During the week of Aug. 21, many freshmen students were asked to live with a rock taped to their hands for an entire day during a boulder take on their assigned reading.
“I wanted to get students to see what it’s like to live with a disability for 24 hours,” said English Teacher Samantha Max.
Max first had students find a rock of any size, then, without telling them why, she taped the rock to their hands. Then, they went through a 24 hour period where they could not take it off without teacher-parent consent.
“I just spend a lot of my time thinking about how I can get students engaged,” said Max. “I know that a lot of [freshmen] coming into high school may not be very interested in reading or writing, so it’s always a challenge for me to try and figure out how to get them involved and engaged in the stories.”
The activity Max is requiring of her students relates back to the current curriculum. They are reading a story called The Scarlet Ibis, which includes a boy who has a disability and, in turn, is not treated very well. Not only does she highlight the skill of empathy for the boy in the book, but hopes to teach kindness to her students as well.
“I think that technically, my job as an English teacher, is to teach English, but that’s really a small part of what I do,” said Max. “When kids leave my classroom, I want them to not only know the English skills, but I want them to be better people.”
The rock taped on each student’s hand helped them understand the difficulties that disabilities may cause. The hands-on activity was implemented to try and change perspectives while also relating students to the curriculum and text.
“I wanted kids to learn to be accepting of people that may be different from them [and] that they may not understand,” said Max. “I thought that if they had a 24 hour period with a rock taped to their hand, they would obviously come into situations, where they struggle to do sports, or maybe they felt pressure from those around them.”
Max hopes that other teachers will try this strategy of teaching as well because it allows the students to remember more than just the curriculum. Fellow Timber Creek teacher Beth Brentlinger had her classes take part in the assignment during the same week as Max’s.
Although it may be centered around the literature studied, students are able to connect these lessons to daily life.
“I would encourage other teachers to be as weird and strange as possible, in your lessons, be as out of the box as you can,” she explained, “because that’s the stuff that gets kids excited, those are the things that they remember.”
Students posted their experiences with the rocks attached to Twitter using the hashtag #TCRockChallenge. See their posts below: