Football and Black Ants

Sooo.... I got a new look. What do you guys think of the new background?
It was a pretty good football day. In fact, that's why this post is so late. I had a Giants @ Colts game calling my name. So quick recap of why today was so wonderful. The Titans lost, the Patriots lost, and the Colts won :) but that also meant that the Giants lost, and though I didn't want them to win, they kind of got slaughtered. Obliterated, demolished, stepped on...
Speaking of what wasn't stepped on, the ants from Black Ants and Buddhism. I knew I wanted to blog about this article when we got it. It just seemed that it was the most interesting. Not that the social studies textbook isn't something I would totally take on vacation with me ;)
There is so much to write about in this article. While I was reading my mind was just buzzing with tangents.
Firstly, I was really impressed with Som Jet. He really had conviction in his beliefs. It takes a lot of courage to stand up in front of your class protesting something that everyone else views as completely normal.
In the last part of the making connections section the kids were brainstorming a list of human rights and as I was reading them I thought about how innocent kids are. They have this clear sense of right and wrong and what's fair and what's not. I remember we watched a video in social studies this week and the kids were making rules for the classroom and I remarked to Heidi sitting next to me that kids are so smart, and that sometimes I think they're smarter than adults. Later that night I was thinking about what it would be like if kids really did make the rules. And I feel like in an ideal world it would work really well, but I guess right and wrong isn't always very clear and that's why things get a little complicated. However, I do think getting down (or maybe up) on our student's level and examining how they view the world can be very beneficial.
Lastly, I just want to say that we need more teachers like Ms. Cowhey. And we should aspire to approach teaching the way she does. She looks at every opportunity as a teaching moment. And not only a teaching moment, but a real in-depth lesson. The lesson could have been "be nice to ants" or "respect all creatures." But she chose to go on a much deeper level and connect it to people in her classroom and the beliefs people hold. She educated her students about the global world and made sure that they didn't live their whole lives hanging out with White Christian Americans, crushing ants and swatting mosquitoes and thinking they were like everyone else on the planet.