Backchannel for School Culture: @MKAScreenz, A Delightful Disruption

@MKAScreenz's most popular tweet

This past summer, I taught a class on Twitter, which convinced me that this is a great vehicle to ignite curiosity and develop lifelong learners. In trying to take advantage of that space again, I created an account to promote community events and foster positive dialogue within our community. Truthfully, I wanted to get students away from Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine and back on Twitter. Though I think all social media sites can be a colossal waste of time, Twitter can facilitate passion-based learning in a way that school just can’t (provided students follow the right accounts, which I take on in this website). So I set out to teach students how to constructively use this space. Many students used their social media as a means to interact with others by venting and criticizing individuals and events (away from parents and teachers); I hoped to help them rethink that approach.

I created the account @MKAScreenz after the Dean of Student Life asked me to produce the content on the LCD announcement screens around campus. Instead of just posting the school schedule, I include news updates, promote campus events with hashtags, and slide in the occasional comedic gif to keep the students engaged. The twitter feed has allowed me to connect with the students about campus life. It has given them agency in what they see on the screens, as they email me and tweet me about content. And students I’ve never even met have started to seek me out about ideas that need promoting. It’s fun.

More importantly, @MKAScreenz has had an impact on community involvement, particularly with respect to the “house system” at MKA. A number of years ago, MKA created a house system--much like Harry Potter--as a way to improve campus life. Each house competes in sports, art, music and other activities and points are awarded based on excellence and spirit. In the bio, @MKAScreenz refers to itself as a “house sports enthusiast.” After convincing the school newspaper’s web editor to join me on twitter, the two of us started documenting campus events. Students noticed; I reached 126 followers in two weeks!

@MKAscreenz energized the school. At our house dodgeball competition, MKAScreenz’s tweets garnered 54 favorites and 11 retweets. At another house competition called “minute-to-win-it”, @MKAScreenz received 38 likes for its coverage. Finally, when a visiting author arrived to speak about his book, students clicked favorite 38 times and retweet 8 times on my live-tweets of his lecture which is incredible. Students were positive and engaged, and wanted to share with their friends the contents of a mandatory lecture!

The success of some of these posts spawned spin-offs. I welcomed it. First, the four houses in the house system joined twitter--@HouseStrong, @MonjoKongs, @WaldenFlames and @BradleyBearsxox. In addition to those four accounts, students created @MKAGossipGirl, @MKAProbz, @OverheardatMKA, @MKAlbrary, to name a few. I know the students behind some of these, and others I don’t know. And I that’s okay, I respect their initiative and I’m sure they’ll learn many lessons trying to brand a new campus online personality. With all the interest, community involvement is through the roof at MKA! And, slowly, I’ve been able to turn over the work to the students through hashtags. Though we call today’s students “digital natives” I was shocked to learn most didn’t know the power of hashtags. On Halloween, they learned: We all used #MKAhallo, and together we curated a great snapshot of all the great costumes.

@MKAGossipGirl is one of the most creative spin-offs

Essentially I started a course in brand management, social media, creativity, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and school spirit. I’m thrilled with the results. Students feel more connected to the school community than ever before. Followers connect and contribute to the larger campus community in a positive, meaningful war.

Igniting this forum was half the journey toward my goal of familiarizing students with the benefits of twitter so that they can use it to further their education. I wrote previously about why we should teach Social Media and also how I taught it this past summer. @MKAscreenz has given me the credibility to further pursue this goal at MKA.

Engagement in Student Government: #ASPElect

This summer at St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program, I taught a course on mass media that sought to teach students how to critique the media and create media. One of our projects was a collaboration with a colleague’s government class to help them host a campus election. My students covered the candidates in our campus blog, they helped the candidates shoot campaign ads, and they live-tweeted the presidential debate in anticipation of the campus-wide vote. This activity fit my goals perfectly—students critiqued candidates’ positions, created partisan and independent media, and voted as informed members of the community—most importantly, they cared; they engaged with local politics, something unheard of among 21st century teens.

