Escape Room The Game

America The Beautiful! My second year at PEC a new person was introduced to my team. His name was Mr. Cacamatzin no one ever knew how to say his name and constantly mispronounced it. He was part of a work program from Romania (Because again, CMS couldn’t find anyone in the continental US who would work for their school). He looked extremely busy and mean when I first met him, but the more I got to know him the more I realized that he was extremely funny and sarcastic. During one of the first faculty meetings of the year, Cacamatzin decided to sit next to me. I was fine with this because we were becoming close friends. This turned out to be a disastrous mistake. During the meeting the administrators told us that they were going to have to ask a lot more of their teachers. They were going to need us to fill out three extra forms every benchmark, and turn in lesson plans in triplicate, and a plethora of other things. Each Time they mentioned something new we were going to have to do Cacam...

Batman 2016! The school was positively buzzing with anticipation during the 2008 presidential election. Our 8th graders were particularly interested in the election because they were learning about how voting is a civic responsibility. Jensen decided that having the kids participate in a school based election for the president would be a great teaching tool (also, I think he wanted to put it on he resume that he helped run a presidential campaign). Somehow this small classroom vote turned into a school wide election. Jensen bought 1,000 “I voted” stickers, created ballots, and worked out a whole system to help all the students in school have a hands on experience with the election. We turned his classroom into campaign headquarters. We had live feeds of the election from various new networks playing on mobile carts; we had students collecting and sorting ballots, and we had the students writing about why this election was so historic (either the first African American president or the ...

A Modest Proposal Every year I like to introduce my students to persuasive writing through an Oregon Trail assignment. It is generally my students’ favorite activity of the year which is a plus. We start by reading a piece of historical fiction that explains what the Oregon Trail is and details the hardships of the journey. I then have students create their own wagon parties within the classroom. They then have to research and decide what would be the absolutely essential supplies for the trip and how much money they would need for the trip. The final step is the students have to write a letter to Potter’s Old Time Banking explaining why they need a loan hand then persuading me to loan them the money for the trip. Some excerpts from my students’ most humorous persuasive letters over the years: When I get out west I will search the lands for the prettiest tree in the wild. I will then send it back to you and you can display it in your bank. All the other smith will be jealous. If you do...

Step Away with Your Hands Up At the start of my third year at CMS we spent five days in professional developments. I spent 40 hours straight being developed. I learned what “color” personality I supposedly have. I learned that it is a good idea to “teach” when I am in the classroom. And I also learned that research shows that if you call a student dumb they probably won’t want to work hard for you. It was the most mind numbingly dull and pointless thing I have ever partaken in. Although to be fair, I don’t think I will ever meet a teacher who will say, “You know that last 40 hours I spent being developed was really beneficial.” I am willing to bargain that you are more likely to shake hands with an abominable snowman moonlighting as Elvis Presley than you are to find a teacher who says that. During these 40 hours all my friends and I waited patiently (mostly because we were in a comatose-like state) to find out what was really important to us, which kids we were going to be teaching. O...

Gold Stars One of my favorite things to do my third year of teaching was team teach. The Civics and Economic teacher and I would put our classes together regularly so we could create cross curricular stations and activities for the kids. The arrangement worked out great because, even though there were more kids in the room, the kids were less willing to act up with two authority figures in the room. One day the Civics teacher’s side of the room was going downhill and fast, while my side of the room was behaving like angels. Finally, he called out, “Whoever is being good will get a gold star!” (Amazingly 8th graders coveted these stars like none other). The room got completely silent and without missing a beat one of the students on my side of the room said, “You mean like Hitler did to the Jewish people?” I suppressed my laughter and thought to myself, “Yes, finally they are retaining true things about WWII!” Then I thought to myself, “Too bad I don’t teach history.”

Welcome Back Everybody! Every school system I have ever had the privilege of working at has held a convocation to welcome the teachers back from summer break. I don’t know about you but I can’t think of a better way to get teachers pumped for the upcoming school year than to stick them in a hot and musty high school auditorium for three hours and COMMANDING them to be better than the previous year. I can think of better ways to pump teachers up such as: giving us an extra day of summer vacation in lieu of attending convocation, recognizing accomplishments we have made instead of reminding us in all the areas we could have done better, giving us our standard pay increase. Hell, even giving me a shiny new quarter would pump me up more than a well executed convocation. During my fifth year of teaching I walked into the school avoiding most everyone I could so I didn’t have to do the obligatory, “How are YOUUUUUU?! How was your summer? Did you cut your hair? Happy to be back?” song and dan...

My students were recently completing my Zombies Paired Passages Activity. As I was monitoring the students answers, I told a student that she needed to be more descriptive about exactly how a zombie sounds. She told me she had no idea how to describe how a zombie sounds. I told her to try to think of what one sounds like in her head and then figure out what onomatopoeia that would be. One of my other students popped her hand up and said, "I would say that it sounds like a student who doesn't know the answer to a question the teacher just asked.  Ummmm Ummmm Ummmm!" Lemme tell you this had me rolling...and still does actually!  If you are interested in the activity my students were completing when this humorous exchange happened, click the picture below!