come fly with me... box not required....
[This post is migrated from my original blog, "Mockingbirds Nest Here."]
“I guess I’m more of an outside the
box person. I haven’t really been
inside a box in a while.” An English I Student
That is what he said. We talked about paper airplanes a few weeks ago in English I and started talking about thinking outside the box. We made paper airplanes. We flew them. In English class. It was pretty awesome. And somewhat disruptive.
I know nothing about the science of flight.
But they did. They talked about wingspan, resistance, jet stream, gliders, jets, tailwinds, and a whole bunch of other things I had never heard of. I mean, I’ve stood at the crest of Kill Devil Hills in Kittyhawk overlooking the sea and the Outer Banks, the wind whipping my face with salt and sand. I’ve looked down the long line where Wright planes once flew, the grass green and soft beneath my comfortable walking shoes. I know very little about the science of flight except that I get in a plane, it stays up, I don’t die, it comes down, I get my passport stamped. But I do know about dreams and imagination. That was all I wanted to tap into with my Sam-I-Am Box Talk.
See? (You can also find this video for free here, but the book is really neat and worth the cost – it contains a DVD.) So yes, we were heading towards a conversation with 14-year-olds about thinking and working outside the box. They wrote things like the line above, which really rang true for me. I myself haven’t been in the box in a while. I took a new job – finding it was hard because so many people wanted me to climb back inside the box, to not rock the boat, to go at teaching with traditional, safe methods. I kept telling my mother: “Well, once you’ve taken the mustang out of the corral and cut all of her ties, how do you get her to go back in?”
Didn’t they know my blog was about singing, not roosting? We don’t just sit and watch learning and life happen here. I’ve never been able to do that.
But I had forgotten about the box with my own students. We’ve gotten kind of lazy about our attention to the box, and how we can step outside of it any time we want at our wonderful school. So I had them read some of their responses to the box question (are you outside or inside, why?) posed by the video again and think about the paper airplane activity. My 9th graders and I talked frankly about the 16 people who didn’t do their writing homework for today for their big newspaper project. We read our responses to the box question and talked about how being outside the box can affect our attention and work ethic. How sometimes creativity is its own double-edged sword. They mused, agreed, nodded, smirked, smiled, and also looked ashamed – all across the room. We finished our talk and they got back to work.
Within about 5 minutes – they had their mojo back. They remembered where the box was and they cast it aside and got excited about their propaganda projects on The Existence of Bigfoot, Unicorn Awareness, Promoting Teenage Hygiene, Bikini Bottom Fish Rights, and The Revolutionary Onslaught of the Uses of Duct Tape. And suddenly – the box wasn’t even in our classroom anymore. Everyone was outside, galloping like crazy people towards the limits of their imagination….
I sort of felt like singing, “come fly with me, let’s fly, fly away….” Out of the box, that is.
