School memories
I'm spending this week in Nebraska, sorting through the countless boxes of papers and mementos from my childhood that are cluttering up my mother's house. In looking through my old school papers, I've come to an interesting realization: almost everything from my math and science classes ends up in the trash, but I've eagerly sought out and kept quite a few of the stories and essays and other creative works from my arts and humanities classes. (Assignments to write about myself and my life and my plans for the future have been pretty neat to rediscover, too.)
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense: those science classes were intended to impart a great deal of human knowledge and, more important, a scientific mindset for approaching the world, and those are things that have remained in my head as a major part of my life ever since. They weren't intended to produce "artifacts" that I'd want to revisit later. But on the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that something so important to my life at the time left so limited a "written record" (tests and homework problems really don't count).
So now I'm wondering what I can do in my teaching that will get my students to produce at least a few concrete things that they'll feel proud of, and that they might feel an urge to look back at ten years down the road. Having some sort of major project or report or presentation is probably a good idea in general, now that I think of it. I wonder if there's any way to work more creativity into the mix, though.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense: those science classes were intended to impart a great deal of human knowledge and, more important, a scientific mindset for approaching the world, and those are things that have remained in my head as a major part of my life ever since. They weren't intended to produce "artifacts" that I'd want to revisit later. But on the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that something so important to my life at the time left so limited a "written record" (tests and homework problems really don't count).
So now I'm wondering what I can do in my teaching that will get my students to produce at least a few concrete things that they'll feel proud of, and that they might feel an urge to look back at ten years down the road. Having some sort of major project or report or presentation is probably a good idea in general, now that I think of it. I wonder if there's any way to work more creativity into the mix, though.