Learning at TLC Middle School

As the principal of TLC Middle School, I aim to exemplify the sort of learning that students will do at TLC. This blog serves as a record of “What I Learned Today.” Students at TLC will keep similar records of their learning.

After nearly three years of writing and reflecting in this space — I’ve written more than 150 posts — I have learned a great deal and have connected with many educators from around the world. This map (available live on the right margin of this blog) shows the location of the more than 20,000 people who have viewed my blog:

Some blog posts are better than others, and rather than have prospective families read through my blog entries chronologically, I’m providing links to five of my “greatest hits” from my past few months of blogging.

These posts should give potential families a sense of the sort of exciting multi-disciplinary learning that will happen on a regular basis at TLC Middle School. Learning about the world can (and should) be fun and engaging and also academically vigorous.

Enjoy!

March Madness Math — about the odds of picking a perfect NCAA bracket

Bringing a book to life — about the science of moving water using canals and locks

Multi-disciplinary news — a look at how an NPR article about grapes leads to an exploration of biology, history, and the ethics of GMO food

Will Ken be elected to Kenya’s Parliament? — an introduction to my good friend, the Honorable Ken Okoth, who was in fact elected to Parliament in Kenya this March.

Ken has agreed to video-conference with students at TLC at least eight times over the 2013-14 school year. Learning about Kenya from Ken is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and this post serves as a good introduction both to Ken and to the area of Kenya where he grew up, the slum of Kibera.

Let the students own the learning – this post explores what happens when teachers have the courage to trust their students; it’s also a nice look at how connected educators can learn from one another, since this post connected me to a teacher from a tiny town in Iowa.

How many plastic bottles?

At Triangle Learning Community Middle School (TLC for short), we will learn math and science and communication skills when we investigate compelling questions, such as:

How many plastic bottles are made each year in the United States?

This seems like a simple question, but it turns out to be pretty complicated. 

I got interested in this topic because my son read this fun book in Kindergarten:

The book says that more than 10 million plastic bottles are made every day in the United States. That seemed hard to believe –10 million per day times 365 days per year would make 3.65 billion plastic bottles! Where would we put them all?

To break it down, that would be 416,666 bottles per hour, or nearly 7,000 per minute.

That’s about 115 bottles made every second!

That seemed ridiculously big, so I did some research.

It turns out that number is wrong. The actual number is about ten times bigger.  That’s right — it’s closer to 1500 bottles per second, according to this source from 2009.

One of the things we will focus on at Triangle Learning Community Middle School is thinking critically about our sources. If you click the source above, it takes you to “treehugger.com” which suggests that the numbers found there might be inflated to exaggerate the point.

If the US does make 1500 bottles per second, that means 90,000 per minute, and 5.4 million per hour. My son’s book said 10 million per day, but if these numbers are right, it’s more than 10 million in just two hours. For a day, the total would be 129,600,000 bottles. And if you multiply that by 365 days per year, the yearly total is more than 47 billion bottles.

That may be a little high — but it seems more in the ballpark than the estimate from the book my son read. Take a look at this search I ran on Google:

There’s quite a range in those results — from 29.8 billion to 50 billion.  But that’s just a difference in magnitude of two — my son’s book had the figure at 3.65 billion per day — that’s smaller than the 29.8 billion figure by a magnitude of nearly 10.

Now things get interesting — what is the difference between bottles of water and bottles? What other sorts of plastic bottles are being made? What other plastic products are being made? How is plastic made? And how long does it take for plastic to decompose?

In my son’s book, the bottle gets recycled and becomes a fleece sweater on an astronaut, which is a happy ending. But what percent of the bottles consumed in the US actually get recycled?

Wikipedia’s article about bottled water says:

The global bottled water sales have increased dramatically over the past several decades, reaching a valuation of around $60 billion and a volume of more than 115,000,000 cubic metres (3.0×1010 US gal) in 2006.[1] U.S. sales reached around 30 billion bottles of water in 2008, a slight drop from 2007 levels[2]

The rate of consumption more than quadrupled between 1990 and 2005.[3] Spring water and purified tap water are currently the leading global sellers. By one estimate, approximately 50 billion bottles of water are consumed per annum in the U.S. and around 200 billion bottles globally.[4]

If we follow the link to source #4 above, we can find a column from the New York Times from 2008, titled A Fountain on Every Corner, that argues we should lay off the bottled water. That column says that “we’re a grab-and-go society, consuming roughly 50 billion bottles of water a year.”

