I noticed the change in myself this school year within the last three days that I’ve been wanting to do my work and do the best I can, while improving my skills.

Day 7

Student Contributions by Binita Adhikari and Yukta Patel

What We Did In Class

We are writing questions based on the information our teacher has given. He started with a statement, “The world of 1200 was the best time period to live.” We were to write questions we had to this statement. Then he showed us images from that period to help us develop more questions. These pictures were in different topics such as military, trading etc. Then, we picked questions that we were interested in and wrote them out.

We learned to communicate with others and share ideas with each other. We are asking questions so, we can become better thinkers. We know we have become a better communicator because we talk to each other in class and ask question to each other which makes us to know each other better and know each other.

Just yesterday I realized, in my freshman year I was a student not a learner. I noticed the change in myself this school year within the last three days that I’ve been wanting to do my work and do the best I can, while improving my skills. Whereas last year, I did everything just for the grade and I know I didn’t put in my best effort towards my work and classes.

My Thoughts

This is the first day of moving beyond introductions and while most of it is great, a comment I heard today was

I think we’re preparing by attending this class, but we aren’t learning much yet.

I feared that by allowing students to develop their own questions in the first few days, it would be a shock to how they have been schooled in the past.  I’m not up there dictating what questions they have. And without being told what to do at every minute of the period, I worried they might feel we are not making progress towards passing the AP exam.  I hope after we get into it they will see they are learning more under these conditions.  That being said, the comment wasn’t against what we were doing, just a general comment. But, I hoped they would see that developing their own questions they were learning.

On a positive, the discussions were amazing.  The students were asking great questions about the world and why it was that way. They were recognizing their own bias in word choice. For instance, a kid said that foot binding was “weird” and another said the world wasn’t civilized yet in 1200.  When I pushed on their subjective word choice, they realized they were adding their own opinion.  I was very pleased with that outcome.