#drawing conclusions

Another day of spending 12 hours trying and failing to get kids to think for themselves.

I'm so tired and so frustrated I just wanted to cry and scream. and stick my fingers in my eyes when I got home from work today.

Every time we do a project, we have to dumb it down. And every time we dumb it down, we think there is no way they (the kids) could have a problem with this. There is no way they could not handle this. They can do this, right?

We gave them a list of Texans or people who had come to Texas to research. They would pick a person, get on Google, find some different websites. Then they had to answer questions like when & where they were born, 3 important facts about them, and what was their impact on Texas?

But instead of finding a website with the person's biography, reading it, and coming to their own conclusions, they were trying to Google every separate question to find a definitive answer from Google.

When they got to the impact part, they were stumped because they had not read any of the biographies.

Then they would come to me wanting to know what the impact was. And I wasn't going to tell them so I would ask them What did this person do?

And in most cases, they could not even tell me.

So I would literally show them here is me typing in the name, here is me choosing a website that looks good. This is a biography, here i am reading through the biography. And this is telling me what this person did.

Even when the accomplishments of these people were:

Being The first African American rodeo performer

inventing barbed wire.

Forging the first ever cattle trails in texas,

Inventing evaporated milk

THE KIDS COULD NOT TELL ME HOW ANY 1 OF THOSE THINGS MADE A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES OF TEXANS!!!!

Then on one class while I was trying to explain this to a handful of kids, the others would not stop talking long, enough for me to even be able to talk!!

part 1 - part 2 - part 3

tysm to everyone who interacts with this!! peoples comments and tags quite literally make my day and id love to hear all your feedback for this or suggestions for other fics!

i also have a small favour to ask! for part 5 i need some twitter names and usernames, so if anyone has twitter and would like to be featured, or would like their tumblr url used (youll have to come up w/ a name), put them in the notes and ill happily use them!

tw: cursing (not a lot), death mention