Presumably, the 50 billion is in the US, rather than in the world. I wonder if anyone has global figures for bottled water consumption in 2013…

Here’s a chart from the Worldwatch Institute that compares water consumption from 2000 to 2005 in a selection of countries that consume lots of bottled water:

As I look at this chart, I notice that the US is number one, consuming about 17 percent of the world’s bottled water. But I’m also interested in consumption per person. The US is not number one there…

In 2005 Italy is number one at 191.9 liters per person, with Mexico a close second at 179.7 liters per person. The US is not even in the top 5, with “just” 99 liters per person, but we are up more than 50% from 2000, when we consumed an average of 61 liters per person.

And the US has a population of about 315 million, compared with 112 million for Mexico and 59 million for Italy (according to Wikipedia’s list of countries by population)

 

That’s a lot of data to think about. But we can handle data — we just have to slow down and think.

We could have quite a thoughtful discussion about bottled water one morning at TLC. Once we discussed the topic for about 30 minutes, we’d stop; each student would then write about what he/she found most interesting in the discussion. If there were interest, we could continue the discussion the next day, or even plan a project that explored some combination of plastic production and/or water consumption.

And the beauty of TLC’s flexible schedule is that we could even continue the math and science portion of the morning discussion later in the day. Each day, we devote an hour to problem solving and strategic thinking (click here for a typical day’s schedule at TLC).

By the way, one of the first extended projects we will do at TLC will be to test the tap water at each of our houses, at TLC, and at a variety of locations around Durham, including nearby Ellerbe Creek. We’d then report about what we learned, perhaps by making a short video. It’s science, combined with math and communication skills. That’s how we will approach the world at TLC — in a multi-disciplinary and engaging way that results in a project that students can share with the world.

Why we will blog at TLC

Greetings! This is one of my most popular posts, and since some new people are visiting my blog to learn more about Triangle Learning Community Middle School (TLC for short), I thought I’d revive it.

The post does a nice job of explaining why I blog, and why students will blog regularly at TLC Middle School.

I hope you enjoy it — the original title was “Blogging 101″

First of all, this really was my 101st blog post, from back in February of 2012.

But it’s also an opportunity to describe —  in “Blogging 101″ how-to fashion –why I think students and teachers need to be blogging (and tweeting and emailing) more. We need to make our learning transparent so that we can share with others and make connections with people all over the world as we broaden our global perspective.

I wrote a post earlier this year titled Why Blog? which I think made a pretty good argument for why students and teachers should blog.

The key quote from that post actually comes from another blog – in this case, Culture of Yes, a blog written by Chris Kennedy, Superintendent of the West Vancouver School District in British Columbia, Canada.  Chris wrote:

The ultimate goal is not to have students blog, it is to have students improve their literacy skills and have the ability to be digital writers, and to do things that would not be possible without the technology.  It is about students creating content to hyperlink to the world, to embed photos and video with text.  It is about students publishing, and then to have the opportunity to receive feedback on their work, review, edit and republish. It is about students producing work not only for their teacher, but for the world. It is about students having their own space to be creative and connect in new ways.  It is, ultimately, about students having greater ownership of their learning.

It’s also about connecting people. If a student writes just for a teacher to get a grade, and not for a wider audience, that student loses the opportunity to have others see the work he/she has produced.

Today’s For Better Or For Worse cartoon makes this point quite well — as anyone who’s written for a newspaper knows, it’s fun to share your thoughts with an audience:

Elly may not be getting paid, but she is getting her ideas out there.  And a well-written newspaper column (or blog) can lead to other opportunities.

Today, Elly would not need the newspaper to get published — she could simply start blogging.

Tavi Gevinson is a 15-year old fashion blogger who has “been invited to runway shows all over the world and has written for and been profiled in magazines like The New Yorker and French Vogue.”

Why? Because Tavi started blogging as an 11-year old and has valuable things to say. She already has her own Wikipedia Page, which notes that “Her parents did not appreciate what Tavi was doing [with her blog] until she asked for their permission to appear in a New York Times magazine story.”

Tavi was featured in October 2011 in a 10-minute segment on one of my favorite NPR programs, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.

