Carrots

Every day I make a salad for lunch. (It’s because of Mark Bittman, if you must know.) And in every salad I include a carrot. I cut the carrot lengthwise into quarters and then, very carefully, I slice it cross-wise and throw it in.

Here’s what I’ve noticed happens when I cut up my carrots (if you’re going to try this at home, get the carrots from a local farm): they spring open.

That’s the best way to describe it. I slice the carrot and it, like, pops open.

Sproing!

So much so that, if I were to try to put the pieces back together into a round carrot, they wouldn’t fit together anymore. They’ve curved out, kind of expanded.

It’s as if, by cutting the carrot, I’ve released some pent-up energy. Some life.

Note that this doesn’t happen when I cut the carrot immediately into rounds. It only happens when I slice it lengthwise.

Which is important to my purpose here, which is to turn this otherwise irrelevant carrot-popping phenomenon into a

metaphor for teaching.

Here goes.

When you’re thinking about how to help students engage with a bit of content, is there some way to slice it so that it pops open? Some obtuse angle you can take? Different from the same ol’ same ol’ cutting-the-carrot-into-boring-rounds approach?

  • Like talking about the Treaty of Versailles from the point of view of Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating bout of the flu?

  • Like turning a chapter from a novel into a scene in a screenplay?

  • Like having students dress up like scientists, adopt a scientist’s voice (whatever they think that sounds like), and discuss a scientific concept the way scientists would? Synchronously or asynchronously (by videotaping themselves giving their own little possibly satirical mini-lecture)?

  • Like creating individual superheroes and storyboarding their solutions to math problems?

  • Like asking students to write the worst conceivable essay — being sure to define “essay” as a coherent string of a certain number of paragraphs with an intro and a conclusion (so students have to work at writing badly) — and then asking the class to choose the winners? the best of the worst and the worst of the worst?

  • Like having Kindergartners demonstrate for each other how to do something: how to draw a tree? how to wink? how to twirl or do a somersault or put on lipstick?

How can you teach to release pent-up energy?

To let life out like a spring?

(or a sproing)

That’s this week’s mantra.

Betsy BurrisComment