In this project I discovered that when given a voice, students owned it: asking astute questions, disagreeing (sometimes vociferously and publicly) with candidates, and connecting with others around the community. This engagement, which began between the students of the media and government classes, blossomed across the community. My students learned iMovie and Garageband while the government students learned how to run a campaign, but students across the entire community collaborated, critiqued and created—exactly what I hoped for teaching a media class.

The students’ agency/ownership of the project manifested itself best in the presidential debate, which was under the lights in the campus auditorium. My colleagues were forward-thinking enough to allow a twitter hashtag to run on the projector on stage while the candidates answered questions down front. As a result, many of the questions asked of the candidates originated in the seats in front of them! This agency piqued the interest of the entire ASP community.

The Debate

Once engaged, students voiced their opinions through twitter, but also in whispers to their neighbors, and the next day, much more vocally at “fruit break.” When the students felt like they stumped the candidates with questions, they got into it and in turn got something out of it. They felt that they were contributing to something important even though the stakes were as low as student governance of a five-week summer enrichment program.

Debating the issues at Fruit Break

The activity encouraged students to use their social capital, and their social media pages for good. Some of my tweets on the evening of the debate garnered multiple retweets and favorites. This means that a number of students were willing to broadcast the fact that they were participating in #ASPElect to all of their friends back at home (during summer vacation!). Students lent legitimacy to student government (something that has traditionally been a popularity contest) and hopefully more broadly, to civic engagement as a whole

I learned two crucial lessons from this activity. First, we need to allow our students to have more agency in school activities. They need to be able to send out their own messages, answer each other’s questions, and sculpt their own campus (and online) profiles. Secondly, engagement comes from school events that students are interested in, but the events deliver more learning when we can ensure that they’re engaging enough to appear in students’ social feeds.

I hope that students enjoyed this activity enough to keep it going when they returned to their high schools for their senior year. It took creativity, collaboration and innovation—all 21st century skills—to succeed in all facets of this project. If students engage with these processes at their own schools--or even better, politically and journalistically on a local or national level--I’d be thrilled. Certainly at this program, students seized the opportunity we provided. They made it entertaining, informational and rewarding. As a result, this project helped build skills, build community, and build relationships that will go beyond the walls of our summer school

Declaration + Drive = Deeper Learning

Whenever I teach the Declaration of Independence, students always think they already know all about it. Most know Jefferson wrote it, and most know it starts out with "When in the course of human events... all men are created equal" yadda yadda yadda. But, for the past few years, I've forced students to read and react to more of it, and I'm confident they've reached a better understanding of this seminal work in American History.

After sharing the Declaration on Google Drive, I have students pair up and read a section of the grievances underneath the famous, "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness." In this section of the document, students I have students connect the grievances outlined with the events and policies of the pre-revolutionary period in the colonies. Check out this screen shot:

Not only did the students learn just what drove our founding father to commit treason by signing this document, but the lesson also served as a review of our previous lessons. Students had to revisit the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, and the Intolerable Acts, to name a few. Therefore, this primary source served as a direct connection between what we were studying and how that drove the decisions of the founding fathers at the time. And for that alone, this lesson delivered deeper understanding of the period and the document.

Perhaps my favorite part of this year's lesson is that one of the students in my class muttered to his partner, "man the founding fathers were a bunch of whining babies." Hopefully that kind of interest continues when we address other primary sources this year.

Teaching Social Media to Teens

Student advertisement for the class blog

This summer, for the first time in my educational career, I had the opportunity to teach social media to high school students. I’ve written about this before and I’ve been itching to teach students the best way for them to use social media to help prepare them for their professional lives while they’re still in school. I believe strongly in the importance of a digital footprint, and I don’t think teenagers are being taught how to properly post, like, retweet, comment, hashtag and so on. This summer, I changed that with 12 smart, rising 12th graders from across the state of New Hampshire at the Advanced Studies Program at St Paul’s School.

