Curiousity and Teaching!

One of my all-time favorite commercials reminds us to, "stay curious, my friends!" Especially good advice for teachers.

This week, I asked you to figure out how your school community voted in the last presidential election and how that might impact your teaching. I thought it was a wonderful conversation. One thing that surprised me, though, was how hard this task was going to be for some of you.

For East Lansing, it was somewhat easy. The boundaries for the East Lansing School District overlap nicely with the city borders. This is not the case for many of you, that have school districts that draw from diverse townships and counties! Of course, even in East Lansing, with schools of choice, there are many students attending from outside the city borders. So defining who is in the East Lansing School District community is not so easy after all!

While information on Ingham County is easy to find, the city of East Lansing was a bit harder. Nonetheless, I could pretty easily find a chart of precinct reporting and do some easy math!

But some of you were going to have a harder time, with precincts spread across diverse political boundaries. It took some searching, but finding this map with the national precinct results--put together by a graduate student at Washington State University--was well worth my time spent looking around. What a great resource to use with our students!

There is a lesson here. As teachers, our own questions can drive our search for resources, which we can then share with our students! We never stop learning!

I look forward to talking about Hamilton and the power of collective memory over the coming weeks!