My magical moment came when Al, who RARELY completed work for me spent a week working on a photomovie about New Orleans. I gave them a template to follow that required them to plug in adjectives and nouns to describe New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.
Al worked on it for 2 days during class as well as before and after my class. It was coming along when a tech glitch in MovieMaker wiped out all of the hard work that he had done. I was more than willing to give him credit for the assignment because I saw how hard he worked on his project. He did not want me to do that, instead, he re-did the assignment and spent day and night for the next 2 days finishing and perfecting what he had done.
His final project brought me to tears and still does even as I write about it four years later. I provided them with some pictures of the devastation done to the city after the levees broke and he decided not to use the ones that I provided but instead chose extremely graphic ones that showed the Hurricane Katrina devastation that he had witnessed and experienced. He chose Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror as the background music for his movie and the song played long after his movie ended but we all sat there – glued to the screen, watching … nothing. My class and I were all speechless by the depth of emotion that Al had shown us in his movie. It was filled with typos and some of the slides had gotten out of order but it was brilliant. We all recognized that he had put more of himself into this assignment than he had ever done for anything else that he completed in our class. I have since lost the movie but it will never be forgotten and it is his work that fuels all that I do in class.
Al showed me that for him technology gave him the tools that he needed to express himself in ways that he had not been able to do before. He convinced me of the necessity of allowing this creative freedom for my students and I have not looked back since.
This post is inspired by Shelly Terrell’s Goal 2 Highlight Your Magical Teaching Moment of the 30 Goal Challenge.
