Carrots
Every day I make a salad for lunch. (It’s because of Mark Bittman, if you must know.) And in every salad I include a carrot. I cut the carrot lengthwise into quarters and then, very carefully, I slice it cross-wise and throw it in.
Here’s what I’ve noticed happens when I cut up my carrots (if you’re going to try this at home, get the carrots from a local farm): they spring open.
That’s the best way to describe it. I slice the carrot and it, like, pops open.
Sproing!
So much so that, if I were to try to put the pieces back together into a round carrot, they wouldn’t fit together anymore. They’ve curved out, kind of expanded.
It’s as if, by cutting the carrot, I’ve released some pent-up energy. Some life.
Note that this doesn’t happen when I cut the carrot immediately into rounds. It only happens when I slice it lengthwise.
Which is important to my purpose here, which is to turn this otherwise irrelevant carrot-popping phenomenon into a
metaphor for teaching.
Here goes.
When you’re thinking about how to help students engage with a bit of content, is there some way to slice it so that it pops open? Some obtuse angle you can take? Different from the same ol’ same ol’ cutting-the-carrot-into-boring-rounds approach?
Like talking about the Treaty of Versailles from the point of view of Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating bout of the flu?
Like turning a chapter from a novel into a scene in a screenplay?
Like having students dress up like scientists, adopt a scientist’s voice (whatever they think that sounds like), and discuss a scientific concept the way scientists would? Synchronously or asynchronously (by videotaping themselves giving their own little possibly satirical mini-lecture)?
Like creating individual superheroes and storyboarding their solutions to math problems?
Like asking students to write the worst conceivable essay — being sure to define “essay” as a coherent string of a certain number of paragraphs with an intro and a conclusion (so students have to work at writing badly) — and then asking the class to choose the winners? the best of the worst and the worst of the worst?
Like having Kindergartners demonstrate for each other how to do something: how to draw a tree? how to wink? how to twirl or do a somersault or put on lipstick?
How can you teach to release pent-up energy?
To let life out like a spring?
(or a sproing)
That’s this week’s mantra.