Here’s the contest again.

We started this process this morning. I’m going to use it as a circle activity but allow students to opt-in to the essay contest via bonus credit of some sort. The students will be designing the activities for the rest of the week.

I tried to come up with a circle activity to think about choices that we make (positive vs. negative) and compare it to choices we had no control over (again, positive vs. negative). Rather than going blue pill vs. red pill, I did it with doorways.

Pretty quickly we got to the “you always have a choice” conversation, which is what I think Wiesel was after. It’s surprisingly hard to come up with stuff, at least as an old guy, where I had no choice. There’s some medical events I never saw coming but that’s about it.

And there was one sophisticated counterargument rooted in urban American poverty: what happens when you’ve lost your ability to get employed because of an arrest and you have no other way of making money. Does that individual really have a choice?

Example one:

Example two (best sense of humor ever)

Tomorrow the students take over circle: TC (Tues), SH (Weds), KH (Thurs), and Friday is still open.