[etni] moving experiences in the classroom
- From: Bari Nirenberg <bnirenberg@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Etni <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:25:02 +0300
Inspired by a British Council demonstration that I saw last year, I decided
to do a project on the Paralympics in my 10th and 11th grade (gifted)
classes. We started the project on the first day of school and most of the
kids had never heard of the Paralympics. They had to choose a sport, learn
about it and how it is different from the able-bodied sport, learn about
how athletes are classified and choose an athlete to research and follow
during the games. Right from the start, the project was a big hit in both
classes. For the first time in all my years of teaching, I had kids
thanking me for choosing such an interesting and inspiring topic to work
on. I also did a shorter unit on the Paralympics in my 8th and 9th grade
classes and those kids came to school every day and told me about what
they'd seen on TV, who had won medals, etc.
Today, the first group did their oral presentation. They had chosen the
sport of wheelchair tennis and Noam Gershony was the athlete that they
researched. Note that they had chosen both the sport and their athlete
before the games had even started, so when Gershony won a gold medal for
Israel, they were very excited. As part of their presentation, they showed
a slide show with pictures of Noam Gershony, starting with a picture of him
as a pilot before his accident in 2006. For the background music, they
chose the Beatles song "Blackbird":
"...Take these broken wings and learn to fly,
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise."
That was about the time I started to tear up -- I don't know if they'd
heard this song playing somewhere in connection to Gershony's win at the
Paralympics or what, but the words were so fitting. At the end of the
presentation, they showed a clip from Channel 1 in which Gershony was
awarded his medal and Hatikva was played. Those of you who saw this know
that he started crying (not just tearing up, but actually sobbing, head in
hands -- I didn't realize how hard he had cried until I saw the entire clip
today). At this point in the presentation, I was trying not to actually
start crying myself in front of my students (I think they were getting
rather teary-eyed, as well) -- I was very glad that the lights were off so
that they could show the clip.
In addition to the moving video and pictures, the three girls who did this
project also talked about how much of an inspiration Noam Gershony is to
them, how they now know that they can do anything they put their minds to.
They called him an Israeli "hero", not because of his achievements in
sport, but because of his sacrifice for his country.
I've had students put a lot of work into a project before, but I've never
seen them get as personally involved as they did in this one. This was
definitely one of the most moving and most satisfying teaching experiences
I've ever had and I just wanted to share.
Bari Nirenberg
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