Intense, Insane, Interminable

Twice a year at our school we have an I³ Day or I -Cubed Day. At this point I really can't remember what the three I's stand for. It could stand for Initiating Intelligent Interaction or maybe Introducing Integrated Information. However, yesterday it felt like the three I's stood for Intense, Insane, Interminable.

Let me explain what I³ Day is. The entire campus teaches various skills and objectives, all centered upon one theme or literature selection. Each teacher is provided with a lesson and all supplies needed for the lesson. Homeroom teachers then teach this same lesson throughout the day as other classes rotate into their classroom. Yesterdays selection was "June 29, 1999". This is a story about a young girl who is doing an experiment for school using vegetable plants. Her experiment is to send plants aloft and see if there is any change in them. Weeks later gigantic vegetables start falling from the sky. Where have they come from? (Go to Blue Sunflower Associates and buy "June 29, 1999" find out.)

I teamed up with a fellow Kindergarten teacher and we both did a lesson on shopping for vegetables at the grocery store. The students were supposed to shop, pay for, and get the appropriate change for their selections. The only problem was we only had 30 minutes for each lesson and 17 - 25 students per rotation into the room. We occasionally modified the lesson and challenged the students to shop for vegetables and try to hit a target amount and not go over. The amount we chose was $3 - $5 depending upon the grade level. Some students did quite well, others broke the bank.

Don't get me wrong. The day is great. Teachers get to see a different set of kids every 30 minutes. (This way we all get to see what the other teachers have to deal with on a daily basis and they see what you deal with.) As a Kindergarten teacher I love it because I get to see my previous students and get to interact with them once again. I also get to see what wonderful students many of them have become.

Now the Intense, Insane, Interminable part. It doesn't really have anything to to do with the lessons, the story, the students, or anything like that. It has to do with the music that our Instructional Specialist chose to signify that it was time to rotate; which is what my head began to do after hearing the same music and chorus over and over and over and over. You get the idea. It was something about vegetables and every time I heard it began to feel like someone was taking a hot poker and sticking it in my head. It really was Intense, Insane, Interminable. Maybe Kathy will write in and tell me the name of the song so I can share it with all of you. After all, you need an I³ day also.

PS: A Google search for June 29, 1999 yielded many scholarly articles. However none are related to what we taught. Goodness knows that we could have done some great lessons on "Neurotoxic Lesions of Basolateral, But Not Central, Amygdala Interfere with Pavlovian Second-Order Conditioning and Reinforcer Devaluation Effects". © 2008 Barry T Horst


This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Please visit the Giveaway of the Day near the bottom of the left sidebar for free software downloads daily.