Tying academic curriculum to real life

This week I came across some marvelous examples of how TBS faculty work to tie examples of real life experience into the academic work of the classrooms.

In Sweet Briar Creek (a second/third grade classroom), the students set up a polling station on Tuesday (the day of the elections). The topic of the vote was the re-naming of the Sweet Briar Creek blog, and each student took a turn as a poll worker. The polling station included a voter register, voting booth, ballots, ballot box, posted times when the polls were open, and even "I voted in Sweet Briar Creek" stickers.  The work wasn't limited to the day of the election, however; while guiding prospective parents on a tour the next morning, we encountered the students working in groups to count the ballots. They began by checking, and rechecking, each ballot for any irregularities, such as multiple votes (those that were found to be irregular were referred to the teachers for arbitration). They then counted, and recounted, the ballots to determine which of the candidates had won.

Instead of learning information about candidates and issues, as is often the basis for a study of elections (though not always developmentally appropriate for 7 year olds), this approach included both giving students the experience of participating in voting themselves, and also an understanding what it takes to actually put on an election. By simulating all steps of the process, students developed a genuine sense of the importance of voting in our society, and why we use it as a decision-making tool for issues that matter to many people, getting at our learning outcomes of interdependency (the society of the class), creativity (coming up with candidate names), critical thinking (doing the voting), and discipline understanding.

[Side note: During my first visit to the class on Tuesday, I was turned away from voting, because I was there at a time when the polls were closed; it was a tremendous a real life moment for me, as an adult who read about the long lines and struggle to get access to polls in places like Florida and North Carolina, to have that experience myself. I've asked the teachers if I can come in to speak with the students about my perspective on this project, and my experience with it, and also to hear from them about what their experiences.]

In Strawberry Creek (one of our fourth/fifth grade classrooms), the study of the election included learning about the Electoral College. In order to give students a direct experience of how it works, the teachers asked the students first to vote about which pet they liked more, cats or dogs. The teachers then had the class offer pros and cons for each pet, which they wrote down for all to see. Finally, the teachers had students re-vote by private ballot, this time tying each student's ballot weight to the number of Electoral College votes that the state s/he had done his/her recent state study on (e.g. the vote of the child who studied Louisiana counted x9, the vote of the child who studied New Hampshire counted x4, and the vote of the child who studied California counted x55). While the results were the same (dogs won), the students were able to witness how weighted voting changes the way national candidates might choose to campaign.

On a completely different note, in 5th grade math on Wednesday, the students' lived experience became a high-interest leverage point in their study of data and statistics. Working in table groups, the students categorized and then taped candy wrappers from Halloween onto posters as a group, before identifying the mean, median, mode and range of group consumption. For some, the act of classifying was the exciting part; for others, the creation of the display; and for others, getting to work in small groups with their peers kept them motivated. For all, the mathematical calculations became an object of intense interest, both to know the group's internal nature better (some groups were high on chocolate, others on chewy treats) and also to compare to their classmates (who had eaten the most candy? the least? how did each person's consumption compare to the group's average?).