Saint Patrick's Day Fun :)

We watched some videos about Saint Paddy's Day...and then the fun began! From Leprechaun capes and skirts, to cute hats; from encarnating Ninja Leprechauns to adding a little green to a piercing, creativity was afloat!

Cleaning the Slate!

In class today we ritualized leaving off the previous un-friendly, binding, constricting model of teaching which I was following. It was this scheme that was broken with The Revolution. Although we are well advanced on this path, I felt it was very important to verbalize two things:

1) To ask for forgiveness. The traditional model of education does not favor good student-teacher relationships. It puts us on either side of a dividing line which turns us into enemies. It constricts us as individuals who have different paces and different approches to learning. I asked for forgiveness for the ways I may have made my students feel bad, for the times in which they may not have felt valued by me, for the times in which they may have felt I did not value their work and effort.

2) To say thank you! I thank my students for never having given up on me completely, for giving me chances to grow and evolve. And...I thank them deeply for they have taught me more about teaching and psychology then I would have learned in years of formal classroom training!

Having done this I asked the students to write down on colored sheets of paper (they each chose a color that represented un-positive things) the things they still remembered about the Dark Ages that they wanted to leave behind in order to start afresh.

Once we had all the little papers we went down to the Lab and burned them all down!!! I must add that we made it more dramatic by having music playing in the background. Then we went down to the park and spread the ashes.

And so the slate has been cleaned!!

From Story-telling to Message-bearing Paper Airplanes!

I had planned what I thought would be an entertaining and fun way to review Chapters 1-3 of "Night" by Elie Wiesel. We had been reading and were then interrupted by exams, the strike, etc. So, I thought that adopting an active story-telling style would be good. The students were organized in groups. One of them would be Elie, another his wife and the others grandchildren. The grandchildren would prompt the story by asking their grandpa about his life during the Holocaust. The wife would complement. The objective was to reproduce the best story of what we had read.

Well, that's how we started off... Now check out how it evolved. The protagonists will explain! :)

Live Poetry

Where there was darkness, there is light.
Where there was fear, there is love.
Where there was prejudice, there is trust.

For the weapons were dropped,
the masks removed,
and in the enemy the friend was found.

LPC, March 2nd, 2010.