My friend and neighbor Valerie Sabbag is one of those teachers. An educator who is always pushing herself and trying new things to make her class fun and engage the kids way that they don’t notice they’re being taught. They think they’re just having fun. I called into her classroom last August and she was standing there with big pots of special white paint, painting all her desks in whiteboard paint so her incoming students could write on the desks and take pictures on their ipads of their work and save them in folders. Not only does it save paper, but also the kids get to write on the furniture and mess around with technology.

We do run therapy together. Which consists of removing ourselves from our families in the evenings and bitching over the course of five miles. I had just released my first kids’ book Why is The Moon Following Me? with illustrator Magdalena Zuljevic, and scientist Dr. Suzana Tulac. While we were out running one evening, we hatched a plan to have her class adapt my kid’s book on the history of early astronomy into a play.  It was just a wild idea, but with Valerie those ideas can become reality before you fully have time to assess the sanity of them.  Our book is about the danger of ideas.          

The kids took to it immediately.Every Friday for the next few months I worked with the class to adapt the book into a play. The kids themselves took notes and filmed the process for a classroom blog they created. They asked me how I would choose the parts, everyone wanted to be Aristotle for some reason, even though he was wrong about the planet positions, he still was Aristotle.  Then everyone wanted to be Tycho’s cousin who doesn’t have to speak but gets to cut off Tycho’s nose with a sword. I told them to bring cash in envelopes. 

They learned what would work dramatically and what we’d have to cut, they learned to speak in the voices of the past, they learned that you can be a girl and play Kepler, they learned that being smart doesn’t make you right, that being right doesn’t mean anyone will listen to you, that truth can take  thousands of years to discover, that people in power hate new ideas, that every scientist builds on the knowledge that goes before. They learned the names and ideas of Aristotle, Aristarchus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho, and Kepler.

Then the kids teamed up with a kindergarten class and had them dressed as the planets. Valerie adapted Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off, to the book, and they all sang their hearts out.

After months of work Room 23 5th Grade, got to perform their play in front of the whole school at assembly.

And all along they thought they were having fun!

Tell me and I will forget,

Show me and I will remember

Involve me and I will understand – Confucius