked out to check out what was going on. Many of the students were standing
between the windmilling arms of three administrators and the whistles of the
security guards, who were shouting at them to get into the classroom—except “him.”
Who was “him”? I pointed my students into the classroom, hoping none of them
were “him.” Something had gone wrong—when the rest of the class finally came
up, they explained that they’d gotten stopped at the door downstairs. Another
fight. Ah, well, and only 18 minutes left to research the Industrial
Revolution.
The fights seemed pretty normal for my students, so I rolled
with it, kept the door closed, and kept teaching. But the thing that I could
not get over as I circled the computer lab was the number of students who asked
me for help with the most elementary of tasks. I’ve helped some nonagenarians
set up facebook accounts, so I thought I’d seen bad, but it’s a whole nother
story to cringe while a high school student painstakingly types something with
one finger, and then another asks for help to add a text box, or x’s out of all
their tabs at once without even realizing it. Their computer access time, I
realized, is near impossibly tiny, and they certainly don’t usually spend time
doing schoolwork on it. The one thing they did know how to do, and well, was
look up their music—this class has beats privileges for the week because of
winning the class behavior prize, and as I walked around I heard overtones of
their music trickling from their computers as they jazzed up their ads for
phonographs and cotton gins (one kid created an ad for “cotton juice,” and I
still don’t know how I’m going to grade that).
Back in the classroom, I set my kids up with the projects
they’ll do while I’m gone at a SIOP workshop for the next two days: create an
Industrial Revolution board game. I’m excited to see what we get—so far it
looks like a whole lot of candylands set in factories, some industrialized
bingo, inventor-invention matching, and, from the group with my student who
wants to build stuff, a 3D theme park for factory workers. They have to use a certain number of the terms and names from the book, and I'm hoping it keeps them joyously busy for the next two days. And then... we move on to world wars!
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