Week 22 - Archigram and ice capades

This week, we began digging into the issue that will drive many of our Place Out of Time conversations over the course of the semester. It concerns an Italian court decision that overturned the conviction of a homeless man who had shoplifted a small amount of food. The court declared that his act couldn’t be considered a crime because he was in a state of need. To unpack the issue a bit, we went through an extremely simplified example of how societies function. (Ask your child about the desert island example.)

Week 21 -- Writing resumes and eating cake

The focus of our homeroom time remains learning about our Place Out of Time characters. Over the course of the week, the timelines of our lives have been completed and posted in the Middle School Commons, allowing us to see how our characters relate to one another in time. We also began speaking in character with one another, having first learned a little about the rules of improvisational acting.

Week 20 -- Snow, poetry, timelines, and Flatland

We had Monday off, and we were all greeted on Tuesday morning with a blanket of snow, but no snow day. Instead, our warm-up was “write a poem about what you would have done/how you’d be feeling if today had been a snow day.” Responses varied, and I was a little surprised to find that not everyone loves snow days. (Others, of course, decidedly do.) I didn’t specify the form, so there were rhyming couplets, acrostics, haiku, and acrostic-haiku, which may be something that was just invented. The bulk of our homeroom time was devoted to Place Out of Time research, including creating a timeline of the major events of each character’s life. The finished results will soon be going up on the wall next to our classroom, so the next time you’re in the building, come take a look and see how the lives of Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, or Jazz Jennings line up with one another.