I learned about Tavi last weekend from the principal of the iSchool in New York City, a dynamic educator named Alisa Berger. I saw Alisa present about the iSchool at a phenomenal conference in Philadelphia called Educon (about which I will blog next week — Educon rocked my world and introduced me to two educators from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta who have become fast friends, and with whom I look forward to collaborating in the future, Jill Gough and Bo Adams).

And I learned about Educon through my blog — well, sort of.  I learned about it through the group of online educators I connect with via my blog and Twitter.

I just looked back through my Twitter stream (which serves as a nice journal of my online learning — another reason to tweet!) and found the exact date when I registered for Educon back in August 2011:

@Deacs84 is Laura Deisley, a dynamic educator with one of the coolest titles ever — she’s Director of 21st Century Learning at The Lovett School in Atlanta, GA.

Laura hosted the first Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) Conference I ever attended back in 2007 in Atlanta (thanks to Sam Morris for bringing me to that conference), and it’s through Laura that I met PLP co-founders Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, who have also had a huge influence on my learning.

This may sound like name-dropping, but it’s really a recognition that the work I’ve done with the folks I’ve met through PLP and in other online spaces has changed the way I learn and connect in the world. It has led me to leave my job teaching at a prestigious high school to open an innovative middle school called Triangle Learning Community (TLC) in Durham/Chapel Hill, NC.

At TLC, all community members — students, teachers, and even parents if they choose — will blog on a regular basis.

What’s the value of publishing our reflections to the world? As I publish this 101st blog post, I think about all that I’ve learned since I started blogging seriously about a year ago.  More than 60 of my 101 blog posts are from 2011 to now, which translates to more than one post per week on average (before 2011 I blogged occasionally at best).

Blogging has become part of what I do: I learn neat things about the world and then I blog about it and share it with the world — hence the name of my blog: “What I Learned Today.”

But blogging is more powerful than just writing and reflecting in a journal. Blogging allows me to learn in public — to share my thoughts and my writing and my creativity with the world.

My blog also serves as my digital portfolio.

When I meet people like Bo Adams and Jill Gough at conferences such as Educon, I can point them to past blog posts I’ve written about such topics as:

How to use Google Earth to bring the world to life,

Why people should tweet, and

Why it’s a mistake to “integrate technology” into the existing curriculum.

My specific purpose in blogging right now is to give people who might come to my school (or people who might provide financial support to help TLC meet its commitment to socio-economic and cultural diversity) a taste of the sort of learning that will go on at TLC.

The purpose of TLC is to mentor a group of students so that they become empathetic global citizens who make the world a better place. In the process, they will learn a ton and will demonstrate what young people are capable of doing.

One of my favorite examples of a capable young person is Jessica Markowitz, a remarkable young woman from Seattle, WA, who learned — as a sixth grader – about Rwandan children who had lost their parents to genocide and war and could not afford school.

In response, Jessica started a foundation called Richard’s Rwanda, which has raised $130,000 to support girls in Rwanda to finish their primary and secondary education. She’s also raised the consciousness of her community about what happened in the Rwandan Genocide. And she’s learned a ton by serving on the board of a non-profit at age 15.

Jessica is now a senior in high school, and I look forward to talking with her this week.

I wrote Jessica last week, expressing a desire to talk with her about what she’s learned from starting Richard’s Rwanda because I want my students at TLC to do similar work.  I noted that “middle school students are capable of doing far more than educators typically give them credit for.  We’re also at a moment when middle school students can connect with people all over the world to do great things.”

Here’s Jessica’s response:

Hello Mr. Goldberg, thanks for your email.
I’m happy to speak with you after my school finals on February 1st.
Your school sounds amazing!

This post is about my 101st blog post, but I don’t blog in a vacuum, and I’m using “blog” as shorthand for all the ways we can connect with the world — through blogging, tweeting, emailing, and even using Facebook to organize (as my good friend Ken Okoth is doing as he runs for a seat in Kenya’s Parliament).

It’s all about learning in public — sharing — reflecting — and in the process, helping students to reach their learning potential.

As folks like Jessica Markowitz and Tavi Gevinson demonstrate, a young person who follows her (or his) passion is capable of changing the world.

Let’s abandon the schools of the industrial age and create constructivist educational spaces — such as TLC – that allow students to work hard, change the world, and have fun at the same time. It’s fun to learn and it’s fun to pursue your passion — those should be things students do on a regular basis.

Let’s have fun.  Let’s blog! (and tweet and email…)

Teaching Emotional Topics

We will start our days at TLC Middle School by reading the day’s news.  Today, the main story is obvious — what happened at the Boston Marathon?