The course provided a classic liberal arts education; students critiqued the media, and students created the media. They discovered and evaluated their own relationship with the media through discussion, and they learned new styles of producing the media through many mediums: writing, podcasting and shooting video. Most importantly, I had them posting their work on the web for all to see; we had a Twitter, an Instagram and a blogger where we kept the campus news.

But, what I’d like to write about in this post is my personal effort to siphon the mindless noise out of their social media pages and get them consuming informational content in their feeds. If we can teach students to consume better content AND we allow them to create as well as critique the media, it has the best chance of having a lasting effect on their intellectual and professional growth.

In consuming, creating and critiquing the media, I intended to plant a seed that will continue to grow as students specify their interests. At least for now, they can identify some good news sources and can use some new applications (Drive, Blogger, Twitter, Instagram, iMovie, Garageband). But if I was successful, they’ll continue using their favorite social media apps to consume media that helps them become informed, global citizens. And in an ideal world, my students would move that informational content and thereby convince other teens to use social media more responsibly; then, maybe, just maybe we can reduce the colossal time-waste that is teenage social media consumption, and instead help them learn about their interests so they are more prepared for college and the real world.

I started the course by asking students to create a twitter and follow each other, and me. Then I had them follow a handful of about 35 accounts that I added to our class account. I asked them to follow news outlets like NYTimes, Washington Post, Brain Pickings, Mashable, the Colbert Report, Open Culture and various guest speakers who taught during our five-week program. These represented the accounts from which we’d consume content. Each day when students arrived for class, they were given fifteen minutes to read the news from their twitter feed.

Even if students had just added these to the feeds that they read each morning, I would still consider this a victory for their education and growth; but, on each Saturday class, we held a “Social Media Marketplace” where students sought quality feeds based on their interests that were outside of the things we were reading/watching in a media class. Some students chose to pick up design feeds like Uncrate, GOOD, Explore and Fast Company while others picked up environmental feeds like, the National Geographic, Huffington Post Green, Climate Desk, Eco Tech Daily, and Green Energy News. Simultaneously, I also asked them to prune their feeds of accounts that don't deliver useful information. Most importantly, students engaged in this process together, so what they added and subtracted could benefit others. This ensured that what students saw and read could be seen by another student, opening up dialogue and increasing understanding. We also had a class hashtag where students could tweet articles to the rest of us so that we could learn and discuss. This curricular agency paid huge dividends in the learning process.

For five weeks students were aware and critical of what was going on in the world, thanks to their social media pages. At the same time, they wrote their own articles for our blog to try to inform our school community. My students felt that following the news was hard for teens because it’s difficult to understand the background behind big stories if you read just one article. My effort to fix this was to open up their feeds to more and better information (a site like Vox built its whole mission around giving context behind the news). But I also created a project to help the students solve this issue themselves. I divided them into groups to record podcasts that explain the whole story behind a current event. This way, teenagers in the community could learn the background behind the stories and then keep up with it. My students covered Israel-Palestine, Hobby Lobby, Ukraine and Boko Haram. At the culmination of that unit, our Social Media Marketplace on Saturday focused on podcasts that the students should follow.

Perhaps the most encouraging development with our production and consumption of social media is that students wanted our blog to move to a wider audience. Halfway through the program, when I interviewed each student, a majority of my class asked me to open the target audience of our blog to outside the Advanced Studies Program. They wanted to write about the things they had become interested in during our classes and discussions; and, they wanted a greater diversity of content on the blog for others to learn as well. The rebranding of our blog proved that students believed strongly in the digital footprint we were creating and they wanted to get better!

Why We Need to Teach Social Media in Our Schools

Parents and teachers are scared of social media, in part because students sometimes use it in mindless and daunting ways, but also because many parents and teachers don’t understand its possible benefits. No one is teaching this generation of students how to use social media productively to nurture intellectual passions and develop marketable skills. Students are not following accounts that provide information and inspiration. Instead, they take photos of their lunch, try to acquire more “likes” than their friends, and try to embarrass one another with less than flattering photographs.

