Students all gave their speeches this week and then each class voted on their favourite. I don't know if having a vote was necessarily the best way to go about choosing but there you have it. One class chose local pollution of a nearby stream and beach and global warming as an issue, closely followed by the decision to put a bus lane through Manners Mall. The other class chose Graffiti/Tagging/vandalism, followed closely by smoking/drugs and the bad things about McDonalds and fast foods.
I was going to run two separate inquiries for each class but realized this was going to be far too hard. But a compromise was to run with each issue with both classes, starting with graffiti and later moving to the environment issue.
So now we need to investigate the issue before we decide what we will actually try and do about it. Their first lesson on graffiti was in maths - which was awesome. They developed some questions that would produce statistically interesting data and next week the maths teacher and I will take them into town to ask a whole bunch of Wellingtonians what their opinion on the questions are.
I really want to get into the social anthropology of graffiti. There is lots of interesting stuff there about an issue I have thought very little about and yet which the students think is important. Even if not all chose graffiti/tagging as their final option for class investigation, pretty much all of them took photographs of it when they were using the digital cameras.
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