Teacher Blogs: USA Today, I'm Still Waiting for Your Call

USA Today has a short, but interesting story on teachers' blogs here. Needless to say, I didn't make the list though at least one Atlanta social studies teachers did. I have been reading her blog for a couple of months, and it is one of the finer teachers' blogs that I have read. There are links to a few other teacher blogs with the article. Explore and enjoy. Or not.

I wrote a senate simulation over the weekend (it took about twenty hours to create the forty different papers needed to run it) and started it today. Things went much better than I hoped. The students love it. How do I know? Not a single soul asked to leave class for water, to go to the office, or to go to the bathroom during any of the three classes. Even better than that, my last class came in already talking about it and anticipating a fine time to be had by all. Anytime they talk about class outside of class, I've done something either very right or something very wrong. Today, writing bills for the Senate was very right. Some ideas I heard floated: a national autobahn, a pass-grass bill, and immigration reform.

Simulations are a great way to teach and generally have a relatively high rate of long-term retention, but they are highly inefficient of time. My simulation will last all week. They will, I hope, learn a lot from it, but I could present the same information in a twenty-minute lecture. Sadly, even I am bored by my lectures so we shall instead be doing something like, according to one of my students, "Dungeons and Dragons for Politics."


Peace