Dani does Project-Based Learning Week and learns a lot

We tried something new at school last week. The big-wigs running it say "new", we say "exhausting".
We worked on projects with our students for a whole week, challenging ourselves to step out of our comfort zones and do something different, and challenging our kids to learn in a more interactive, hands-on type way.

I worked with Year 7s on an environmental impact project that, I would say, was quite successful. We went to the new Olympic Stadium and learned about the impact of the stadium on London, and I must say, I'm quite impressed with the way that London regenerates itself.

I'll tell you a bit about it -

Let's start with the O2.

This monstrosity in North Greenwich was built as a gift to London for the Millenium, and was originally called the Millenium dome. Interestingly - it is 365m in diameter, representing the days of the year; 52m high, for weeks; and there are 12 spokes, representing months, but equally spaced like the hours on a clock. This information made me hate its design slightly less.

Anyways, this segment of London used to belong to the big-bad Mister Gasworks, and when they shut down in the 80s they left the area a toxic wasteland. Nothing could grow here. Nothing could live here. So, good ol' Tony Blair (I know nothing about Mr. Blair, but everyone in England hates him, so I do too), put in an action plan to clean it up by the Millenium, and build a gift there. By doing this, they naturally regenerated the area, building housing around it, and of course the public transit to and from the area made it easy to commute into Central London so people could actually reside here and feasibly get to work. Well done, London!

The Olympic Stadium is doing the exact same thing, only tearing down old falling down buildings in one of the most impoverished areas of London (Newham/Stratford - in the East) and building everything a new. Brand new athlete's villages, to be turned into affordable flats. The aquatics centre will lose it's "wings" (pictured below) and become just a local pool. The wings are just extra seats.

The athletics venue will become home to West Ham football club (also spelt "C-R-A-P" according to my students).

And this tower will likely become a tourist trap (not quite finished construction):

They also are refurbishing the public transit out to the area, and have unfortunately put this awful equestrian centre in Greenwich Park (I love Greenwich park - they shouldn't clog it up with stupid Olympic stuff)

While the week was absolutely exhausting (I spent, literally, all day every day with a group of 5 year 7s - as teachers we don't do that - we have the beautiful "non-contact time" where the kids go play with somebody else and I get to sit at my desk and get some work done) - digression too long, must continue sentence awkwardly - the trip to the stadium was awesome. The people at the Olympic stadium were very supportive of our goal -to show the kids the impact of the olympic stadium on the environment- and so we went down to an area called 'Fish Island' to show them what it was like before. Basically, we took the kids to the graffiti-covered, broken-windowed, ghetto of East London. It was not, not okay. Then we crossed a dirty canal lock and went for a stroll beside polluted water. Not, not okay. I was just waiting for the moment when a student went into the water and I would have to jump in after them. Fortunately, did not happen, and the students learned a lot.

Here are a few pics from Fish Island:

... all the rest of my pics have students in them.. unfortunate.. but I think that last bit of graffiti shows you just how ghet-TOOOO we are talking about here.

Here's a cool Olympic graffiti from the stadium: