Social Justice Teach-In Reflection-Will Balsam

During the workshop, I think that the Free Rice game went well because they all wanted to keep playing and I really think that they will play on there own time and donate.  Another aspect of the teach-in that went well was the video that showed where the rice was getting donated.  It seemed like all the kids where interested in where all this rice they were donating goes.  I thought it was fun being a teacher and getting to be in charge.  It was sometimes hard to keep everyone in order though and have them listen to you.  Especially with the distraction of the computers.  As a team we handled the misbehavior by going around and checking up on everyone and making sure there laptops where closed and they weren’t talking to the people next to each other.  I would have waited to give them the computers until it was absolutely necessary so they weren’t playing the game while we were talking.  The thing I will leave with from this activity is the necessity for people to care and help.  By help I don’t just mean go to a soup kitchen once or donate one dollar.  I mean do everything or as much as you can to help out.  For example, if everyone in our school went on freerice.com for 5 minutes every day, as a school we could raise a lot of rice for hungry people everywhere.  In my set-up group we worked together well even if not all of us got to preform during the assembly.  But, during the assembly everything went great and the performers really showed their practice.  For the weeks leading up to the teach-in our group changed our idea several times until we found the perfect one.  We started with jeopardy and then went to guessing game, to analyzing, back to guessing game, and then finally found freerice.com.  I think that next year everyone should really think about their ideas before writing about them.  I also think that interactive games and activities are a really good way to get more people to care about you subject and get involved in your subject.