This was an awful raw event, and my thoughts and prayers are with the people of Boston, my home town. Thankfully, all of my family and friends are accounted for and safe — but it’s been a gut-wrenching 24 hours.

As of mid-day on Tuesday, April 16, we don’t know a lot beyond these basics, from the Boston Globe: two bombs went off near the finish line of the Marathon; three people have been killed; more than 170 have been injured, and 17 are in critical condition.

A lesson I learned as a young teacher 15 years ago is that it’s crucial, before starting a discussion with student about an emotional topic such as this one, to see if any students in the room have personal connections to the event in question. Back in 1998, I was troubled by the attack on Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming who was targeted and killed because he was gay.

I mentioned the Matthew Shepard case to my students — 11th graders at The Walnut Hill School in Natick, MA — and when I did so, one student started crying and ran out of the room. The rest of us were stunned and wondered what was going on. One of her friends asked if she could go comfort her friend, and I said of course. It turned out that the student who first ran out had gone to school in Saudi Arabia for a few years with Matthew Shepard.

So the first thing we’d do at TLC is ask about personal connections to Boston, and proceed accordingly, depending on how everyone is doing. We’d also find out what students know already. Some students may have read articles or discussed the events in Boston with parents or friends or older siblings; others may have no idea beyond “I heard something bad happened in Boston.”

Assuming that it seemed safe to talk in more depth about the events in Boston, we would start with student questions. What does each student want to find out about this awful event? We’d list the questions and plan to have a conversation in more depth later in the week, when we know more.

Because we want to empathize with the people who went through this awful event, we would need to read a few difficult accounts of people who were killed and/or injured. There were about 27,000 runners at the event, and more than half a million fans lined the race’s 26-mile course, so there are lots of stories. Together, we could each read a few articles from a variety of sources — The Boston Globe would be a good starting point — and share what we learned.

One of the more poignant accounts I have seen thus far (I’m sure more will come out in the next few days as things get sorted) came from Kevin Cullen, a columnist for The Boston Globe.  On Monday night, in a piece called A perfect day, then the unimaginable, Cullen wrote this:

This is how bad this is. I went out Monday night and bumped into some firefighters I know. They said one of the dead was an 8-year-old boy from Dorchester [a section of Boston] who had gone out to hug his dad after he crossed the finish line. The dad walked on; the boy went back to the sidewalk to join his mom and his little sister. And then the bomb went off. The boy was killed. His sister’s leg was blown off. His mother was badly injured. That’s just one ­family, one story.

This sort of act of violence is hard to comprehend. It takes time to process or to even begin to imagine what that family is going through right now.

[note: that piece of reporting was not accurate -- the father did not run the race; but the family is clearly grieving, as this story details]

If students have not already studied 9/11 in some depth, this would be a good time to learn the basics about what happened back in 2001. Since that’s before most middle schoolers were born, it’s likely that most students don’t know much about 9/11. We’d find out what students know and work to provide basic context about that event.

I don’t have answers to the “why” questions — but I am a good listener. That’s one of my strengths as a teacher, and is one of the characteristics we will look for as we hire teachers at TLC — how well can you listen? It’s a valuable skill.

I’m also prepared to lead a basic discussion because I have been following the events in Boston. I know some of the basic facts and can clear up any misunderstandings about what we know (thus far) about what happened. This map from the New York Times, for example, is a good starting point to give students some geographic context.

I also have a personal connection — I grew up for the first 18 years of my life in Newton, a suburb of Boston, so I’m quite familiar with the Marathon, and have attended several Boston Marathons. I can share with students what the Boston Marathon is supposed to feel like.

Depending on what questions came up in our initial discussion today (we’d definitely set aside ample time to talk about this event today), we would break into teams and have each team take ownership for a few of the compelling questions that came. Each team would assign itself “homework” to research the questions we want to know more about and share what we learn on a shared Google Doc. We would then come back later in the week ready to have an informed and thoughtful discussion — we might aim for Friday. On Tuesday, the day after the bombing with the FBI investigation just getting started, we don’t yet know enough to have much of a conversation.

One of the benefits to TLC’s small size is that by mid-April of next year, we will all know each other quite well — and teachers will have a sense by then of what students know about similar such events, such as 9/11.

