Changing the World… One Lesson at a Time

As a teacher now two days are the same.

Some days are good, pupils seem to all complete tasks well but you don’t think you were particularly engaging, some days you feel so grumpy for no apparent reason and you seem to take it out on your class and other days you have days that you just think WOW today was awesome, I love my job. I wasn’t expecting much from today, its the first day back after the October Holidays in a new classroom. I was expecting today to be a day of new seating plans and reminding pupils about how they need to be prepared for class. I was wrong.

Before the holidays, I gave my S2 pupils homework. We have been looking at changing the world in class, looking at people who have changed the world and why people act in the way they do. We looked at brown eyes blue eyes and the Milgram experiment as well as injustices in the world. Before the holidays I gave pupils the homework to “do one thing that will change the world”. Today when i came back I was overwhelmed at the amount of pupils who actually did the task, took selfies of themselves recycling or turning off lights, reflecting on their own reactions, making tally charts of items they have recycled.

I asked pupils to think about someone inspirational that has changed the world and then for them to pledge how they will change the world. We talked about pay it forward and how it only takes one person to start a chain reaction.

Here are some of the responses I got. 

Later in the Afternoon, I had an S1 class. With them we are looking at Hope- with the ultimate aim to create a School of Home. In the first lesson, I like to give pupils an A4 piece of paper and let them doodle on it as we go through the lesson. Stopping at regular intervals to give them a chance to write things down. We talked about what is despair? What is Hope? how can we make a difference in someones life? How do we show someone we are thinking of them? These sort of questions… This always has a good conversation and its lovely to see what kids think of afterwards.

So there we have it some examples of how the pupils of Banff Academy are Changing the World.