Reflection of 3/24 Class

Class
I'm pretty sure I audibly groaned when we were introduced to the lobe problem. Teaching Kindergarten for 10 years doesn't give you a lot of opportunity to keep your higher math skills honed. Thank goodness I taught a sprinkling of 4th and 5th grade over the years as well! Still, I want to be honest and share that solving problems every class is not what I enjoy. I know our instructors are working to make our classes interactive and share learning experiences to help us "feel" the lesson possibilities instead of just being talking heads. And they're doing a great job. If we don't experience some discomfort, how can we relate to our students, right?

Having said that, I will admit that the hour we spent working the lobe problem (attempting to solve for density, mass and volume with little to no concrete information) went quickly. The slides included some information, a grid map (that totally threw one of our team members off), a "slice" of mass composition, and a page to record assumptions and calculations. We quickly agreed on certain roles for efficiency of fact gathering (one person grabbed formulas for particulates included in the mass, I started noting the data that was provided in the summary of the lobe and roughing out calculations/assumptions, another worked on bringing meaning to the grid, etc.), and then we came back together to collectively think through the assumptions and calculations we made. It was a great group to work with and we ended up coming up some some logical assumptions, working through the math, and towards the end, rapid selection of percentages of the lobe material composition. I think that was the most fun part because we were out of time and just had to pick!

Project
We are busy building! The section of the map that we needed to include the area where the river changed course has proved to be very challenging! My students, after much "deliberation" (that sounded a bit like arguing) decided to start at sea level because they just couldn't figure out how to manipulate the landscape without. Lots of comments like, "that is totally in the wrong place", "there's not hill there, that's river bed", "well, the road needs to go there according to the map, so that mountain is totally not right". So, they got really quiet and very intent once they had a clear map and each decided which area they could work in without getting in each others' way.