If there’s still not enough information from FBI investigations by Friday, we have the flexibility at TLC to table the discussion until early next week. But we will discuss it in some depth, as soon as we know enough to have a thoughtful conversation.

This is a big deal event. It’s front-page news around the world. We should take time to talk about it and work to put it into context.

I fear that most schools will continue with business as usual, which is unfortunate, because middle and high school students — like other people who are old enough to think about these sorts of things — should have some time to process what it means to live in a world where a marathon can go from a wonderful event to a tragedy.

Are there places in the world where such bombings have sadly become commonplace?  Of course — Baghdad is a prime example. A month ago, a dozen bombs went off in Baghdad, killing at least 56 people on the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Students should know about that. Students should also learn about the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that hit Iran on Tuesday afternoon (Iran time), and that has killed at least 46 people, according to this account in the Huffington Post.

Part of being a global citizen means knowing about what’s going on in the world. That includes the great accomplishments and horrible events. Lately we’ve had a spate of horrible events — the Boston Marathon was supposed to be in the “great accomplishments” category. That’s part of what makes this sort of attack so sinister.

But we should also recognize that this sort of attack is new for the United States — the only comparable attack at a sporting event in the US in recent memory would be the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where 2 people died and 111 were injured.

Before that, and before 9/11, the most destructive act of terror on US soil was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people and injured nearly 700 people. That’s the job of the teacher at TLC — to provide context for students. And to listen and be a respectful and caring adult.

We’re still sorting through what sort of difference the bombing yesterday at the Boston Marathon will make in our lives. But we owe it to students to take their thoughts and feelings seriously, hear what questions they have, and help them begin to make some sense of what’s happening.

We of course want to assure students that they are safe. And we can do that. After all, this sort of attack is quite rare in the US, and has never happened in the Triangle. But we’d be lying to students — at least I would — if I didn’t admit that this sort of attack makes me want to hug my family closer (even though our son, who’s not quite 6, doesn’t know what’s going on — unless it’s come up in kindergarten today).

This attack does not mean that I won’t attend large public events — that’s giving in to terror, as Joel Achenbach notes in his column in the Washington Post, titled After Boston: Why the terrorists can’t win.

But the bombing in Boston probably means a bit more vigilance at such events, which represents a loss. People should be able to attend the Boston Marathon and similarly uplifting events — be they sports or entertainment or other celebrations — without feeling unsafe or worrying about bombings. Sadly, it’s a little harder to do that after yesterday’s events in Boston.

Engaging with the news

Here’s an example of how a morning news discussion will work at Triangle Learning Community Middle School (TLC for short):

Let’s take this article from today’s (April 4) Washington Post, titled Short on graves, China turns to sea burials

Here’s the first paragraph:

BEIJING — In this country of almost 1.4 billion people, life is an unending struggle for resources — money, property, even spouses. And it doesn’t get easier in death.

And here are some examples — in italics — of questions I’d ask of students at TLC:

If China has 1.4 billion people, how many people do each of the world’s most populous countries have?  Do these countries have similar issues with burying their dead?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

One of the major strengths of the TLC model is that we’re small enough that teachers know what each student is reading and learning, so we can help students make all sorts of connections.

For example, some potential TLC students met this past Friday to discuss world events, and we talked about an article from the BBC, which noted that Hong Kong has population pressure.  Using Google Earth, we learned that Hong Kong is about the same size as the city of Durham, NC, but has more than 28 times the population (7 million for Hong Kong versus less than 250,000 for Durham).

This made me wonder how burials work in Hong Kong, and so I found this article from Time Magazine.

How did I find that article??  By entering a simple search:

See how much we were able to engage with an article from the Washington Post using only the first paragraph?? 

This is the sort of active reading and curiosity about the world that we will model at TLC.

Here are a few more examples of how we’d engage with various paragraphs from the Washington Post article.  For example, this paragraph mentions several Chinese cities:

In the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, officials recently announced a $160 bonus for families that scatter ashes at sea. In Shanghai, officials upped their offer in the past year from $65 to a more persuasive $320. Topping them all, however, are the coastal cities of Shaoxing and Wenzhou, which are offering $800 and $1,290, respectively, for sea burials.

Where are these cities?   We would find Guangzhou, Shaoxing and Wenzhou on Google Earth — as well as Shanghai, which is the biggest city in China (by population) and is mentioned in paragraphs 19 & 20.  We would also find Beijing, which is way up north, and if I included it in this map, it would be hard to read any of the cities.  As you can see below, we made a place mark on Hong Kong (“Packed people in Hong Kong”) when we discussed it on Friday. Over the course of three years at TLC, students will make more than 1,000 place marks on Google Earth as they learn about the world.

