Values and Beliefs

With my 11th graders, I’m painfully working our* way through “A Discussion of American Beliefs and Values,” a somewhat dry interview with 4 American high-schoolers about what values are most important for them. I began yesterday with the first group.... awful. While they were half-lazing, half terrorizing each other, and no-percent working, I was doodling a cartoon of the word “ABYSMAL” in my grade book...

Today with the second group, I wasn’t expecting much better, but they they surprised me my working half-diligently almost the entire hour. Except one group, of course, who did half the exercises before rambling off-topic. More interesting than the worksheet to them was to make up bizarre, semi-thoughtful, “discussion questions.” The best two:

-What would you do if someone told you that you would die in one week?
-Would you rather kill yourself or kill another person? Does your answer change based on who the other person is?

It’s a great feeling of success for me, and I suspect for other teachers as well, when take something from class and expand it into their own lives in some way. Since these questions can, plausibly, be linked back to values and beliefs, I choose to believe that’s what the boys were doing. Not just slacking off...

*should it be “our way” or “my way”? “My way” sounds right, but isn’t the subject “I and the 11th graders,” therefore, “our way”? This sounds like a questions for Mrs. Chili’s Grammar Wednesday...

And speaking of slacking off... I’m off work for a week and off to Budapest to help train the new amcsik.... I mean, the new American CETP teachers.