Our Classroom, Not My Classroom

Welcome. I hope you are here to be re-energized, inspired, and ready to take on the challenge that is teaching. This site is hopefully a place for that. After teaching the same subject at the same school for over a decade, things started to get old. I was losing my passion. Nothing was really new and it was getting more difficult to engage students. I am an elective teacher and recruiting students to my classes was becoming more difficult. I think they knew my passion was fading.

One semester, I was teaching a unit about the history of technology. I was really having a difficult time engaging my students. Then, looking around at home I saw my Nintendo Game Cube, my Playstation, my SNES and had an idea. I brought my vintage systems in and hooked them up to some TV's. The students finally cared a little more. We talked about the sound, the graphics, the game cartridges and discs. We compared them to current systems (XBox 360 and PS3 at the time). We looked at other technologies like VCR's, tape cassettes, DVD's, digital cameras, Polaroids, old cell phones; you might be able to tell that I like to keep things.

As the students had this hands-on experience, mostly with the gaming systems, they enjoyed learning. After the unit ended, some students asked if I would keep the systems set up so they could play before school. I obliged and weeks later I had almost a dozen students coming in regularly to play. Game Club was born and populated with students that often did not want to play sports or be on the Student Council. They wanted to be with like-minded peers who loved gaming.

Over the years the club grew, and so did the relationships among those students as well as myself. I met students I would have never before interacted with. And they became some of my favorite memories. Overall what I saw was that games brought kids together, helped them build a sense of community, form relationships, and feel like they were a part of something more than themselves. They belonged.

This is why I have brought games and game elements into my curriculum. Although not all students have the same passion for games as my Game Club members, they all seem to play along well. Students work in teams to accomplish goals. They take on challenges or have boss battles. They climb leader boards and challenge other teams to feats of knowledge. They work as a class to outwit the other sections. Along with this sense of community and increased engagement, I deal with fewer discipline problems. I believe that games can help us as educators, but our students even more. After all, this is not really my classroom, it is our classroom.