School Projects and Classrooms

We wanted to share some of our experiences from teaching this past year in Rwanda.

Chuck:

 

In addition to my role as a Math Teacher, I work as the Network Administrator and IT Support for the school.  A new Windows 2008 Server was installed this year, and the school bought thin client computers that run off the network.  One of my big tasks was helping to get the computer lab of 24 computers up and running, as well as administering usernames and passwords to all of our students.

Once that was set up, I tried to take advantage of our resources by having the students do projects in the computer lab.  One of their early projects was about the stock market.  Groups picked a company to “invest” in, followed its progress over the week, and displayed their profit or loss using graphs in Microsoft Excel.  The kids really got into it, and there were some excellent presentations.

In another project, students had to study the design of buildings they found on the internet and design their own tower out of tooth picks.  Their design was supposed to support a baseball, and most of them did.

This project started out more low-tech.  Students measured the height of water in a container with a hole at the bottom at different intervals.  Later, they took their data and put it into Excel.  They then took the resulting graphs and made connections between their displays and the shapes of the various containers.

Since most of our projects are electronic, I don’t have the chance to put a lot of student work up.  However, I always do when I get the chance.

 

Emily:

When we were studying diffusion and osmosis (Biology I), we put lots of things from our kitchens into lots of salt and sugar solutions to see what would happen.  Short answer:  if you don’t clean them up by Friday, they start decomposing over the weekend…

 Student demonstration of osmosis: the carrot in concentrated salt water shriveled, the one in fresh water swelled up, and the one in a weak salt solution didn’t change.

 This was our praying mantis.  The kids caught grasshoppers for her during their lunch break; their favorite part was how she’d snag bugs with the spines on her front legs, and then eat them head-first.  We know she was a “she” because she produced an egg sac that eventually gave to rise to several hundred tiny mantises.  Unfortunately, she didn’t live to see her children—or maybe not so unfortunate, since I bet she would have eaten them as snacks.

For several weeks, students left insects for me as little gifts for the mantis.  Better than apples but not as good as chocolate.

 The P.E. teacher brought me a chameleon one afternoon.  He (the chameleon, not the P.E. teacher) was never really a class pet because everything I read indicated that he wouldn’t want to be anywhere near middle-school kids,  I released him outside before long because he didn’t’ like any of the bugs I brought him.  He could not, I’m sorry to say, turn the color of whatever he was sitting on, but he did turn a dark color when he was nervous, which was whenever I was around.

The middle-school science classes designed Newton-mobiles whose movement was based on equal and opposite reactions.  We raced them in class: two groups went with sails (and Spiderman) while the other group used a snazzy flame-painted coke bottle with a deflating balloon that didn’t survive the 2^nd trial.  I wasn’t able to document the kids clustered around their devices trying to generate enough wind by blowing on them or fanning them with their notebooks because it turned out to be really funny and I was laughing too much. 

Both “male versus female” and “black versus white” were English students analyzing cultural expectations in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The DNA molecule that was hanging across the ceiling is pretty ragged by now, so we use it as an example of how high-energy radiation affects cells.  The row of drawings across the top of the windows contains biology root words; the front window is physical science terms; most of the back corner is wanted posters and Facebook profiles for elements from the periodic table. 

 

Switching gears between English and biology and physical science has been tricky, but I like teaching in both disciplines.  I don’t have photos of the puppet show or the live guitar solo explaining how solids transform into liquids and gases, or the huge mess in my room after we made Oobleck out of cornstarch and water.  I was too busy keeping track of the stopwatches to carry my camera when the kids ran sprints to find speed and stopping distance in order to calculate how wide the out-of-bounds should be on the basketball court.  About once a month, we go to the computer lab for the students to look up all the imponderable questions they’ve been asking in class, but I can’t post kids’ photos online, so I can’t share their presentations.