Educators need to begin to help students build their own responsible digital-profiles and use social media for academic enrichment. What crosses students’ desks, or appears in their feeds, should be substantive and based on their interests. The best way to create a culture of curiosity, exploration and sharing is to teach students how to manage content and conversations online. Students who are interested in business, for example, should be guided to the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Financial Times or The Economist. Students who are interested in psychology should be guided to Psychology Today, Pyschobest and Psych Central. Unfortunately, there’s little time for this guidance in our crowded curriculum and, on their own, students can’t be bothered to seek out educational content in place of their social updates. Yet, this content, ideally grounded in their curiosity, could form the basis of a lifelong intellectual passion or even a possible career.

Educational institutions equip their graduates with the research skills, organizational skills, analytical skills and verbal/writing skills to succeed in the workforce. This has been true for decades. But, thanks in large part to technology, the professional landscape has changed so much that it’s hard for students to figure out in which industry, or for which cause, they would like to employ their acquired skills. As it is, most universities do not invite academic specialization until students are in their final two years. The best way to help students with these issues is through social media.

Social media provides a forum through which students can learn about and engage with industries and professionals that represent a wide-range of intellectual opportunities. The forum invites dialogue and content updates in real-time. We need to teach students what to read and watch in order to develop expertise in a given field. And, we need to teach them how to post, like, comment, inquire, reply, and connect in ways that benefit students and their chosen industries. As educators, we know that the best learning is a product of guidance, encouragement, and debate. If there’s a student who is interested in technology, I want to help him read, analyze, and debate content from Mashable, Gizmodo, CNET, WSJD, and Wired, to name a few. Or if a student wants to save the planet, I’d like to point him toward Greenpeace, Climate Desk, and Green Living.

Upon graduating from college in 2009, my friends and I were asked by executives to use the academic skills acquired in college to curate and deliver information that could help organizations advance their brand, cause or idea. Frequently, we were also asked to combine these skills with our knowledge of social media in order to reach new audiences. Independently, we realized that our ability to flourish in our young careers depended upon our connection with industry leaders, consumption of up-to-date content, and creation of digital profiles, whether for a company or as individuals. Far more effective than a paper resume, strong digital-profiles are the best way for young professionals to progress in a given field, and even move between fields.

None of our professors ever advised us to explore social media, nor did they talk about the changing economy that we would inherit as young professionals. Today, economists keep referencing the “startup economy” but schools aren’t teaching students how to navigate this landscape. Educators should guide students not only in their consumption of information, but to internships and other experiential opportunities to build a resume in a given industry. Ideally, social science teachers should encourage their students to follow Re/code, Techstars, or Kickstarter so that they can feel empowered to start their own business.

Ironically, if schools taught a class on social media, and that was the only class a student took, some could still find employment monitoring feeds, creating snapchats, producing vines, or curating Pinterest for a business. Businesses will pay for these services. Young graduates, who have learned to harness the power of social media, update pages, curate a digital footprint and forge connections to make themselves knowledgeable in their content area and valuable to their employers.

Fulfillment comes from exploring a wide variety of interests and developing our understanding of them all. It’s time to help our students pursue interests outside of their core academic courses. It’s time to help them to customize their own learning, and engage in professional dialogue in an appropriate manner. With our guidance, students will feel prepared and confident navigating the professional landscape they inherit. Social media has disrupted society; the learning environment is changing, the professional environment is changing, and schools should be changing with them. If we want our students to be curious, informed and competitive, we need to acknowledge, appreciate, and, finally, teach social media

A version of this post was published by NAIS

Social Media 101: My Presentation to the Parents’ Association

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Last week, I was given the opportunity to teach a lesson called “Social Media; What’s in, what’s out and what’s trouble?” to any middle or high school parent who was interested. About thirty parents arrived, a few with notebooks in hand, to hear what I had to to say. I started by admitting I am no expert on Social Media. But, I do have a different perspective on how their children use social media since I’m around them every day in so many different capacities--as teacher, coach, advisor, mentor, and friend. I decided to start my presentation by scaring the parents, then presenting my more optimistic thesis about teen social media use: that with the right mentoring, they can harness its potential to pursue passions and express creativity.

