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You can discover more about a person in an hour of play
than in a year of conversation
-- Plato 427-347 B.C.

Just a thought--if classrooms were somehow more fun, might kids learn better?  if one can learn more in an hour of play, how come all horseplay is forbidden at schools?

Of course, kids must learn appropriate behavior.  Sometimes it is not okay to do certain things that are okay at other times.  As a teacher I remember one time when our class had an official Paper Airplane Contest as a preferred learning activity.  The only eligibility requirement was that for about a week prior to the contest, no planes were thrown in class.   On the day of the contest, I sent two students who made bad choices to a time-out room, while the rest of us had a blast!  We trashed the room with paper planes and had a paper wad fight, (Rule: not thrown at the head or the fun’s over) then immediately cleaned up together afterwards. We got it out of our system, rewarded appropriate behavior, created a memory and taught two boys a lesson.

If we had our kids play longer they might sit still longer, having burned off their excess energy.  And despite all the talk about different learning modes, most lessons are heavily biased toward reading/writing with little more than token efforts in most cases for kinetic learners.  Far too much focuses on paperwork that could be automated.

Now, another subject but related.... We’ve become much too concerned with exalting other cultures, the ones around the world that we’ve been propping up with our tax dollars through the corrupt United Nations for decades.  It’s time to start communicating to students again just how special is our republican form of government is and understand the difference between it and a pure democracy.

It’s time for some unabashedly PRO-USA lesson plans!  America is STILL the best place in the world to live--and if you disagree, go live in Central America or Zimbabwe or North Korea and prove you’re not a fraud.

Reagan's lessons for Islamism

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