Christmas and Joy in the Classroom: what are students doing in school on the last day before winter break?
Please don't make this political. It's not.
Welcome! I'm Lauren Brown and this is my newsletter on education issues that impact all of us. Here we go:
“Ms. Brown, can we have a party?” “Can we just do nothing?” “Are you going to make us put away our phones on Friday?” “I won’t be here. My family is leaving early for vacation.”
“You’re not going to try to teach anything, are you?”
Christmas and the break from school is a Big Deal. Anyone who has ever been a teacher or a student knows how hard it is to motivate during the challenging period between Thanksgiving and winter break (the weeks leading up to spring break and the entire month of May aren’t easy either).
In the last few years, I’ve been hearing more about students who don’t come to school on the last day because they’ve convinced their parents that “we’re not doing anything, anyway.” One teacher told me she got an email from a parent asking if they were doing anything at school that day, because if not, the parent was going to take their child holiday shopping.
Call it vacation creep. Blame it on the fallout from Covid. Or perhaps, we can connect it to a larger problem that also manifests itself in our dropping test scores.1 Kids just aren’t learning enough in school. Period.
So what do we do that last day or days before winter break that can straddle the divide between learning and celebration?
One of the buzz words in education in the last few years has been “joy.”2 It is everywhere. The word, I mean, not necessarily actual joy. I’m not anti-joy. Who could be anti-joy? But what does “joy” look like in a classroom in December? Is it holiday decorations and treats? Parties? Holiday word find worksheets? Can’t we do better than that? Dare I ask, is it possible to find joy while actually teaching something worthwhile? Can kids find joy in…learning?
Last week I wrote about curiosity in the classroom. It is our job as educators to find ways to stoke students’ natural curiosity in the world around them. It is our job as parents to push our schools to do this, as well as doing what we can to support teachers at a stressful time of year. (Remember that teachers have families and holiday shopping to get done, too!)
We can do this without violating the First Amendment or crushing holiday spirit. And without making things political. The tweet below is what actually inspired this post.
I will save you the burden of reading through the “outrage” thread (linked in the caption above, if you must). The gist is that some teachers are seeking alternative ways to bring light and joy into the classroom in December while others feel that de-centering Christmas is caving in to a minority of students, missing the opportunity to celebrate a joyful holiday that the majority of Americans celebrate in order to cater to a few. Mostly, the gripes were about decorations in classrooms, but it got me thinking about what we teach at the time and the lameness of the holiday word find puzzles.
There are plenty of things we can teach about in December that are worthwhile, will spark student curiosity without violating the First Amendment nor stoking political outrage.
First off, we can and should teach about religions. There are lots of them. Christianity is one of them. I can tell you from my experience as a teacher, there are a lot of Christian kids who don’t know basic facts about Christianity.3 Instead of arguing about whether we should have Secret Santas or Christmas trees in our classrooms, perhaps we should teach some basic facts about the religion itself. This does NOT violate the First Amendment as long as you are not proselytizing.4
You can teach about different holiday celebrations around the world. But if you do, do it right. Don’t just teach about Hanukkah, because although it falls in December, it is one of the more minor Jewish holidays. It is not, I might add, “the Jewish Christmas.” Teach about the major Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. Teach about the other major world religions—Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Teach about other people who aren’t religious or who are not members of one of the 5 major religions, such as indigenous peoples. And about Christians who don’t celebrate Christmas because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or who celebrate it in a secular way.
If you teach about Kwanzaa, do that right, too. It is not a religious holiday. Don’t let students walk away with the misconception that it is the “African American Christmas” and that all African Americans celebrate it.
But you don’t just have to teach about holidays. If you’re a high school teacher, you probably don’t have to worry about this at all, because you have final exams coming and can just focus on that. For teachers in middle school, whose students may be past the holiday stage, there are plenty of other topics that can be a break from the regular curriculum and thus infuse “joy” without sacrificing learning.
In the next section of this post, I offer up 3 ideas for this— Time Magazine’s person of the year (can you guess before you peek?), the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, and religion around the world.
And if you’re not a teacher, maybe you can check out the stuff below as interesting topics for family or holiday time.
Here are my top 3 favorite lesson ideas for the last day before winter break:
Cool topic #1 - Time Magazine’s Person of the Year
Trump has just made it to the list of people who have been named Man of the Year more than once. It’s a fascinating thing to discuss in social studies classes. Admit it—you want to know who made the list more than once, don’t you? You want to know who was person of the year last year, don’t you? (Trust me, your students will want to know that one.) Check it out at Wikipedia. While you’re there, check out the cool story on why F.D.R. (the only person to have made the list 3 times) replaced the Disney character of Dumbo in 1941. Or why Michael Moore and Mel Gibson weren’t on the cover in 2004. Or why it started in the first place.
