Jeff for America

My school’s elective program is kind of messy. Back in the fall, we were told a week before school started that every teacher would be in charge of teaching an elective of their choice. Every day. All year. Thankfully, it’s turned out better than I expected. Ungraded, under supervised and completely student focused, the electives program offers students a variety of extra curricular paths to follow and remain engaged with throughout the week. If they hate the academics of school, the idea goes, at least they’ll have something to invest themselves in at school. Despite the often-frantic planning, I think we’re lucky to have a program that allows students to spend part of their  day learning about things that are as off-topic and non-traditional as German, Robotics, Drumming and Yoga. The list goes on, and every trimester, we get to shake things up and offer a new slew of classes.

My first elective was student government. It was a feeble attempt to relive the glory days of my own schooling and ended up being a disappointment. The only meaningful output was our school climate survey, which I wrote about before. This trimester, I chose to go with a topic that excited and enthused me – teaching American Sign Langauge. I took two years of ASL in college and have been looking for a way to stay in practice, so it just made sense.

Definitely obscure for my students, ASL was a popular choice and I ended up with a good group of kids that took on the language with intense interest and dedication. There are a few that can out-sign me at this point. Kind of embarrassing, I sometimes let them lead the class in whatever topic we explore.

And, as our culminating project for the trimester, a small group from the class interpreted a song in ASL and performed it for the school last month. I was so, so very proud of them. Check out a scaled down version of the performance below, which we’ve also posted to YouTube. Our goal is to reach 1,000 hits by the end of the year. So…watch as many times as you’d like. Enjoy!

- Jeff

Note: I have received the permission of all the participant’s guardians to publicly broadcast this performance. Just a disclaimer for those of you worried about my legal obligations.