Here’s one final example of engaging with a paragraph

Cremation — long shunned — was promoted as practical, even patriotic. Even Communist Party leader Mao Zedong had declared his wish to be cremated (in vain it turns out, as successors embalmed his body for permanent display in Tiananmen Square).

What was the funeral like for Mao Zedong in 1976?

Here are some pictures I found online — looks like millions came to Tiananmen Square (another location we would find using Google Earth) and that people all over China wore black armbands to mourn Chairman Mao.

I know from talking with friends who lived in China in the 1970s that the mourning period after Chairman Mao’s death was about a week long.  Let me see if I can confirm that — yes, it was 10 days of mourning, according to this book excerpt I found:

One of the things we will work on in depth at TLC is how to conduct sophisticated research.  That would include learning how to use Google Books to search pages of books, as well as regularly visiting the library to read actual (gasp) books.

The TLC model for morning engagement with the world is to take an interesting current news article — such as this one about burials in China — and to use such articles as a springboard to a host of issues that might include world population, modern Chinese history (Who was Mao?  When did he come to power?  What is a communist?), or even science issues dealing with the myriad environmental issues raised as China industrializes and has a thirst for energy and material goods.

Hunger at Home and in Chad

Today, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is holding a food drive to benefit hungry people who get food from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

Our family is dropping off cans of food to help the cause.  You can read more about this event at the NCSSM Food Drive Facebook page (pictured below).

I visited the website for the Food Bank, and it says that within the 34-county area served by the Food Bank, “more than 560,000 people live at or below the poverty level: 191,000 are children. 40% of those we serve have had to choose between food and paying for utilities. 33% have had to choose between food and paying rent or mortgage.”

There’s a 2-minute video that shows an animated girl named “Hungry Kate” to personalize the problem.

This is a great effort, and I look forward to seeing how much food folks at NCSSM are able to collect.  The goal is to get to a total of more than a million pounds of food donated (over the past four years). In 2011 alone, NCSSM collected more than half a million pounds of food and set the Guinness World Record for food donation in a single day.

Broadening from North Carolina to the US, there may be more than 50 million people in the US today who are hungry, according to the Feeding America website.  If that is an accurate number, that’s one in six Americans (the US population is around 315 million, according to the Census Bureau)

If we look at the world population of more than 7 billion, we see that the US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population.  What does hunger look like outside the US?

I did a quick Google Search for “world hunger” and found this chart:

If we think about this for a moment, the people making this global chart must use different numbers than the people at Feeding America, because Feeding America says 50 million people in the US are hungry, and the chart above says that in all the developed countries (which includes the US and most of Western Europe) there are only 19 million hungry people.

So this would be a good question for exploration — how many people in the world are “hungry” and how do different organizations define “hunger”?  Finding a reasonable range of answers (I’m sure different groups approach the issue in different ways) would take some research and would be worth doing.  That’s the sort of work we will do at TLC middle school. We will find topics that interest students, and pursue those topics in some depth.

Part of the role of the teachers at TLC is to help provide a global context.  So when students get excited about local food drives, we should support those efforts, as my family is supporting NCSSM’s drive now.  But we should also push students to see the global picture, of which the US represents less than 5%.

The title of this post mentions hunger in Chad, which I happened to read about this morning because of this re-tweet from Nicholas Kristof:

<start twitter aside>

If you’re not using Twitter yet, please see my previous posts about Twitter’s value.  I’ve written about it as a great was to find resources and connect with people. I’ve also written about the value of Twitter in three earlier blog posts:

• Why you should use Twitter,
• To Tweet or Not to Tweet?, and
• Participating virtually at a sold-out show

<end twitter aside>

In any case, when I clicked on the link in the tweet from Lydia Polgreen (who I’m now following on Twitter), I read tha article she mentioned, which led me to an earlier article, titled

LACK OF FOOD STUNTS CHAD CHILDREN, DAMAGES MINDS

This is one of the most powerful articles I’ve read in a while about the effects of hunger.  You should click on the link and read it.

