Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire- Chapter 6 and 7- We Won't Get Fooled Again and What a Wonderful World

Chapter 6- We Won't Get Fooled Again
This chapter was really interesting since it dealt with standardized testing. Pretty much the only thing students do in school now is take test after test after test. They are being tested on everything. It can be incredibly stressful and exhausting for them. I'm sure many students get so tired and burned out on tests that they just give up and don't even try to do well on them. A lot of them don't really know how to prepare for those tests, either. So, I'm sure that can be very disheartening too. My favorite part of this chapter was when Rafe talked about his conversation with the students at the end of the day before the test. His students knew what they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to study. His activity with the practice multiple choice questions was really interesting. I think it's a great idea to teach students the reasoning behind the right answers and the wrong answers and how to tell the difference between them. I loved that his students would laugh out loud when they recognized a wrong answer on a test and the knew reasoning behind it. I hope I can help my students do that.

Chapter 7- What a Wonderful World
This chapter was very interesting. When I was in elementary school, history and social studies were always kind of boring. The teachers never really did anything to spice it up or make it interesting. Yes, we would watch films about historic events, but they were always during class and were always boring and uninteresting. I really like Rafe's ideas about showing films after school. I think that would be a really great thing to incorporate into my classroom, if I am allowed to. His geography game, Table Points, was really interesting as well. It really made the students think about what they were learning. They weren't just memorizing the positions of the countries on a map. They could do more than just label the countries. They could talk about the individual country and also the surrounding countries. It was really neat. They weren't just memorizing. They were actually attaining a vast knowledge of the countries. That would have been so fun to play in school. I really think activities like these could make social studies and history a lot more fun and interesting for the students.