Squared

Yesterday in inquiry block, we read the amazing true story of Henry "Box" Brown's journey to freedom.   He was a slave who worked with tobacco in Richmond.   Once his family was sold and sent to another state, Brown decided to make a wooden box and ship himself to Philly with the help of two friends.   That's the short version.

Read this book to find out the details.   

It's illustrated by Kadir Nelson. 

I first fell for Nelson's warm style when I bought a copy of Ellington is not a Street because the cover had a beautiful girl in braids holding a 78.   It's like everything he paints is smooched by the sunlight.

See?

But let me tell you about the craft we did today.   Thanks to Pinterest, I decided to bring in paint chips and have my students make small boxes.   One chip for the lid, one for the box.   Easy enough, right?   And free!

Well, the first set of directions I found were not in English, and the computer translator was no help.

I found another set of directions that seemed straightforward and headed to Lowes for more chips.

Yeah.   I was so prepared by the time IB rolled around, so prepared that I should have known better.   My paint chips were smaller than the pattern suggested, and we weren't too skilled at immediately reducing the box to lid ratio.  

Who among us can do such precise math in the 15 minutes before lunch anyway?   

I showed the kids the main idea behind creating the box...where to cut vs. where to fold and then we estimated the size of our matching lids.   Some of us did pretty well.   And others of us, ahem, had lopsided marshmallow looking creations.   In spite of it all, many of the kids gave it their best shots.  

We ended up with enough oddly shaped containers to have a wedding shower for Barbie -n- Ken and offer them endless colors and sizes in casserole dishes, litter boxes and trash cans.  

And that's all I have to say about that.

In Which Our Heroes Search for Answers

Conducting research is really only meaningful when you have an interest in a topic, and that might mean a ratio of one topic per student.   That's difficult to manage.   As I was brainstorming a way to add student choice to the activity while still maintaining some control over the process, something happened in Sandford, Florida that captured all of America's attention.   George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin.

Whatever our feelings are on an issue, I feel that a teacher's role is to allow our students access to enough information for them to make up their own minds.   The opportunity to think critically is one of the best gifts that we can give teenagers.   Although I was anxious to start talking about this issue right away, I guesstimated an approximate time that enough information would be available to us and booked one of our rolling computer labs.   Also, I decided to create a list of questions to guide their research, so they would get to investigate as many sides as possible.   All answers were to be paired with their source and the date of publication.   Of course, there was also space and time for them to seek out answers to their own questions and express their own opinions.   Students were also asked to read Toure's response to Trayvon's death, "How to Stay Alive While Being Black."    

I didn't give a lecture regarding what happened, although I could have.   Being a sage on the stage when you're trying to get children to think for themselves is counterproductive.   I kept quiet for most of the time, but I did ask a few questions out loud after about a half hour of research, so students who wanted to speak up could.  

And you would have been impressed to see the seriousness with which they took on a detective's task and the intelligence with which they discussed the issues surrounding the incident.   No one ever lost sight of the tragedy of a teen's death and the fact that we wouldn't be able to sort everything out in 70 minutes of inquiry.  This was one of the quietest activities I've ever witnessed.   I gave my second block a five minute chat break, but most of them just continued to dig deeper.  

If you've ever looked at a teenager and presumed anything about their lack of passion for learning, or anything else for that matter....well....you know where I'm going with this.