"I'm very sorry for making the class invisible"

This can be filed under "Conversations I never thought I would have", which, teaching Minecraft, could be it's very own blog name!

Brandon "I just want to tell you that I'm very sorry about yesterday"

Me "Thank you, I appreciate your apology. Do you know why what you did wasn't appropriate?"

So far so good, right? This is the same conversation teachers have a hundred times a day....

Brandon "Yes, but I just wanted to make it so that people couldn't see what I was doing"

Me confused "But, how would putting invisibility potions on other students make it so that they can't see what you're building?"

And that is where this conversation takes a sharp left from the millions of other conversations I've had over the years with students!

But, really, it doesn't.

Yes, we were talking about his choice to throw invisibility potions on his classmates, and no that is not specifically covered in classroom management 101, but really we were talking about off-task behavior, personal space, the norms and rules set up by a community, decision making, and all the other things that teachers and students talk about every day.

Number 7 becomes number 1!

MckennaP (her user name) came into class today all excited. "I'm number 7 on your blog!!".

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant, and yes, she is #7 from yesterday's blog post. She is the student who started practicing her scene from Bud, not Buddy at home before we started the project. She was so excited that she was one of the moments that I chose to highlight.

At the end of class, I warn students that I am saving the world. Any changes or actions that happen after I click save, don't show up the next day, so they race to do "just one last thing" before I click. After I had saved, MckennaP came up to me and said, "I think I accidentally set the library on fire, but I hope I did it after you saved". I told her that I would log back in and check. Low and behold, when I logged back in, their entire building was engulfed in flames!

Not MckennaP's library, I was too panicked to take a picture

Not having any clue what to do, I grabbed the closest kid and told them to go get MckennaP from her class, then I started dumping water buckets EVERYWHERE! Pretty soon, I had the remains of a building, now totally flooded and still sprouting fires here and there. Again, a brand new classroom management moment for me!

Also not MckennaP's library....

MckennaP and her partner spent most of their next class (Shout out to Mr. B, ELA teacher for letting them stay) rebuilding....

She did give me the suggestion that we shouldn't tell the other students what happened, because she is worried that they will start setting their buildings on fire just to get more Minecraft time. We came up with a (totally believable) story about how I was carrying flint and steel and set the library on fire accidentally, and they needed to fix it......

This could have been a lot of posts......

I have been thinking about starting this blog for a while, if you consider "a while" to be since December 1st that is. It certainly feels like a while! I have had no less then 20 great blog post ideas and moments that I wanted to share in that while.

What this blog post could have been.....

1. Not the first day I taught MinecraftEdu, I was too dazed and overwhelmed to form a coherent thought!

2. The day that one of my 6th graders came up to me with tears in his eyes and softly said, "I love this class", and I replied, equally teary and equally softly, "So do I"

3. The day an Ender Dragon spawned out of nowhere and swooped through our World Religions world causing chaos as students stepped up to destroy it, and then a whole class discussion about if we should just quit without saving the world because that might be easier then trying to fix the destruction.

4. The day I came back after having a sub to find that one of the students had killed another student's horse and stolen the saddle, and the class discussion about community and respect that was spawned.

5. Every day that something has sparked an amazing whole class conversation about something I never could have imagined or planned for.

6. The day a student told me she had gotten MinecraftEdu for Christmas because she loves the class so much.

7. Telling the students that our next unit would be recreating a scene from the book Bud, not Buddy, hoping that maybe, I could plant a seed and they might start thinking about the assignment and then having a student come in the next day and tell me that she had already started building her scene at home so that she would know what to do when we started working on it in class.

8. After our math week learning area, perimeter, and volume having the 6th grade math teacher tell me that one of my Minecraft students had raised her hand in class to ask when they would learn about volume because she enjoyed it so much in Minecraft.

9. Getting used to the noise, because a Minecraft class is loud! Kids collaborating, planning together, partnering, asking each other for help, offering suggestions, and generally being excited and loving what they are doing is loud!

And of course today, when I overheard a student talking to a friend as he left class, and he was saying "This class is the reason I come to school". I wanted to say, me too kid, me too!