3.4 Conclusions and Caveats

What do students think about this? What does the story mean to them? It is a call to action. It’s a reminder that their education is not only about self-improvement and credentialization to move ahead in life—job training and getting more stuff. ICE is not only an evolution from novice to master but cyclical and pervasive; it’s a way of thinking, a mindset—I’m not joking when I say that ICE is a way of living—a religion? I am a disciple of ICE. So, yes. I use ICE in my courses. Each assessment rubric uses ICE as its basic framework. I teach students to use ICE as a compositional structure for their weekly writing responses, beginning each 250-word analysis with an Idea, filling the body of the paragraph with their Connection, and concluding with one or two sentences that launch into Extensions. But it is more than that, the mindset of ICE, the challenge to live in Extensions, reminds me that what I do in the classroom has a higher purpose. There will be Extensions in the world beyond this week’s assignment, beyond this course, and beyond this one discipline. My classroom is merely a practice ground for Extensions still to come. And even beyond the training in Connections and Extensions, my role is inspirational, to spread the gospel of the broken toaster, to plant an activist seed in the students to apply ICE and change the world.