The Apps:
I felt obligated to start with Facebook largely because the adults in the room to whom I was speaking all admitted that they had facebook accounts. I moved away from it quickly, though, because teenagers are doing the same. Next, I moved to Tumblr and Twitter to give the parents a landscape of the social media their children use. I also used these apps to highlight how our economy values social media start-ups: Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr, and Facebook paid $750 for Instagram. I showed a video, explaining how much a stranger can learn about someone by searching nearby social media pages, that understandably terrified a lot of the parents in the room.

Relentless, I then moved to the apps that I red-flagged for the parents: Snapchat, Vine, Tinder, and Chatroulette. Snapchat, an app that turned down $3 billion from Facebook, moves 350 million photos a day. I told the parents a story of a sophomore girl who, upon checking her snap profile, realized she had sent 28,000 snaps since she downloaded the app the previous year. I used my math skills to highlight that she sent, on average, over 50 snaps a day! Naturally, the parents hoped that it wasn’t their kid, so I shared the story of a junior girl with 33,000+ snaps sent since she created her profile. The scary thing about “snaps,” of course, is that they don’t actually disappear, as teeangers think they do. Others take screenshots, and Snapchat holds them in a database. After my Snapchat warning, I told the parents about the meme “do it for the vine,” and implored them to discourage their teens from doing something stupid or dangerous for internet fame.

Finally, when I got to Tinder and Chatroulette, the parents started to speak up--even though I had said I would take questions at the end. Fortunately, I don’t think a lot of our students are on these apps, but they exist, and they’re popular. Tinder is a “dating” site based on proximity that allows users who have mutually “liked” one another’s photo to chat and perhaps meet up! In February, Tinder boasted 750 million swipes a day. And, Chatroulette is one of the scarier apps--through Chatroulette, users can connect to anyone with a webcam anywhere in the world with just a click.

The Argument:
Despite all the negatives associated with these apps, and the overarching disconnect teenagers are facing, I tried to spin this talk optimistically. Acknowledging the negative, I urged parents to speak to their kids about this stuff. I argued that students are sacrificing their physical relationships, basing their self-worth on the number of “likes” on their online profile, and that’s not okay. I told the parents a story of a 16 year-old girl who I caught during check-in at 10:15 putting make-up on so she could go take a “selfie” with another student. The next day I asked her why she was on her phone while I was talking, and her answer was that she was checking how many “likes” she received. Unfortunately, this happens when students don’t find anything else to post about, and therefore put themselves out there for the digital world. We, parents and teachers, need to be on the look-out for this behavior and find other ways to help our kids evaluate their self-worth--hopefully based on interest.

Again, in an effort to emphasize the positive, I looped back around to an opening statement I made about the Arab Spring revolutions and their dependence on social media. I pointed out that social media has potentially immense value. Though I argued students were stuck using apps for “social” updates, I hypothesized that they could be using them for information updates. In order to get students from “social” to “informational,” I hope to help them explore their passions on social media. I talked about Tumblr blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages that students could “like” to get updates that help them become deeper thinkers, informed citizens, and inspired creators. Unfortunately, our students struggle to get outside their social circles and into the part of social media that benefits the 21st century student. Social media has beneficial, informational uses, including opportunities for personal and professional development and networking, a platform from which to ignite regime change, a source for promoting a worthy cause, and an outlet to help a boy fighting cancer become batman for a day. I’m convinced my students can be inspired by these uses, and though I didn’t say it explicitly, I think schools have to be teaching this stuff. Fortunately, I didn't have to say it: The parents did in their follow-up questions, which turned out to be more of a discussion and less of a Q&A. I couldn’t have been happier; it was a great first step!

