Widgets, Cogs, and Flipping the Syllabus

Bored with the traditional first day syllabus and icebreaker routine, this year I figured out how to spend the first day incorporating a simulation while walking on tables and watching Pink Floyd videos instead.

Emotionally Intelligent Classroom Maxims

Inspired by Dan Pink’s emotionally intelligent signage posts, I replaced my classroom rules that nobody (including me) pays attention to with a set of 3 maxims. Knowing that my maxims would lack concreteness and be equally as worthless as the old rules unless I could attach meaning to them I came up with a set of lessons to drive home the point.

Widgets and Cogs

For the first lesson I was able to repurpose an old assembly line simulation that I used to do during my Industrial Revolution unit. As I was mulling over ideas for the first maxim I came across the video for Another Brick in the Wall. The crazy scene where the faceless kids are marching into the grinder has always stuck in my mind and I got the idea to create a widget that looked like the grinder and have students make it piece by piece in assembly line fashion.

When students came in the tables in my room were arranged in three long rows and I had taped instructions for each students construction station on the opposite side from where they were sitting. I started by asking them what the most important innovation in American history was. I fielded their responses for while (some were really quite good) and told them they were all wrong. After a few minutes of this fun, I pulled out my completed widget and told them that I had devised it over the summer and it was in fact the most important American innovation ever.

Of course they then asked what it did and I had a lot of fun playing a wealthy self-important industrialist. I told them I could not possibly explain it to them because they were all just lowly cogs who lacked my genius abilities. I told them that a cog was a cheap easily replaceable part just like they were and they could not possibly figure out what it did but that I could teach them to build one. That’s when I introduced the assembly line as the second most important American innovation and shared some photos with them to show how they worked.

They were all ordered to stand up and take their places on the line. I came around and gave them the materials and simple tools they would need at each station. I had a few students left over that became “scrap monkeys” and were ordered to walk around picking up the scraps. They then worked the line as I walked around as the industrialist character and examined their work with a ruler chastising them for minor flaws in cutting or folding. I walked back and forth on table tops doing this making faces at the frightened 6th graders who happened to look into my room while passing in the hall.

At the end we debriefed and talked about the lowly level of skills and the negative emotions involved in such work. Nobody raised a hand when I asked if they wanted to ever work on an assembly line in real life. I told them that was good because those jobs had largely been replaced by robots or overseas laborers and were no longer common in America and that higher order thinking skills were now needed for most jobs. Maxim #1 was then revealed:

This is not a widget factory; you are not a cog

We discussed what it meant and I told them that I would never treat them as cogs but that meant that they were never to come into the class and act like cogs. I then told them that I would refuse to grade any work that looked like it was made by cogs in a widget factory. We finished by watching Another Brick in the Wall to see if the could spot where the idea for the widget came from. One girl said she was going to have nightmares.

Flipping the Syllabus

All of the syllabus information was moved to my website in video form and students were given the first day homework assignment of watching the videos with their parents and taking a simple Google Form quiz as they watched.  

The tedium of the first day was not completely removed since I wound up doing the same lesson five times. However, I did have much more fun and got to know the students on a different level. They also saw me in a different light and I was able to build excitement for the class. I had asked the students to view the flipped syllabus videos with their parents and while it is not something that they all did, my intent had been to engage them as well. So far the feedback from both students and parents has been positive with one girl even telling me, “my dad thinks you’re cool.” Considering the fact that nobody in any situation has ever referred to me as cool- I’ll chalk it up as a first day success.