Rogue One, a Grammar Quiz, and Von Miller

Holly
Aug 26, 2016
2 min read

Part 1:

"You're like my favorite teacher already."

What a compliment, right?!

Unfortunately, this comment was prompted by my decision to play the trailer above before class started on day 2, not by anything my teaching actually did for this student.

However, it was very important to me to play this trailer at exactly the time I played it. During our first day as I was making my way through the notecards and meeting each of my students, Star Wars came up as a favorite movie. The student quoted above started talking about Rogue One and how we should watch the trailer.

I somewhat brushed the comment off (it wasn't his turn) and said we'll watch it Friday. Now, here's the catch:

We watched it Friday!

It is so important to follow up on your students' interests.

This was such a simple thing. The trailer itself only lasts 2 minutes and fifteen seconds. As long as I can control it, I'm always in my classroom early, so I simply set up everything we needed for class plus YouTube. It took no class time and deepened the rapport started on day 1.

Part 2:

At the end of this same day, I had my students take a grammar/mechanics quiz. Bor-ing...right? Maybe. But I think teachers can control that to an extent. I created the quiz myself and used their index cards from day 1 to create the questions and prompts.

The quiz began with an Instagram post from Chris Pratt that my students had to edit. It moved on to homophones, but the sentences included references to The Office, Harry Potter, Grey's Anatomy, and even a compromise on Nicholas Sparks novels. The last section asked how to punctuate certain titles; one of the questions read, "How do you punctuate song titles like Hotline Bling (what?)?"

At the end of the quiz, I had a student tell me, "That was like the coolest thing ever. I was bad at it, but it was cool."

Part 3:

This is big.

Have you ever heard of Von Miller? Me neither, until now.

Most of my students are interested in sports in one way or another. Unfortunately...I am...not. But, two days ago I broke out of my comfort zone and had my students read an NPR article about NFL salaries to put it simply. We spent nearly the whole class discussing the article and then breaking into teams for a debate. It went over really well! My students got into it, I learned who Mr. Miller is, and I think learning actually happened. The decision helped me broaden my class topics, and I guess sports aren't that bad--look at Von go!