Some days you have that eureka moment. Today was just such a day.

Today was a busy day, 5 classes picking up one for my colleague Diana who was off feeding the five thousand or something equally as worthy as part of the schools CAS or community action.

But my first class of the day made the whole day for me a grade 8 class on the second lesson of their box manufacture program. What made it so special was that 5 or 6 pupils came to me during the lesson where they were basically self driven doing design ideas and sorting out images on the PC and asked if they could redesign the actual box, this is almost better than I had hoped as it shows independant research, and desire to step "outside the box" pardon the pun. Naturally I have given them complete freedom to be as creative as they can be and I will mark appropriately for independant thought and a desire to stretch their abilities.

It is moments like that where as a technology teacher I feel the job is so worthwhile, where the student takes control over their learning and rather than settle for the simple and easy option wants to experiment and achieve something more than the basic box design they were given within the brief.

The other classes were all grade 6 and my expectations of them are a lot less, there are some interesting aesthetic designs but no one has attempted to change the basic box design but rather they are content to work through the process as it has been laid out for them. This I feel is fully acceptable and having seen some of the design ideas I am happy they will achieve some good results.

Considering this project came to me on a quiet Saturday evening and has shown that the kids do rise to a challenge by doing, not just listening. I might have to do a quick VAK survey at some point to see how many Visual, Auditory or Kinaesthetic learners I have in the classes just out of personal curiosity I know I did a similar survey in UK between primary and secondary and found that in Primary <11 the split was 60% Visual 30% Kinaesthetic and 10% Auditory but in Secondary 12> it changed to 30% Visual and 60% Kinaesthetic with still just 10% Auditory.
I am looking forward to tomorrow to see if any of the other Grade 8 classes I have tomorrow (I have 3) are equally as innovative or whether they are happy to stay in their comfort zone. (I would like to give some credit to John Dakers from Glasgow University, He had a very unusual teaching style that I doubt everyone could appreciate - I know I fought against it for 2 of the 4 years I spent there, but in the end I feel I probably learned more from his lectures than the lectures that gave me screeds of notes.) Strange how reflection lets you see what wasn't obvious at the time or is that hind sight ....