Jace Flores Student Teacher Blog

Unearthing Joy:

1. I appreciated how digestible the book is written. A lot of texts about education get to be very technical or dense that makes it hard if not near impossible to parse what exactly is being said. This book does a good job getting its concepts across without me having to re-read a section over and over.
2. I found it interesting how the book provides a multitude of mediums to help get the point(s) across and sort of establish the mood. Beyond the texts and graphs there are also playlists at the start of each chapter as well as little coloring pages. Admittedly I found the coloring pages a bit childish, but hey if it helped someone understand the book then power to them.
3. I resonated with the ideas of joy and genius being the sort of thematic lynchpins of the book with every student being afforded recognition as being smart and the need for there to be joy in both learning and life in general.
4. I thought the core ideas of the book were interesting. The HILL model was a good way of tying together the sort of general steps of making teaching history something that can strengthen a student’s identity and ability to control the world so they can change it for the better. The five pursuits needed for the HILL model to succeed were also interesting and fit well into what the HILL model was. Didn’t feel crammed or forced together, if that makes sense. There is clear logic that connect the pursuits and HILL model.

Building an Academic Community:

1. I am very fond of the way this book is constructed where it breaks things down into clear objectives and timelines. I like that sort of rigid structure when it comes to accomplishing bigger things as it makes things digestible and comprehensible for me rather then me struggling to wrap my head around all of these ideas and concepts and whatnot.
2. I thought this sort of rigid structure works well in tandem with the more free form ideas put forward by the Unearthing Joy book. There is a sort of yin-yang between the two I think that help to flesh each other out, BAC providing more tangential and physical ideas while UJ provides more intangible values and such through its HILL model. I can definitely see one merging the two books together for the first month of the school year.
3. The flow of the goals and such for every week made sense to me. It felt like building foundations within a foundation based around teaching, behavior and routines.
4. One question I have is I wonder what is missing from this or would be changed in a high school setting. I imagine a lot of this is applicable for those higher grades, but I would imagine the author would change the book a fair bit to meet those standards. Given I am going to teach in a high school setting, it is important I know how much of this book is actually usable.