Forming a Foundation for Teaching Fascism

In the US History curriculum, students struggle to understand the finer points of fascism and how it led the globe into a second world war. I’ve tried many ways to help them consider this, but I think I’ve found the answer. Last week, I generated a solid lesson outlining the details of this complex governmental institution, by first having students evaluate the US Government’s relationship with the tell-tale signs of fascism. I printed and distributed the goals of fascism from this great article at Addicting Info called “You Might be A fascist If...” Each student had one quotation that defined fascism. They shared their detail and then debated whether the US has been guilty of said violation.  

For example: 

“You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.”

When forced to first wrestle with America’s fascist tendencies, students better connected the dots as to how the worldwide depression led to a rise in the fascist governments in Italy, Germany, and Japan--to name a few. Since we had just covered WWI and the Depression, students knew how citizens around the globe struggled. And, they admitted that people could be coerced by their government.

Clearly, some cases compared closely to the United States while other were more of a stretch, but inevitably students recognized that even the US contains elements of what most would define as fascism. This lesson generated lots of questions about international policy and governmental corruption. From this discussion, I carefully segued into ways in which Mussolini and Hitler concentrated power in the state apparatus--for fascism.

And one more quotation for good measure:  
“You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong.”

Bringing Model UN into the History Classroom

Truly understanding why the globe launched itself into a second world war in just two decades is challenging. Textbooks try to highlight a few terms/events to sum up a very complicated international political economy. In the textbook our school uses, Alan Brinkley’s Unfinished Nation, he highlights: Dawes Plan, Kellogg-Briand Pact, Lebensraum, the Neutrality Acts, Rome-Berlin Axis, Anschluss and the Munich Conference. Obviously, reading the chapter is not enough, which is why students took their seats in my classroom the next day. Only--this time, it wasn’t a classroom, it was an international diplomatic table of countries involved in the lead-up to WWII

Procedure:

First, I divided the students up into the different countries including a League of Nations. Then, I had them take on the issues. Naturally, I didn’t like Brinkley’s terms, so I made my own list. At the beginning of class, students quietly worked with their fellow ambassador (if they had one) to write a press release about each event and thus play model UN without being in model UN!

After they wrote their press releases, I let them debate the issues. This was a lot more challenging. When I do this lesson again next time, I’m going to give them their countries before hand so they can do some background research to better defend their positions with proof.

Results:

Students certainly better understood the lead up to WWII. But, this lesson also taught students what it’s like being a politician/diplomat/ambassador. They also played around with writing a formal press release. When some countries/students had more formal, articulate press-releases, the other groups tried to keep up. In the end, they were all really good!

After the classed hummed along for a while,I figure I would detail the opening movements of the war in Europe. But, I didn’t get far. When we started talking about the Munich Agreement and Germany taking over the Sudetenland, one of my students drew a parallel to the current situation going on in the Ukraine--the exact parallel former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton made two days later--I might add. Clearly they were thinking like diplomats!

Then I embarked on a sweet tangent about how history relates to current events. And on that note, I’m going to read the news.

Great Depression Storytelling

As a history teacher, I find one of the best ways to get engagement and retention is to give students a role to play in class. One way to do this is to set up a hypothetical situation where students are actors in a story from history. During the Great Depression (or any depression/panic for that matter), I make each student a part of society and force them to contemplate the decisions that led the country into depression.

While the best part of the lesson is student engagement, it’s also a great teaching tool for empathy. Students have to grapple with how people lose their jobs, but also about how businesses--usually banks--make bad decisions that lead to financial catastrophe.

Finally, it provides a nice framework to refer to when you discuss subsequent recessions. Or, when you’re trying to review the material and you can refer to the exact student who was the banker who had to send his/her hired thugs to call-in a loan; it helps to jog students’ memories.

