Imagine this: you’re in a classroom. The lights, at their maximum setting, blare down onto you, making sure you can’t sleep right. The lecture about consciousness, or the judicial branch, or the Pythagorean theorem just seems to go into one ear and out the other. And as you hustle on to your next class or onto the bus you just seem to forget everything you heard.
In schools across America, this is the reality for many students. For so many of them, grades are going up in flames. Instead of having plain assignments, lectures and silence, some Trojan teachers try to make your learning experience more enjoyable, hoping to defeat the boredom with engaging, memorable lessons.
AP Psychology: “The Egg Project”
Teacher Michelle Leonard has a project that has her students take care of an egg as if it were their child for a week. There are different scenarios that they are given every day as the egg “grows up” until the very last day when it reaches “adulthood.”
“It’s a good example of how we develop and grow up as children,” said Leonard. “It teaches the kids to be a bit more responsible, and it lets them tap into their own creativity. They have a lot of fun, and they usually get super attached to the eggs.”
AP Government: “The Cake Project”
To show off the different kinds of federalism, teacher Lisa Chinn made a project where students make cakes. Each student shapes Play-Doh into a cake, based around one of the two kinds of federalism. However, if someone wants extra credit, they can bake a real cake based around the same premise and have the class try it.
“I think that whenever you can do projects like this, you should,” said Chinn. “Unfortunately though, sometimes you just can’t do stuff like that, especially in semester classes. And some people just don’t really like doing the hands-on stuff and not really put any effort into it.”
AP Human Geography: “Chocolate Day”
Just down the hall, in Kourtney Saavedra’s class, students learn about agricultural markets and have a treat too during what she calls “Chocolate Day.” They try chocolates while learning about global supply chains which creates it. It also addresses the dark side of the cacao trade, spotlighting some of the largest chocolate companies built off of child labor.
“I never thought about agriculture before and needed a way that was fun to teach them about commodity chains,” said Saavedra. “So to get them excited about it, I decided to use chocolate as our example, instead of giving them a ‘friggin packet.’ Coming up with [a fun project] takes a lot of prep, but in the end, it helps my kids remember it all, so it’s a lot easier.”
