This year’s new English teacher Ms. Butera did something she’s never done with her students before. Unfortunately, she forgot to do it to her W8 class but said exactly what she did to her classroom for the Lord Of the Flies (Written by William Golding in 1954 about a adolescent boys stranded on an island after a plane crash and how they organized their little “society”) intro.

“So I wanted to introduce the unit in an interesting way so I messed up-well I had students help me mess up my classroom so I tipped chairs over, the desks over, moved things around on my desk, turned around my podium, put papers and books all over the place to make the room look messy! And I left the room and so none of the students can see me and I hid across the hallway in Mrs.PR’s room. Then I waited about ten minutes to see what they would do and how they would react,” Butera said.

After finding out what Butera did, she was asked what made her want to do this. She said “So I wanted to do this to get a reaction from them to see how they would handle the situation and it related to the book that we just read which is Lord of the Flies because those young boys were on an island and placed in a difficult situation. Some had to take leadership roles and I wanted to see if anyone in my class would do that”.

After hearing that, I asked the next question anyone would think: How did the students react? Did they freak out? Did they leave class? Butera answered saying “The students reacted in a really interesting way. They cleaned everything up, they sat down and they followed the instructions on the board which was to start their warm up and answer the questions. So it was really amazing and flattering to me as a teacher because they followed directions, but they didn’t seem concerned as to where I was… And no one came looking for me! Which is fine, and they told me that they sort of suspected that I was testing them. That’s what they said at least”.

Butera was then asked where she received the idea from to do this to her room and she responded saying that “Mrs. Mathis next door gave me the idea because she did it last year with her students and so I thought that i would give it a try”.

After saying this I asked Butera if this is something she thinks she’ll end up doing every year. Butera said “I  think so, I would like to see how different students I know every year you get a different group and students might react in a different way so I really liked it. And I got a good response from the students, they really responded to it so I would definitely do it again yeah”.

Butera was then asked what she thinks she  would do if her teacher did the same thing to her in high school. She answered saying “Oh gosh! That’s a really good question I think I would want to do what they did; clean up but I would also believe that I would be concerned for the teacher’s well being. And I would probably go next door or across the hallway and find a teacher and just let them know that there was no adult in the room. Although I’m saying that as an hindsight as an adult’’.

This is only one cool way a teacher has tried something new for the school year, hopefully more teachers are engaged and jump on the train.