First off: Gev. McAdams and Gev. Jirovetz are amazing at what they do!

Secondly: they let me steal their amazing teaching strategies (and make me look good while doing that).

The 7th graders all read an article about the good and bad of urban gardening projects in Milwaukee (as it relates to our question of how do we get healthy food options to people cheaply; especially those living in poverty and food deserts).  When reading this article, they were asked to write down five passages from the article that they: 1. agreed with, 2. disagreed with, 3. had heard of before, 4. found interesting, and 5. wanted to talk about.  They did this process alone.  Next, they gathered in small groups of 4-5 students.  One person started the conversation by stating the topic (meaning “something I agree with…).  Every student then got a chance to share something that related to that topic, with the person who started the conversation having the last word.  From there, organic conversations and questions popped up, which was awesome to hear about (I heard a lot of “why do you think that” and even heard a conversation about the merits of investing in solar arrays for one’s house).

It was great to see them having an informed and intense discussion of the good and bad of urban gardening in Milwaukee.

really good conversation about solar arrays and their economic value

really good questioning and support for answers

really diverse set of opinions on offer

One of the driving questions my students want to know (and will ultimately answer) is how to get healthy food options to people in need for a cheaper price than they are currently available. Everyone that has been grocery shopping knows fruits and vegetables are far more expensive than processed chips or other factory-produced items.

As part of that process, each student came up with a policy/plan on how to get more healthy food to people in need (check out their blogs; in particular the blog post from February 14 titled “How to help close the hunger gap”). Those plans were a great start, but something was missing. Numerous students for example stated the government should just raise/lower prices in order to make food cheaper.

These statements directly correlated with some economic principles and curricular standards. Understanding the role of competition in an economy is one of the standards our students have yet to master. As a class, we began to study the meaning of and impact of price floors (minimum price something can be charged at) and price ceilings (maximum price something can be charged at) and how it impacts consumers and producers differently.

Feel free to ask your student to draw out a supply and demand curve, label everything, and explain in their words how price floors and ceilings impact people in our society. Hopefully we will use this information to better understand how to make policy/plans to get healthy food to people without harming others in our society.

Once a week, we spend some time in class responding to comments/questions posed on our blogs, as well as connecting with our friends in Malaysia.  Today, someone posted the following question on one of our blogs: How can we help those in poverty get a good education?  This was such as amazing question (especially as it related to our lesson from yesterday when discussing the factors leading to poverty).

As good as this question was, the student who had this posted on their blog asked if they could lead a classroom discussion on the topic.  They wrote the question on the board (in black) and started calling on students.  This lead to a further discussion on school funding (in red) and different examples/solutions to the question (in blue).  Aside from me writing to expedite the process, the students managed the entire conversation, challenging each other (respectfully), and really pushing their thinking.

Moral of the story: please continue to comment on their blogs and to push their thinking!

We all understand what poverty is.  Many of us don’t understand how one gets in poverty, but most importantly; how one gets out!  We began an activity in which students started to look at different factors related to poverty.  We utilized a Teaching Tolerance lesson focused on the factors leading to poverty.  Within each group, students read, brainstormed, and shared out different factors leading to poverty.  Eventually, each student will create a mind-map of the factors leading to poverty; allowing us to better understand why some people are in poverty.

Knowing the problem and allows us to work toward solving the problem.