“I couldn’t wait to show you what I found out on the news.”

There was a problem with the water pipes in our school that necessitated early release.  The students were told that as soon as lunch was over, they’d be sent home.  The bell rang at 1:01 for the kids to go home.  I planned on using the extra time to get some work done, so I settled into my chair and got out my to-be-graded stack.  Just as I got comfortable, my door burst open and my Speech students, Heather*, an athlete, stood at the threshold.  She held out a printed out news article.  “I couldn’t wait to show you what I found out on the news.  Gaddafi is dead!  I’m so excited.  I knew you would be too, and I wanted to be the one to tell you.”  Anticipation and excitement shone in her eyes as she pushed the article toward me.  She said, “I was just surfing the internet, and I saw this headline, that Gaddafi was dead.  I thought, ‘That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about in Speech,’ and I had to know more.  So, I checked it out, and when I read it, I just knew I had to print it and show it to you right away.” 

In my Speech class, we are working on building students’ background knowledge to enable them to do extemporaneous speeches about world events.  So, each week, they are required to choose a big topic like environment, politics, or international issues.  Then, they find three reliable articles to share with the class.  We talk about the articles they bring in, and I try to fill in the gaps.  When one student brought in an article about Gaddafi being tracked in the desert a few weeks ago, I asked the class what they knew about what was happening in Libya.  They didn’t know anything about it.  The next day, I showed them a few articles from Time magazine about him and his opposition.  We went back to an article posted in February, at the beginning of the resistance, to find out what the complaints of the rebels were.  Then, we talked about how it would feel if we were asked to live in a regime like that.  Students were appalled by the accusations of the Arab Spring, and couldn’t understand how someone who treated his people so badly could continue to be in power for so long.  Of course, this led to discussions of the importance of being active citizens to make sure something like that doesn’t happen in the United States.

 Students are engaged in the current events collection and discussion, as is evidenced by Heather’s excitement.  When asked at the beginning of the year if she read the news, she told me she did not.  Now, she cares about finding out what is happening in the world.  The fact that she’s the one who brought me the news thrilled me.  Sometimes I’m not sure how much of an impact I’m making, and if they are going to take what they learn in class to apply it to their real lives.  Times like this give me hope.