Here’s the set up for my Great Depression unit. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section if you don’t understand how it works.

Characters:

Banker 1

• invests in the market responsibly
• pays back debts

Banker 2

• bad investments
• bad loans
• bankrupt when panic sets in

Business person

• needed a loan to expand his business
• they take on an employee (character below)
• when times get tough the employee gets fired
• people (including former employee) now can’t afford goods and price falls
• tariff rates also lead to
• price drops and deflation occurs

Employee

• has a job until the employers loan gets called in
• then fired and unemployed--with no way to get a loan

Citizen 1

• can buy on margin
• can invest in one bank
• can run on the panics when panic sets in

Citizen 2

• Just took out a loan to buy a house (or expand a small business)
• bank comes knocking

Farmer 1

• takes out a loan
• prices fall

Farmer 2

• drought/dust bowl and displacement

The Government (usually teacher)

• invests heavily to win WWI
• pulls back on investment
• increases interest rates (Fed)
• increases tariff (Congress)
• Hoover’s government vs. FDR

World War I Wall Machine

For an extra credit assignment at the end of the semester, I did something that makes a teacher cringe, I chose to give my students tremendous latitude in how they created and portrayed any event from the history we studied. The description was simple enough; I had students summarize one of the units we studied over the course of the semester, and I let them present it however they’d like in front of their classmates. Though I gave a multitude of options--prezi, blabberize, twitter, video, to name a few--students leaned heavily on the Facebook option. It just helped prove to me how much that site dominated their (or should I say, our) lives.

They had a lot of fun with it. And, for some, it really helped them recall information about the units covered in the previous months.

Follow this link for one of many “wall machines” that were created.

Teaching Marx to 10th Graders

This year, my syllabus requires me to teach The Communist Manifesto as a “core-work” to my sophomores. I didn’t read Marx until college, and when I put the manifesto into readability, it clearly labels it a college read. Needless to say, I was concerned my students wouldn’t understand the piece. So I decided to recreate the manifesto inside the classroom. Here’s how:

Before their first night of homework from the Manifesto, I activated student’s prior knowledge of capitalism and communism and filled in the gaps so they learned enough background to understand these social economic and political systems. Then, I prominently displayed this visual representation of Capitalism on the whiteboard (below) knowing I would refer to is as we talked about Marx. After we activated our knowledge of our own system, and what capitalism and socialism/communism might look like in diagram form, I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out fifty Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins.

With my munchkins, I represented the bourgeoisie, controlling the means of production, and the students represented the proletariat trying to get a piece of the means of production (except for those who didn’t like munchkins!). As we went back through the first chapter of Marx, in which he attacks capitalism and the bourgeoisie for its exploitative nature, I asked the students directed questions. When students answered correctly concerning Marx’s main points, I gave them donuts. I did this in my role as a teacher to reward understanding and get everyone involved and excited about learning a tough topic. But, in my role as the bourgeoisie, I was using my donuts to bribe the proletariat (the students) to keep quiet about my controversial business practices that rewarded me with 50 munchkins compared to their zero or one munchkin. Obviously, this was not done fairly--I played favorites, I didn’t always call on first person with their hand up, and I lowered the bar for others.

“[Labourers] are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market” -K. Marx

As we progressed, students began getting angry at me as a teacher, for my stringent, unfair requirements for distributing donuts, and angry at me as the bourgeoisie for just how aggressively they had been exploited for more donuts/money. They started to understand Marx; their eyes opened to the negative aspects of capitalism. And when they were getting tired of my game, and Marx’s critique of capitalism, it was time for revolution, and donuts for all!

“The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority” -K. Marx

When we got to Marx’s points about how the proletariat can come together and rise up, I relinquished my monopoly on the discussion to allow them to organize. Then, I allowed them to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The class concluded deliciously with munchkins for all--minds and stomachs were happily satiated!

