I wanted to introduce imperialism and colonialism to my students in a way that would make an emotional impression so I had my principal and IT people come in and take away all of their laptops. We are a brand new school that is 1:1 laptops and the students love them.

I told the students that there was a board meeting and they decided that one of the new programs in the vocational school in our building needed them more than we did. So because of budget cuts our students were losing their computers and might get new ones next year.

It worked wonderfully. Some of them got mad. Some got emotional. Some started texting their friends or parents about it. Students choose to come to our school from 20 districts in our county. So many of them said “why should we even come here?” or “I am going to go back to my home district.” One of my favorite responses came from a student from a rural district who was very upset, “I am a farmer and this is the only technology I have. You can’t take it away from me!”

Once they were loaded on a cart and taken away I tried to continue teaching but the students kept interrupting with questions and complaints. I then asked them how it would feel to go home and have someone meet them at the door and tell them this was not their house and to leave. I then asked them how to think about how it must have felt to be Chinese, African, or Native American and have Europeans do just that.

In one class a few students had some hints that it was not real and refused to turn in their laptops in “protest.” There were two groups of protesters. One group sat on the floor in the middle of my room, but when I called them out individually they all turned in their computer. The other group was off to the side of the room and refused to give up their computers. This led to a good discussion afterwards of protesting and how they have been trained by schooling to be obedient and compliant.

When I revealed that they were getting their computers back some students just thought it was a joke. I think they got the connection after we talked about it as we gave them their computers back and specifically talked about colonization. We then looked at this slide and did “Knows and Need to Knows” (part of the PBL process).

This is where I have one question about the PBL process. The students were so excited after the simulation but by the time we got done with KNTK’s I felt like they were almost lulled to sleep. To me we lost all of our momentum as a class and went from excited to bored.

My plan is to try to re-capture some energy tomorrow by scrapping my planned mercantile simulation and instead leading a “research session” on Libya and Quidaffi. I am hoping the spontaneity of it will generate some enthusiasm because I don’t know where we will end up and want students to pursue it however they choose to.