Team Spencer Does Korea

Here is a Playlist of short videos that I made for Team Spencer on my trip to South Korea.

Team Spencer Does Korea:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEIB6EfUmePSnlkY2x5sRxx5_Z3O6MixP

Stick Game Expands to Include Branches of Government

In a recent session of The Stick game, a student came and told me that he thought there needed to be a court.  "Why?" I asked. "There is no one violating any rules.  They still wanted to set something up that gave them something to do and took some power away from me.
"What about a student government that decided on the laws instead of you?" Came a suggestion from the group.

So that's what they did.  They created a small, 5 person, lawmaking body that consisted of one member from each table.  Every time a law was proposed, the person proposing the law would give the money to me and tell their law to the council.  The council would then argue the validity of the law amongst themselves, sometimes making changes with the consent of the proposer, and decide whether the law should be passed.  If someone didn't agree, they could still pay 4 sticks to bring it to the whole class for a vote.

This was working fine until the next session where there was an argument regarding a law about stealing sticks.  The argument was immense.  The kid that initially asked for a court, looked at me and said, "I told you we needed a court, Spencer."  So a court was created.  They elected 3 students to a "Supreme Court".  One of the students was a defendant on the initial argument, so he had to recuse himself.  The next court case was regarding a law that said that one has to know the answer to a question before they pay the stick to answer it.  The plaintiff in this case won the case and had to split the sticks with the person that originally won them.  The defendant, seeing his bounty cut in half complained that he lost the case due to favoritism.  Two of the supreme court justices were from the same table as the plaintiff.  He proposed that the supreme court justices should all be from different table so that one table will not have all of the power.  This inspired an intense debate.  The people had elected these individuals, did they not trust them to make objective decisions?  We wouldn't have to worry about it if they were all from different tables.  What if we end up voting the same people back in, will people stop fighting this?  There was yelling and some tears.  It was magical.  They ended up electing 3 individuals from different tables. Whew!

During this process we discussed the American branches of government and some of the differences and similarities between that and our stick game.  I didn't want to give them too many ideas because I wanted them to innovate new solutions, not model them.

Portfolios

Over the last few weeks we have been collecting our favorite and most important pieces of work from the year.  The students are grabbing pieces of work from all of the disciplines: math, science, humanities, reading and writing.

Because we are creating our portfolios online in Google Drive, we have had to learn a lot about all of the Google programs.  Some of the students knew a lot already, but for some, this was new territory.  In order to help out those that did know where to begin, we called in reinforcements.

The 7th and 8th graders are also creating their portfolios for this year and came in to share their wisdom on the process.  Each one teamed up with one or two of our students to help them create and organize their portfolios.  We got a lot done!

Stick game makes some changes

When playing the "Stick Game" with the kids, I always come up with laws that I would enact if I were in their place. Just in my head, mind you. Sometimes they do exactly what I thought to do, and sometimes they surprise me.

When we last played our game, a student had seceded from his table to form his own one-person table; they decided to reinstate the laws punishing people for stealing and making it so they could police each other on the matter; social welfare was in full effect stating that no table should ever have less than 20 sticks; taxes will come at 6 minute intervals instead of 10; and any table over 50 sticks had to pay 2 sticks per person in taxes instead of 1.

Things got heated when they realized that the one person table had a guaranteed 20 sticks no matter what, but only paid 1 stick in taxes. Someone tried to make the table minumum 5 sticks per person instead of 20 per table. If the single person table was poor by tax time, the might not have enough to pass any laws or pay to play the game. A huge debate ensued. There were tears. The class voted this out. Crisis averted.

This week they brought back the law saying that every team gets 10 sticks for every correct answer. This was after I was giving handfuls of sticks to one table and 2 or 3 to other tables. Armed with this new more consistent income, they then changed the tax law so that every table paid 5 sticks in taxes regardless of how many people were at the table. It raised taxes for most tables, but the wanted to raise taxes to support the new income law. I  actually hadn't thought of that, but it made sense for the game. It actually lowered taxes for the rich team, but they were no longer getting handfuls of sticks when they answered questions correctly. They are creating balance.

Little by little they are taking power away from me and working together to benefit each other. It's beautiful.

Re-purpose with Purpose

Hi Team,
In the last few weeks my repurposing elective has been taking old things and transforming them into new things.  This has been going...ok.  While we have no lack in creativity in the class, we lacked direction.  We came up with some very inspiring pieces like this bench that was a table and this display case and cds that were turned into a toy table saw.

On the whole though, we needed a goal.  After watching way too much Project Runway over mid-winter break, I was inspired to make the class more like a game.  Every 2-3 weeks the students are given a challenge.  This week's challenge was to make a lamp.  They had an hour to play with light bulbs and twinkling lights and to sketch out an idea.  The next week they had 30 minutes to search through the Ann Arbor Reuse-it Center.  The following week they had to create their lamp.  On the final week, they will put on the finishing touches and present their lamp.

The people at the Reuse-it Center loved it so much they started making $20 and $30 items only $1.  We got $70 worth of stuff for $10.  They said they loved our project and thought the kids were cute.  I'll take it!  While our pieces are still in progress, it's going to be amazing!

Glass Blowing Tour (posted on 2/5)

On Tuesday our class when to see a glass blowing shop. It was pretty cool. Here are some photos from our visit.

New Civilizations

This week we read the picture book, Weslandia. In this book, a young boy named Wesley creates his own civilization in his backyard. Based on a central crop he creates, housing, clothing, entertainment, tools, and commerce. 

In keeping with our "Systems" theme, we have been studying and discussing the different ways our society runs and how societies develop. Our Stick Game is a part of this discussion, although the students are still working on how to make it work better.

In the coming weeks we will be creating our own brand-new civilization. We will have a giant territory for the entire class, with language and general cultural signifiers. The students will each create their own specific territory. At each step in the creation of our civilization, we will look at how different cultures have dealt with that stage of development.

It will be exciting to see what we come up with.