Hey, Everybody!

No matter the school, my lunch table was always strange.  I attract odd folk, so this shouldn't be a surprise.  Band geeks, nerds, theater kids, and me.  We were all kind of misfits, so we fit together.  One girl never even talked to us.  She sat at our table, reading a book to herself, and laughing out loud as though the characters were telling jokes to the whole table.

In the eighth grade, I sat next to this boy.  I thought he was cool, but looking back on it, I have no idea if he actually was (there's a lesson in there somewhere).  He was tall and stocky; he had curly blonde hair.  He was a couple of years older than I was, and I was slightly confused why this "cool" guy was ever spending time with me.  I really don't know if he was cool at all.  Maybe he wasn't cool in his class, but he knew he was cool to some kids a couple of grades down.  I don't know; it's been a long time since I even thought about this time.  To be honest, I can't even remember his name, but I want to say it was Adam.

The point of this journey down memory lane is that I had a flash of memory about those lunches yesterday.  Every day, for at least a year, Adam stood up in the middle of lunch and shouted, "Hey, everybody!"  The room would get quiet, and he would announce something meaningless like, "Ricky's got a ham and cheese sandwich."  People laughed and went back to their regular conversations.  This happened every day.  Every day, knowing that he was not going to say anything of remote consequence, every person in the room (including teachers and actual cool kids) stopped talking to hear what Adam (was that his name?) was going to say.  There was anticipation about what it was going to be, even though we all knew it was likely to be about food or the color of someone's shirt.

What made me think about the odd-ball middle school memory?  I was scrolling through Twitter.  What is Twitter, after all, but a giant, worldwide lunchroom of people having a lot of parallel conversations?  It's even kind of cliquey, just like a school lunchroom.  Every once in a while, a voice rises above everyone else's and gets our attention.  Whether it is a viral video of a cat or a story that we find outrageous or the news that Disney has cast a woman of color to play Ariel in the live action version of The Little Mermaid, we stop scrolling and pay attention in some way.  Perhaps we add meaningfully to the discussion; perhaps we add something without meaning.  Perhaps we just read everyone else's comments.  Regardless, we have allowed our lives to be interrupted and spent some of the finite number of minutes we have on earth paying attention to it.

Twitter has the power to grab our attention and time, and that can be a good thing.  It is what kept us informed about the Arab Spring.  It allows for up to the minute information on developing stories in the news.  I have a great community of educators to share information with.  It has the power to bring our attention to really good things if that is what we choose to stop scrolling for.

What we allow to have our attention reveals something about us.  The people in the cafeteria stopped what they were doing every single day, knowing that what Adam was going to say (the more I think about it, I don't know if that was his name - could it have been Alex?) wasn't going to be important.  It was usually funny, but it was never important.  It was a harmless and entertaining 10 seconds a day.

Think about this as you scroll through Twitter.  What are you stopping for and for how long?  A few seconds a day being entertained by a cat video is the harmless digital equivalent of "Hey, everybody!"  If you are spending time arguing with a stranger about the race of a fictional character, you should probably reflect on whether or not that is how you want to spend your life.

Personifying the Elements

There are a lot of ways to teach the elements.  If you type chemical elements into youtube, there are over 641 thousand results.  Google shows 102 thousand news stories, almost 1.5 million books, and countless images.  As I have mentioned in this blog before, I did the same element project for years.  Each student built a model of the atom for a certain element and then wrote a paper (or podcast or webpage, depending on the year) about that element.  Last year, I tried replacing it with a nuclear energy project, but it didn't have the effect I had hoped for.  I was ready to do it again with some tweaks, but my co-conspirator, Kellie, had a better idea.

I was skeptical at first.  She came to me after last year's collaboration on the Mars paper and said, "I have an idea for another paper your kids can write."  My half-joking response was that I only grade one paper per year.  Then she said, "What if they have to make a case for an element as "the best element?"  Oh, that's interesting.  I may have to grade a second paper.  When talking about it with our tech coach, she said, "How is anyone going to make a case for anything besides carbon or oxygen?"  Hmm, that's a thought.  How were we going to do that?  Kellie said, "What if it is running for President, and they have to talk about the strengths that would make it a good candidate?  There are a lot of qualities that might make a good candidate."  Now, we were really onto something.  There's a lot of talk in education right now about doing things that cannot be googled, and both we and our principal agreed this was a way to do that.

I don't teach English, but I assume there are a lot of ways to teach personification.  If I remember correctly, I learned it in a poetry unit.  I think a tree was talking or something.  I never thought about it existing outside a poetic context, but this collaboration allowed kids to apply personification to science, especially when we decided it should be a speech instead of a paper.  Students actually spoke AS the element (or a spokesperson for the element).  The described its strengths (noble gasses have stability, bonding means working well with others, etc.) and accomplishments (hydrogen being the fuel of stars, sodium keeping you hydrated).  I even had someone make a case that radon could be a means of population control.  We gave our students the option of doing their speech on video if doing it live was too intimidating.  If you would like to see the results of that work, here's the playlist of their work.

I have enjoyed a lot of collaborations, but this one may be my favorite.  Kids learned the properties of elements in an interesting way.  They learned personification.  They overcame their fear of public speaking.  We have management tweaks to make for future years, but this was a great project.

Next week, I start a new collaboration, this time with history, a video project about inventions and their impact on culture.