Here’s an excerpt from the article, which starts by describing a little girl struggling to trace a circle:

Drawing a circle is considered a developmental marker. It tests fine motor skills, the use of the small muscles that control the fingers, allowing us to eat spaghetti with a fork or cut a piece of cardboard with scissors. Children who are developing at a normal rate can trace a circle by age 3, and Achta doesn’t look much older.

She is so small that you can hoist her up on one hip easily, as her mother sometimes does when she carries her to school. She is so small that when she sits on her bunk in class, her feet dangle a foot off the ground.

But Achta isn’t three. School records show she is 7 years old.

In this village where malnutrition has become chronic, children have simply stopped growing. In the county that includes Louri, 51.9 percent of children are stunted, one of the highest rates in the world, according to a survey published by UNICEF.

Students in the Triangle need to learn about hunger in their own backyard, and efforts like the food drive at NCSSM today and efforts in general by the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina are a great place to start.

But we need to get a global perspective as well — the video about “Hungry Kate” notes that  Kate seems like an ordinary girl, but that her parents may have lost their jobs and her family may be in danger of losing their house to foreclosure:

It’s important, though, to consider all the community resources available in the US to help people like Kate. The video explains that the food people donate gets sent to community agencies that help people in need:

By contrast, there’s little infrastructure in many parts of Africa, such as Chad, and as a result, there’s nobody to help people who are hungry, and so we see stunted growth in children, which can look like this:

 

What we would do at TLC middle school is to read and discuss the powerful article about how a lack of food stunts children’s growth and damages their minds.  We would locate Chad on a world map, and get a sense of where the village of Louri is located.  We would try to empathize with families living there.

We would then take time to reflect on the article. Each student (and the teachers) would write a bit about what he/she learned.  We won’t always publish what we write at TLC, but we will spend time thinking about both the local and the global.  That’s part of what it means to be an empathetic global citizen.

March Madness Math

In the midst of March Madness, just as the NCAA tournament was about to begin, I read a piece on NPR about the odds of choosing a perfect NCAA bracket.

It’s a fine piece, except for one thing — it gets the math wrong.  I commented on the NPR site, and I think my comment helped NPR get the math right… but when I read the article, here’s a screen clipping of what it said:

Here’s what I wrote in my comment:

This is a fun story, but it’s not mathematically accurate. You note that the odds of choosing the entire 68-team field is “about 147 quintillion to one (that’s 147,000,000,000,000,000:1).”

That’s right verbally, but your number is wrong — a quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros (you have 15 zeroes following your 147). It goes million (6 zeroes), billion (9), trillion (12), quadrillion (15), quintillion (18).

Your story then makes the mistake of saying that “The odds get slightly better (about 9 trillion to one) if you ignore the play-in games and just look at the field of 64.”

9 trillion is 9,000,000,000,000 — that’s a nine followed by 12 zeroes. To go from 147 quintillion (18 zeroes) to 9 trillion would be more than “slightly” improving your odds. But in fact, that’s not what’s happening — when you ignore the play-in games, your odds go from 147 quintillion to 9 quintillion. They improve by a factor of 16. And the reason is that there are four fewer games played.

The algorithm for the number of possible outcomes is to take the total number of games played and raise 2 to that power.  The number of games played is the number of teams minus one, because once a team loses it goes home; if there are 64 teams playing, there will be 63 teams that end their season with a loss and one national champion.  That makes 63 games.

If you count the play-in games, there are 68 teams, so that’s 2 to the 67th games, which is the 147 quintillion number.  If there are 64 teams (which there will be after Wednesday night’s games), you raise 2 to the 63rd power to get the total number of possible outcomes — and that’s 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.  So the odds of filling out a perfect bracket are a bit worse than 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

When we get to the Final Four, there are four teams left, so we’d raise 2 to the third power and get 8 possible outcomes. When we get to the Sweet 16, there are 15 games to be played, and 2 to the 15th power is 32,768.

Here’s a 3-minute video from math professor Jeff Bergen at DePaul explaining this same idea, but we really shouldn’t need math professors to explain this.  I’m opening a new middle school in a few months in Durham, NC (called Triangle Learning Community), and I’m confident that my students can handle this sort of math.

When it comes to big numbers, we can keep things straight — we just need to slow down and think things through.

POSTSCRIPT: Below is a screen shot showing how NPR fixed its mistakes, possibly in response to my comment on the NPR site.  I feel like a good digital citizen

POSTSCRIPT #2:

Here’s a look at the closest anyone has come to getting a perfect bracket (55 out of 63 games right).