I'm Raising an Army of "Google Jockeys"

Last week, my department chair called me a “Google Jockey” when I looked something up while conversing with him. I had never heard the term, but immediately fell in love with it. In my history classroom, I encourage students to google things that we are discussing. If they’re acting like a google jockey, they’re engaged. I know teachers who would disagree, but nothing makes me happier than when I walk around behind my students and see them on wikipedia.

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Some days, I start class with a list of terms for students to google, and I recommend that they do that each day when I state our agenda. It’s my opinion that if a student is curious, they should look up what we’re discussing. If it helps them answer a question or formulate an opinion, great. If it leads them to ask me a question about it, even better. Perhaps the greatest thing about the immediate google search is that often when you stumble upon a page, it will lead you to another page with more information.

If students frequently pursue further information, they will naturally weigh how that information fits into whatever you may be doing in your life. This leads to powerful connections and these connections push creativity and innovation--two of the most important things I can teach.

While activating google to pursue knowledge is excellent, learning evolves when a student curates or distributes that information. Simply perusing the information is good, but applying, moving, or storing it for discussion and re-engagement is that much more important. As a digital student in graduate school, I frantically googled content that my professors discussed or suggested we research. And, this led me to information that I wanted to learn (and store) from the graduate classes (that ironically, would help my own classes down the road). I’d much rather go looking on my own than getting stuck with just what’s on the syllabus. After all, if I wanted to just follow the syllabus, why pay for and show up for the class at all?

Of course, those who disagree with this practice argue that it distracts the student. This is true. But, there are hundreds of things that distract students that they’ll have to get used to succeed in college and make an impact in their profession. If a “distraction” is to further research a topic we are discussion in class, that’s a win. I will admit, however, that this approach is not for every student. Some retain and apply more when they have time to let the information marinate rather than consuming more. Therefore, this practice inherently helps students figure out the kind of learners they are.

Amazon and the Industrial Revolution

A Prime teaching tool!

During the holidays, I recalled just how easy Amazon.com has made our lives, so I tapped into the sales monster for my next class project.

For the Industrial Revolution, I had students choose an inventor and use Amazon to sell their invention. They were to create a fake amazon page to build a fake business and sell a real historical product! Students presented their mock-pages when we began our study of Industrial Revolution economists: Smith, Ricardo, Blanc, and Marx. It worked perfectly. Students presented the inventions--the machinery that changed economics forever--and we discussed the socio-economic changes that resulted in the life-work of economists like Smith and Marx.

I assessed students on the accuracy of their product information. The Amazon format functioned well for this. My students leveraged categories like “‘features,” “dimensions” and “Frequently Asked Questions” to creatively display information about their inventor and his invention. I also evaluated them based on their understanding of the Revolution as a whole. Students were encouraged to show how these inventions changed society. Again, they used Amazon features like “Frequently Bought Together” to fit the invention into the larger context of the Industrial Revolution and a changing society.

Finally, I had them comment on one of their classmates’ projects to make further connections between the inventors/inventions. Students were supposed to give the product 1-5 stars based on its efficacy which could be evaluated based on legitimate, historical problems with the invention, or based on knowledge of a similar product elsewhere that may have been more or less effective. Below is a sample project and a sample comment.

This student covered Robert Fulton’s steam engine in Pages:

Here’s a comment on Elias Howe’s sewing machine of 1846. It’s quite harsh!

It was amazing how many different ways students chose to complete this project from the platforms they used to the sections of the Amazon pages that they manipulated. Some used pages (example above), word, powerpoint, and even photoshop (see below). The assignment required research, critical thinking and creativity. All in all, I felt my students did a great job using the Amazon platform to portray information. It also led us into an engaging few classes on Industrial Revolution economics. We reflected on how the Revolution’s changes relate to today, and speculated that services like Amazon may one day be referred to during a lesson on the “Internet Revolution.”

And I'll leave you with one more example: