“A Beautiful Mind” is a powerful movie telling the story of the brilliant mathematician John Nash.
There is a scene in the movie in which John Nash, played by Russell Crowe, at a loss for space to record his ideas, uses his windows to write his formulas on, trying to keep up with his ideas as they race to the forefront of his mind.
Each of our students needs an opportunity to express their thoughts from their beautiful minds. Some students need to do this in a manner that is outside of the box, and that can be as simple as writing on a window!
This past year I was assigned a new classroom, one with windows! I was excited not only because did this mean that I would have natural light in my room (and actually know what the weather was like outside), but it also meant that I could provide a new canvas for my students as they developed their beautiful ideas.
Our school is a “problem based learning” school. This means that typically at the beginning of a unit I will present my students with a problem, our objectives for the unit, and suggestions for how we might attain our objectives while solving our problem. I saw my new windows as a great, fun, engaging way for my students to develop and map out their ideas as they attempted to solve their unit problem.
In my classroom I have two traditional white boards, one easel style board and 4 large windows. When I presented to my students the option to write on the windows (!) most of them stared at me waiting for the punch line. A few though grabbed the opportunity, and the provided pens, and began taking over the windows. Slowly, the others realized that this was truly “legal,” and they too began writing on the windows. In fact, each day it became a race to acquire the limited window space. What I saw as a result was their ideas and their mind maps becoming bigger and better - because they wanted to write on as much of the window as possible!
As mentioned, I have 2 traditional white boards and one large, 6’ easel style board. After the windows, the easel board is a student favorite. It is in the back of the room, in a corner, perhaps a bit inconspicuous, even at 6’ tall. My foreign language students love to use this board for their messages, in foreign language and always appropriate, to the other students that use my classroom. It is amusing to come in each day to see what has been communicated and in what language, whether it be Spanish, French or Hebrew!
Students need a place and a way to express themselves. They each have a beautiful mind and we as educators need to provide safe ways for them to communicate - even if that means on a window or allowing them to “tag” a white board.
