Once the school bell rang in middle and high school, students like myself would just be huffing and puffing up the stairs of our crammed school hallways to get to our next stage of classes. As I walked into the classroom of my next class, let's say it's science or math, then I realize that you have little time to interact with friends, get girls' phone numbers, or ask my buddy for the extra tater tots from lunch that he would sneak into his pocket.
You had just a bit of time, about four minutes or less, to answer a question projected on the projector and write a prompt about some topic an employer might not care about. Our teacher would tell us to think long and hard about our prompt. The dreaded words on the chalkboard projected on a large projector were the words we all dreaded when we were young, "Bell Work." Then there would be a ridiculous question from maybe a chapter we had to read in our textbook or something we were supposed to remember from class the previous day. Once the bell officially ran and the hallways became a ghost town, our teacher would yell, "All right! Bell work! Let's get working on it! You won't get extra points unless you write all of the prompt, and not just part of it! Let's go!"
To me and other than puberty-filled Gen Zers like myself, I thought bell work was the dumbest thing I had to do in school.
It was five minutes to write, draw, or narrate on paper, with my hand as sore as ever from maybe four two-hour courses earlier in the day, and now it's 1 pm, and I have to write about something I forgot about throughout the day or the last two days before this class started?
Back in school, I thought about girls, food, going home, and sports talks. The more I did the bell work, the more the teachers I had would always mark my work with a 30/50 for the response. The nicest teachers who care about my performance and grew a bond with me would score me a perfect score for trying my best (which described a lot about my adolescent school years).
Throughout this week, I thought more about the term that would haunt us in high school, but I question its purpose in its effect of grasping the combination of inspiration, emotional distress, and memorizing knowledge. How can a teacher expect their students to memorize material when they might have behavioral or major social situations affect them daily?
Through my research, I dug up this conclusion, social, political, and emotional norms drive bell work to become important for students for it's social and emotional connection between life and study.
In other words, bell work is an acronym for be wise. Be prepared for the game.
For example, when Colorado football coach, Deion Sanders tells his players not to use a phone before a game, he means to put the phone away, keep it out of sight, out of their mind, and focus on the task, the game, and the road at hand.
Bell work, in its simplest form, is preparing you for class. The human brain is the largest and most precious bone in your body, and when bell work begins to make you wiser, you're thinking about the work you will do for the day.
I watched a ton of cereal commercials while I was researching and writing this article, and let me say that in the advertisements, they promote "heart health," or "sufficient brain growth," while you eat the cereal and prep for the day ahead so you can work and grind, then go home and sleep.
Bell work is a refresher. Like drinking a bottle of water after mowing the grass on a dry summer's day. Bell work is supposed to make you wiser because this skill is a great lesson to have for students to use when they eventually graduate and head to the workforce.
Bell work is like preparing for an athletic event, your brain should be recharged and now you can go into class, perform at your best, never miss a day of school and feel rebirthed about your studies. This shows teamwork and shows a level of determination in and out of the classroom to work.
That as I have learned in college is a very important skill to obtain.
Educators think of this reason differently as the educational field has changed and expanded since the pandemic and other social issues have occurred throughout one of the most challenging times in education.
According to an article published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, educators have changed what bell work has gone away from its traditional norms to add an energy boost of sorts, and just like my reasoning, add in a boost for students to think as they walk into the classroom.
The article says, "Traditionally, educators have implemented bell work -- shortened assignments that begin class with content reviews, silent reading, or completion of assignments -- as the students trickle in carrying backpacks and a broad variety of needs and emotions. This past year, I began looking at research about the primary/recency effect and how I could better engage students the minute they walked through the door each day. Bell work rang my bell! I was reminded how content and experiences in the first few minutes of a lecture, teaching episode, or assignment have the best chance of staying in working memory, where new thoughts and ideas connect to what students already consider relevant or meaningful."
The article also makes another interesting point, "Brain-aligned bell work captured the engagement that I desired for longer-term learning. Not all bell work has to be tied to whatever standards or topics we're teaching that day or week. Sometimes, it activates powerful ways to explore perceptual data from the students with regard to their interests, passions, feelings, insights, and bundles of beliefs."
Believing a student can try is like an athlete on a field. You need coaches to instill toughness and strength in your players. We all need motivation and teachers are the coaches for the next generation of employers, so we need to learn the skill of the trade no matter how ridiculous AP Calculus might sound to the average person, you need a minute to stop thinking about the girl you want to ask out, or the big play you will make in the football game, and center your focus on the task you are assigned to do.
I think now I get this lesson of the point of bell work, but it is clear that it is supposed to motivate us, and through all of our #teachers hard work and dedication to coaching us every single day, with low pay and hard lives, I am not criticizing the teaching industry by saying bell work is silly or foolish to speak. In college, I love to take notes and occasionally check emails if I didn't do that at my apartment because as a college student, you learn that life is harder in school and you need to take a break and collect what you forgot to do during the days.
I know an employer will not accept this notion of missing emails or not checking your files before work, but hey, I'm still learning even though I should know by now to check my emails and get my tasks done, I am thinking in 50,000 thoughts and I thought bell work will not replace what I am thinking about during the day.
Stress happens and that is life, but bell work was used as a huge moment to socialize when I was in school, and before I knew it, it was time to turn in the assignment and move on with the meat and potatoes of our lecture for the day.
In the end, even with these reasonings, I still think bell work is silly to do for students who have hard lives or a lot going on. The words "Bell work" will still haunt me in my sleep.
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