Following the lead of the good folks over at One Good Thing, I’m sharing a couple of fun tidbits from my life at school this week.
Today a student came to ask for help with a trig problem he had. He’s part of a team building a 3D printer and stand and he needed to figure out how long to make a brace of some kind. (I don’t really know exactly what his team is working on, but that’s the gist.) He had everything set up properly, but it wasn’t making any sense to him. Turns out, his calculator was set to radian mode. Yay that he recognized that something was wrong. Yay that he asked for help. Yay that he knew what he was doing.
One of our math classes this term is called Euclidean Geometry & Introduction to Logic. The teacher (not me) has been focusing on precise communication of reasoning. The other day I observed a student in my advisory ask for some peer feedback on a proof. The first student he asked had been out sick for two days, so he very kindly declined. Then next student, also a member of my advisory, gave very solid and constructive feedback about how the proof could be improved. I love it when they talk math with each other.
My Introduction to Stats class was dealing with correlation vs causation this week. They were presented with these two variables: time in seconds spent draining a full bathtub, water depth in cm, and asked to identify the explanatory and response variables. Some students saw the draining time as the explanatory variable and others saw the size of the bathtub as the explanatory variable. The debate that ensued was engaging, animated, and enlightening. Plus, I was able to unleash the voice of a 9th grade girl who has been afraid to speak about math before that moment. Another student commented on her way out of class, “I’ve never had such an argument about bathtubs before!” I love it when we can respectfully disagree and have interesting conversations.
rawsonmath 