"just throw them!"

Leave it to my students to teach me how to upgrade our classroom culture in two seconds.

On the first day back from Winter Break, I had three sets of papers to pass out while the kids were seated on the floor in a big, open area where they could reasonably distance from each other.  Passing out papers to students on the floor always takes for ever, and social distancing has made it even slower.  On this day, I had three things to pass out.  We did the first one.  All the little inconveniences happened - it took forever, somebody didn't get one, we couldn't find who had the extras, I face-palmed at our inability to complete such a trivial task, and so on. Then we did the second one.  All the same inconveniences. I started the last one, yet like always, by handing a third of the papers to a kid in the front row to take one and pass back.  Before I was able to give out the next third, one of the kids blurted out:

​"Just throw them!"

So I just threw them.

​Instead of handing the next third of the stack to another the kid in the front, I just threw them into the middle of the room like a frisbee.  Took a few steps to the right, and did it again with the last third.

Everybody laughed.  Everybody got to move a little.  Everybody got a paper.  It took less time than passing them out.

It was effective.  It was fun.  I learned how to do it in two seconds.  Not a bad day's professional development.

Doing a quick search to write this post, I found this similar example of a teacher I follow on YouTube using the same tactic to give kids a quick break when passing back work.

That's what I learned this week.  A two-second tactic that made my class a more efficient and more fun place to be.
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