Hey! Teacher!

This morning I did my second classroom observation. It was a fifth grade class – fresh off a three-day weekend for Memorial Day and anxious to become sixth graders. It also happened to be “Crazy Hair Day.”

Needless to say, they were a bit antsy.

They fidgeted in their seats, munched on snacks, played with each other’s “crazy” hair, and roamed around the classroom while the teacher read aloud from a book (an attempt to calm them down first thing in the morning).

When they transitioned into independent work for their final project, one student raised his hand and asked the teacher how they could possibly be graded on the assignment.

“It’s due the last day of school,” he said. 

“Yes,” she replied.

“How are you going to get it into the grade book in time? Don’t we get our report cards the last day? Is this even going to be graded?”

She fumbled around with an answer, ultimately telling him, “You can either do this project or work on those boring, long worksheets.” (She later told me grades were due later that afternoon… the project was just to keep the kids busy and learning during this last week of school.)

With that, the students began working on a project that I know I would have jumped all over if I was in fifth grade: They were designing “dream homes” and calculating the area of each room. There were specifications: each house needed three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, living room, dining room and closets and could be no larger than 2000 square feet. The very minimum size each bedroom could be was 60 square feet and to demonstrate how big that was, the teacher lined up the students in a rectangle that was 10 by 6 and asked them to make note of the size.

Although many of the kids were less than enthused by the project, I watched as they worked independently – figuring out how to fit the rooms within the piece of graph paper and wondering aloud if a 10 by 10 bedroom would be big enough in their “dream home.”