Over the last five weeks, I have been on a quest to improve my Polish through a project I am doing called "Genius Hour".
At the start of term, Genius Hour was defined as a student-centred, self-initiated research project. It allows students to entirely run the show in their own learning. They are allowed to choose what they want to learn, how they are going to learn it, and when. The reason it is called "Genius Hour" is because the learning/research is done during one hour a week (or day depending on the teacher). On my first week of class, when Genius Hour was introduced to me, I was both inspired, and a bit afraid. I had never been given so much freedom to do a project before. I am the type of person who thrives on guidelines and rubrics when it comes to projects. I need to know exactly what is expected of me and how I am expected to present it. So, when our Professor essentially told us: "go pick something you want to learn, and spend an hour a week learning it", I was a bit dumbfounded. I didn't know where to start, where to go, how to get there, nothing!
After a few hours of contemplation, I decided to centre my own Genius Hour project around learning Polish. I was born into a half-Polish family. My father's side of the family is Polish, while my mother's side is Canadian. We speak almost no Polish at home out of respect for my mom, but I do speak with my Babcia (grandmother) almost daily in broken Polish. I've always wanted my Polish to be better than it was, so I figured if I am to learn something for an hour a week, Polish is the one thing I'm interested in most!
While I cannot say that my Polish has improved dramatically in five weeks, I am confident in saying that it has improved! I am now slowly learning more and more about the structure of the Polish language through the app Duolingo (an app which I highly recommend by the way). I've learned small grammatical differences between the spelling of words, and most importantly, have learned that Polish is a language in which nouns are declined - just like Latin!
Although five weeks (read: five hours) is too short a time to drastically improve anyone's Polish, these last five weeks has definitely sparked my desire to learn! I found myself wanting to go on the Duolingo app and take notes even after I had completed my Genius Hour research for the week. I also found myself actually getting almost a butterfly feeling in my stomach when I learned something new or cool that I hadn't known before. This type of learning project was so fun to do.
As a future teacher, I now fully see the appeal of Genius Hour after having completed my own project. I was so motivated to learn, and found the learning fun and exciting since it was a topic that I cared about, was passionate about, and was eager to learn. Also, once I had finally accepted that this entire project was really in my hands, and I could truly do whatever I wanted with it, I really started to enjoy myself. It took a lot of pressure off of me to hit certain standards/criteria. I began to let go of "Is this enough?" "Is this what she wants?", and began to just go forward how I wanted. I loved having all of that freedom in the end. This was the least stressful project I have ever done!
I want my future students to feel this way about their own learning. I can see now how important it is to have students engaged and excited about what they're learning about in order to not only make their time in school more enjoyable, but to help them nourish their own minds in a fun and engaging learning process. Genius Hour is definitely a concept I will be using in my own classroom in the future!
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