Choosing to Participate
Watertown Middle School eighth-graders examine important social issues
June 3, 2010
The eighth-grade students at Watertown Middle School are working on a Choosing to Participate project in humanities class where they try to communicate with foundations, groups, and individuals close to the community. The goal of this months-long project is to try and inform others about a problem in the community that the student is worried about and wants to stop, such as teen smoking or teen pregnancy.
Karen Zawisza, one of the humanities teachers at WMS, started this project two years ago and spread the project to other teachers and now the entire grade participates in the project. Many of the topics that the students choose have a big impact on the world and the teachers think that the projects can be just as big as the “Paper Clip” project where students got millions of paper clips in remembrance of family and friends who died in the Holocaust.
Teacher Daniel Skop said, “Students can be in charge of taking the project as far as they want to.”
Some of the students are receiving responses from the people they contacted for information. The students are hoping that more people will get responses so that they can visit foundations or have representatives talk to the class about what they can do to help.
–June 3, 2010–
