Peanut butter and Jelly, Salt and pepper, Fantasy Football
and Geopolitics. – wait, what was that last one?! You read correctly. Two terms
that don’t seem to fit together were combined in 2009 to encourage kids to get
interested in global news stories. In an article found on KQED News I read the
story of exactly how it happened. The article by Greg Toppo tells us of a
teacher, Mr. Nelson, who was disheartened after he started in a class 9th grade
students who were anything but engaged in global affairs. When recalling the
disinterest he claims,
“I was kind of shocked, when I started teaching, at how
zombified ninth graders were. They just sort of looked through me.”
Toppo, Greg. "Teaching Geopolitics: Fantasy Football as
a Learning Game."MindShift. KQEDnews, 4 May 2015. Web. 07 May 2015.
The only thing that Nelson thought they seemed to be
interested in were video games. This love of games, the article claims, was
shared by Nelson as well. Though the games he played were a bit different than
the games of his students. Fantasy Football was the game that held Nelson’s
interest and he began to notice it helped him further his understanding of
football and what would happen behind the scenes. To build his team and make
the greatest decisions he spent time studying team members and stats. Then a
lightbulb clicked.
To get his students interested in foreign affairs and world
news he would challenge them to build a fantasy geopolitics team. The winning
teams would be the teams whose countries were featured the most in news
stories. Everyone suddenly became interested in studying who was in the public
eye. Things like earth quakes and revolutions could suddenly throw a loop in
everything so students had to stay up to date in order to keep their teams
strong.
No comments:
Post a Comment