100 Uses for an Exercise Band and Other Teacher Things

There is something absolutely delicious about an assignment that takes the task of thinking away from the teacher and hands it to the students.


It leaves time for dressing up in exercise bands and colanders, and for taking ussies with your collaborative, in-classroom, teaching partner.


We finally have our students in class and have been tasked with teaching them the fine art of communication with a dab (yes, Silas, I said dab) of critical thinking thrown in. My goal--make them work harder than I do while we are in the classroom.


By throwing a mix of items onto a table and asking the students to come up with 100 uses for those items in 10 minutes, at that moment, the students were thinking way harder than I was and thus working harder than I was, too.

A small success.


The students were no longer sitting down.

As a matter of fact, they were jumping up to hustle around their tables to stand next to one another, looking over one another's shoulders and talking to one another.

Group secretary

For those of you who have lived and/or taught here, you know that this kind of genuine communication between boys and girls is exciting when it happens as it seldom happens outside of families.

Wire hanger uses...

And to be frank, the students were not just talking--they were shouting at one another. They were beginning to network and to learn to learn from one another instead of just from me and my trusty colleague (the one with the colander hat).

Considering 100 uses for paper cups.

Okay, the students were not quiet. But quiet is boring. And while I am at it, textbooks, classes driven entirely by teacher lectures, and set syllabi are boring. Really super-duper boring.

There. I have said it. May the teaching deities strike me down.

This looks like success!