GREAT DISCUSSION

HERO STUDY

One of our big assignments this year was our hero study where we studied people who we thought made a difference. For mine I studied Thomas Edison.  Others studied Wangari Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony, John Muir, Steve Jobs, etc... We found out as much as I could about our subjects and wrote down the facts on notecards. After finding as many facts as we could, we put them into an outline. When my outline was finished I reviewed it and looked for the big ideas that made Edison so interesting to study. I put all the main ideas together to create my Final Biography. This whole process took about two months. Our Hero Study concluded with The Great Discussion. We generated ideas in response to the question: What is the best way to make the world thrive? We got into groups according to the kinds of work our biographical person did and took their perspective on what the best way was to help the world thrive. For example, as Thomas Edison I was part of the technology and innovation group.  But there were others in conflict resolution, environmental sustainability, and human rights also. We then wrote a little bit about our biographical person from our person's point of view. For example, Hello, my name is Thomas Edison I made... you get the idea. We wrote these for our Great Discussion to introduce ourselves.

On the day of The Great Discussion everyone in our class came dressed up in a way that represented their hero. I wore a suit jacket, dress pants, and a bowtie, all of which I wore to my aunt's wedding the year before. We sat down in our groups and the discussion began.