Celebrating the Nobel Prize in the New Year

December 10th was Nobel Prize Day! A great day to bring attention to the Nobel Prize and all the winners. This is not just one of those random days like National Lollipop Day or National Hammock Day (that one is for sure, I learned about because it is on my anniversary) But December 10th was #NobelPrizeDay because on this day the winners received their prize during a ceremony. Check out the Nobel Prize resources at Nobel Prize Live Ceremony  (!!!)

The man to create this prestigious prize is a Swedish inventor and businessman named Alfred Nobel.

Nobel was a very successful man, he spoke 5 languages, held 355 patents (one being dynamite) and started 87 companies. In his will, he left this idea of the Prize. It at first came with some controversy. This information and more on Alfred Nobel and the prize can be found at the National Calendar website. If you want to dive into more detail about Alfred Nobel check out the Nobel Biography to see more about his life, work, and his will.

The winner this year is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) organization. The Nobel Prize organization said they deserved it, “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons”. You can learn more about this organization at http://www.icanw.org/

Alfred Nobel valued education, specifically mathematics, chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature. His prize clearly reflects those areas, but creativity was also a key value for him. I mean he had 355 patents, that is amazing!!! So how can we relate this to our classroom and students’ education? Here is my advice, let us celebrate Nobel’s amazing achievements and the prizewinners accomplishments. But in this new year let us also be reminded of the importance of creativity. Use #NobelPrize as a way to reflect on how you are doing to help your students be creative and solve problems. Is technology helping them or hindering them? Is technology in your room, helping them explore, or is it an avenue they can take to take the easy way out? As educators let us celebrate #NobelPrize and use it to inspire our students whether that is through technology or just our conversations with them!

 

 

Ryan Jolivette
Fountain Middle School
7th Grade World History
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