Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Homeroom Announcements, my Friday podcast type video where I give thoughts and updates about the Skooled Zone channel.

In addition to giving you updates about the Skooled Zone channel, I'm also going to wax philosophical sometimes. In today's episode, I'm going reveal a bit about how I arrived at the concept for this channel. Over the next year, I'll be doing Part 2, Part 3, etc. Just because I'm a fan of superheroes and comic books, we'll call it the “Origin Stories.” I'll probably do one at each significant subscriber milestone. Since we just reached 1000 subscribers, I figured now is one of those milestones.

So let's start when I was in high school. I had this English teacher who gave vocabulary tests on Fridays. She gave us only 15 minutes. You could be done in less if you studied. After the test sheets were collected, she would spend the rest of the period with the class just having a down to the earth conversation. It kind of blew my mind actually. No other teacher did that. Other teachers would just give a quiet period. Some would even let kids wander the halls unsupervised. But she was creative. She occupied the time with a concept that could shape minds. It did for me at least.

Most of the time she chose the topic, but sometimes she would open it up to the class. It was the only time I ever remember in any of my school years where I could have a deep conversation with classmates that I would otherwise never have. The jocks could actually discuss the possibility of life in space with the nerds. The cheerleaders could discuss if consciousness exists with the emo girls. You know, whatever clique you belonged to, it didn't matter. The discussion was for everyone.

I went on to university for psychology. After I got my degree, I decided not to go to medical school. Too expensive and I was still sort of finding myself. I'm sure many people out there can relate. For a short time, I wanted to become a teacher. So I eventually went through the accreditation program for secondary education, which basically means that I went back to college to become a high school teacher. As part of the program, you get the opportunity to become a student teacher at a local high school for a semester.

That was a really fun time for me. Creative writing and cinematography were my areas of specialty. I also taught an English class. I adopted the idea from my own high school English teacher and gave a vocabulary test on Fridays. After the test, I opened it up into that sort of discussion forum. However, I did it a little differently.

There were about twenty kids in the class. So I came up with twenty philosophical questions. A whole range of questions from the political to the existential, the mundane to even the supernatural. I projected them onto the screen and the students could come up and choose a question. I was creative about how I ordered them though. The really fun questions were near the top and the more difficult questions that required a little more research were near the bottom. The order from top to bottom was the order over the 18 weeks of the semester that the students would have to give a 10-15 minute presentation on the topic. So if you chose an easy question, you'd be up to bat much sooner. If you wanted to be a procrastinator, you'd be forced to pick a more challenging topic.

After giving their 10-15 minute presentation in front of the class, they would then get to be the discussion moderator. I would sit in the back and be the facilitator. Kind of helping to prod the discussion when it was slow or nudge them back on track if it went too off topic. I called that whole assignment idea “Philosophical Fridays.”

Needless to say, it went over like gangbusters. I was getting visits from parents saying that my project got their kids asking questions about things that they'd otherwise never have thought about and was developing their critical thinking skills. The principle told me that he's never seen higher attendance statistics in a Friday afternoon class before and my mentor teacher even adopted the idea after the semester ended.

I never went into teaching full time because I had my heart set on the entertainment industry and I ended up moving to LA to pursue that dream. But I never let go of that idea of “Philosophical Fridays.” The real spark of the lesson plan was the concept of contextual learning.

Contextual learning is a theory of teaching where someone learns information more effectively in a way that is meaningful to them. For example, a great way to teach classical poetry to inner city kids is to allow them to rap the sonnets or whatever. You know, spit rhymes to Shakespeare and then discuss the underlying message. I can't remember if I got that from a movie but I'm definitely not the first to suggest that example.

Anyway, the whole idea is to find something people are really into and then use that to further expand their minds. For me, I love video games. Always have. From back when I was a kid playing Street Fighter in the arcades to being an adult and unwinding from a stressful day with a little Call of Duty or whatever. But when I found myself pausing the game to look up online whether a particular gun really existed or how far robot AI has come in the last decade, I realized that I was on to something. How cool would it be if there was a YouTube let's play style walkthrough channel that would deliver that sort of information for me? In-game, with the information trigger right there in front of me on the screen to look at.

Maybe I didn't dig deep enough, but from a cursory search, no other YouTube gaming channel was doing that. So I said, it's high time to pioneer that idea. Contextual learning through video games. And thus, the Skooled Zone was born.

There's much more to the origin story, but we'll delve deeper into that at the next milestone. Until then, keep sharing the channel. Your support means everything.