Project Bridging Cultures as salon

As students are looking ahead to the future (as Amanda wrote about in the last post), there is also plenty to occupy them in the here and now.

Our classroom serves a number of roles: homework center, resource center, and activity center, among others. It is in this last category that students have been really making this space their own.

Chess continues to be incredibly popular. We often see our "chess team" engaged in play, especially during fifth period lunch and after school. Our room has also become the meeting place for a student-run calligraphy club. On Tuesday afternoons, the members cover half the conference table in newspaper and practice writing beautiful Chinese characters. Once in a while, a student brings in a guitar and strums in the background.

Students also often debate in our room. One particularly hot topic has been the presidential election. Many students have a candidate that they support, and some of them even voted on Tuesday in the Pennsylvania primaries. When I ask them about the issue they care about most, their responses are various: the war in Iraq, the economy, health care, the environment.

Another popular recent debate had to do with the death penalty. Some of our students had been studying the death penalty in their classes, so I asked them if they were in favor of or against it. Interestingly, the students were almost evenly split, and each side had a very strong opinion of why the death penalty should or should not be allowed. Over the course of several days, they had intense discussions with each other, bringing up point after point even after our program had closed for the day.

For students who are often graded in school based on whether they have the right answer, these discussions can be an opportunity for them to express themselves and learn from each other without having to worry about being wrong. For students who sometimes feel bored by their classes, they may feel more engaged having discussions concerning the same issues that have confounded countless philosophers and intellectuals. And for students who often feel shy about speaking English, these conversations are a great way for them to talk about real, substantive issues and practice their language skills without it feeling like work.

I wonder, what will they talk about next week?