You can have students guess, compete on teams or not. Turn it into a Kahoot. Or just have an informal discussion. You can see my discussion points from my 2022 version here. Then I gave them time to check out the whole list on Wikipedia. There’s quite a bit to talk about— the importance of individuals vs. groups (check out the nominations for 2020 on slide #20, the US-centeredness of it, the role of women, the effort to avoid controversy (read about the 2001 choice). There are so many ways to extend this activity. Have students think about a runner’s up list (answers here). Or compare the actual winners, who are decided by Time editors vs. choices made via online polls. Or check out the list of after-the-fact women on the cover.
Science teachers can also use the topic and have students guess which scientists/science topics made the list. And if Time Magazine could retroactively go back and do scientists from previous years and even centuries, who would be chosen? Why?
Cool Topic #2 - the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year
Until 2020, I didn’t know such a thing existed. But it made for one of my more interesting lessons on Zoom in December 2020. English teachers could have a field day with this, but so can others. I know I did. Check out a few of my slides here. It’s a great way to have fun with words. Check out slide #6 for the 2020 words— so many of them! What a fun opportunity to teach about the portmanteau (my favorite from 2020: covidiot). Have students come up with some others. Show them a list of words they might not realize were originally portmanteaux: internet, podcast and more. Have them read this article about the 2024 word, brain rot, and the other finalists and runner-ups and fun facts. One of those fun facts: one year the word of the year was an emoji! Guess what year and which emoji. Answer at the end of the post.
Need a whole lesson? In my previous post I wrote about how easy it is to use ChatGPT to brainstorm things for lessons. So I asked ChatGPT to write a lesson on using the word of the year. Check it out here.
Another riff: if you have more than a day you want to fill with end-of-the-year material, have students reflect on the contrasts between the thinking that goes into choosing a “person of the year” and that which leads to the “word of the year.” Obviously, both honor people or words that have made an impact. This is a great opportunity to teach a fabulous word, zeitgeist. Have students write something about the zeitgeist of being whatever age they are in 2024. Bonus points if they can mention the current and 3 previous winners of “person of the year” and use 5 OED words/runner-ups of the year.
Cool Topic #3 - Demographics of Religion in the United States
Given the ferocity of the “please don’t make us have to do work right before break” comments, even I was surprised to find my students genuinely engaged with this one. It was December 2019, and I think we had shortened periods that year. My son was home from college, my high school daughter had just finished her finals, and I was more interested in spending time with them than planning a lesson. I gave my 8th graders this website, The Global Religious Landscape, from the Pew Research Center and instructions to explore all the links, find 3 things that surprised them and share it with a partner. For example, check out the map below. A quick glance makes Christianity look like the most common religion in the world. But compare it to the pie graph below and you get a more nuanced understanding.
As I walked around the room, making sure they were actually doing what I asked and not playing video games, I was thrilled by their reactions. I remember them calling me from around the room, “Hey, Ms. Brown. Check this out!” and asking me questions and pointing at their screens while they showed something to the student next to them. It was a great opportunity to learn more about the world, work on data analysis (math skills like reading charts), and learn vocabulary (words like “unaffiliated.” Check out more recent religious data from the Pew Research Center, like this table which lists every country’s percent (or number) of different religious groups in 2010, 2020 and projected through 2050. Or this overview. (I would have gotten this post finished earlier if I hadn’t gotten sucked into all this good stuff!)
Cheers to your children and/or students ending the year by learning something worthwhile. Farewell 2015. I mean 2024. The year of the 😂 emoji “word” of the year was back in 2015.
😂
Last week, reports came about a precipitous drop in national test scores in math—worse than the drop in other countries. A few days ago, a report came in about adult scores on basic numeracy and literacy, showing a drop in the skills of US adults compared to those in other wealthy countries. According to the website of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), the study is “designed to measure, analyze, and compare adults’ foundational skills of literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.”
See “Ode to Joy: A look at how we used education's new buzz word in the past year” from a post by Harvard School of Education back in 2022. Two years later, it’s still a buzz word. A conference in Connecticut this past May: “Boldly Reimagining Our Schools: Nurturing Genius and Joy.” A credit union in Michigan awarding “Joy in Teaching” grants to teachers. Just enter “joy in education” in a search engine and you’ll see what I mean.
Just a few of the many questions I have been asked: Doesn’t Christian and Catholic mean the same thing? Is Jesus that dude on the cross? Don’t Jews celebrate Christmas? What’s the Exodus?
See chapter 9 of Finding Common Ground: A First Amendment Guide to Religion and Public Schools for guidance and ReligionMatters.org for materials and resources. Find other sources at the bottom of this post.
In rush to finish this post, I neglected a key point: we need to know our students. By December, a good teacher should ideally have a sense of what religions/how religious their students are, what holidays they might celebrate and what they do not. That's a key part of relationship building and trust that are essential for effective learning to take place.