Chasing Orchid: Hope Reborn?

I know, I know, I've been conspicuously absent the last few weeks. Yes I've been busy, but I'm not making any excuses, I simply haven't really had much to say. However, today was a bright spot in my short teaching career so I thought I'd share it with all of you. Hope you enjoy! ~ElusiveOrchid

I teach world history to juniors in high school. Today it was Ancient Greece. Of course the first thing my students had to say was “Miss we have to watch Troy!” To which I was bombarded with a chorus of “cool” and “I have the dvd at home, I’ll bring it in.” After the cacophony quieted down, I explained to them the three reasons why we couldn’t watch Troy.

1. It’s rated R! My school and most schools have a strict policy against any movie that is rated above PG13. First I have to view the movie (no I haven’t seen it just because Brad Pitt is in it.) then if I deem it’s worthy enough to show my students, I have to send home permission slips for parental signatures.

I tried to explain this to my students and they couldn’t understand it. Apparently a good chunk of my colleagues ignore the R rule and just let their students watch them. After I told them I wasn’t about to break policy they argued that they would just get their parents to sign the permission forms. This leads to reason number two.

2. Parent release forms. I only had one thing to say to the parent signature idea…I just told them the following: “By the time all of you Yea-Hoo’s get the permission forms back to me, the school year will be over.”

They had nothing to say to that. *chuckles*

3. We're studying Greece! Reason three was very simple, so simple my students just didn’t get it. Troy is in Turkey, we’re studying Greece. How hard is that to understand? Sure Troy was a huge battle that Greece fought but aside from that, Troy has nothing whatsoever to do with Greece. Not to mention that archaeologists aren’t even sure Troy existed. At least Greece is a proven civilization!

My students tried to argue with me on reason three when they saw Troy mentioned in the text…I just pointed out the sections in the text that said “Turkey” and “Debate the existence of.”

They eventually gave up. I told them that if they put forth as much energy to their studies as they did with arguing about the movie, they’d all be passing my class. Needless to say they didn’t appreciate that.

The rest of the class passed relatively uneventfully, until about the last 15 minutes.

Let me backtrack a bit. For me teaching World History isn’t about dates and timelines, it’s about thinking critically and reasoning about cause and effect. For the most part I had begun to doubt that critical thinking was ever going to even flicker into the picture. That is…until today.

In the last 15 minutes of class we got into a sideline about modern day, technology and those types of things. One of my students, who rarely ever says anything, looked at me and asked a very introspective question he said “Miss, why is it that ancient Egyptians were so smart and we’re so stupid? I mean they didn’t even have technology and they figured things out.”

I looked at him and said “Well why do you think we’re not very smart these days?”

He went into a long explanation of how technology has pretty much rotted our brains. If we need answers we can hop over to the computer and google or yahoo the question. If we need to add something we get a calculator.

Pretty soon, my other students were debating the pros and cons of technology. I just stood with my back against the blackboard, smiling.

Perhaps there is hope for them yet.