As some of you may know, I work at a small high school in New Hampshire. One of my favorite things about working in a small school (we currently only have 53 students!) is the opportunity for student voices to be heard. Two weeks ago we had a student suggest that our school organize a Spark Day. This is a day when anyone, staff and students alike, can choose to teach a class on any subject, skill or interest that they want to share. Because we have such a small and flexible community, that student’s idea was able to take off. A week after she pitched it, we had enough interest to run not one but two Spark Days!

Some of the classes staff and students signed up to teach included:

• Cookies: the perfect butter to sugar ratio
• How to change a tire
• Marvel vs. DC comics debate
• Learn to play cribbage
• How to shoot a wrist shot
• Making pasta from scratch
• Zentangle doodling
• Fabric collage
• Juggling
• Unicycling
• Recycled music
• Tiny weapons for giants
• Dress for success
• How to throw 5 baseball pitches
• Animation basics
• A Capella singing
• Frisbee golf
• Stilt walking

Naturally, being myself, I signed up to teach three sections of Tie Dye 101. Tie dye is one of my favorite crafts and as the summer goes on I hope to post several tutorials on here. But for today I will just share some of the results my students got after taking my spark class!

Spark Day ended up being an awesome experience. It was great to see students teaching other students, students teaching staff members, and staff teaching outside of their normal subject areas. The success of these two days leads me to believe that Spark Day is going to become a tradition at our school. I just want to end this post by reiterating how cool I think it is that one of our students was able to voice an idea to the community, and within a week it became a reality. I hope that other students will begin to realize that their ideas and opinions matter, and that by speaking up they can continue to improve our school.