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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

It’s a great book — filled with examples of what the title promises.

One section caught Ben’s attention, and he asked me if I had heard of the Falkirk Wheel.  I had not, and so Ben told me all about it — here’s where he got his information:

Ben was excited about a Ferris Wheel for boats, and I of course said “let’s look it up on Google Earth.”

We then found this 36-second time lapse video of the Falkirk wheel in action:

Ben’s excitement about a picture in a well-researched book helped bring to life a part of Scotland I’d never heard of before — the Falkirk Wheel.

When I saw this video on YouTube, there were related videos that seem like they would be worth checking out at some point — we could watch these videos and locate the places they show us using Google Earth:

At Triangle Learning Community Middle School (TLC for short) we will have the time to look into the deeper significance of forms of transportation such as bridges and locks and airports. This morning, for example, I looked more closely at Ben’s library book, and learned about the locks of the Rideau Canal.

Note that if I were working with middle school students, I’d make sure they understood what “locks” look like and how they work — we could even make a working model of locks if students got into the topic. For now, I’m assuming my reader knows about locks.

Here’s the image from the book:

I found the Rideau Canal on Google Earth, and learned from the Wikipedia article about the canal that it was built in response to the US building the Erie Canal.  The Erie Canal was conceived in 1807, and took eight years to build (1817 to 1825).

The Rideau Canal started to be built one year later, in 1826, “and it took a total of 6 years to complete … the majority of the actual work was done by thousands of Irish and French-Canadian labourers.”

So that’s interesting — I wonder what the lives of those Irish and French-Canadian labourers (I’ll keep the English spelling) were like…  At TLC we would take time to do some research and empathize with the workers who made these structures.

I was also impressed to learn that the Rideau Canal is 123 miles long(!) and was “built as a military route and incorporating 47 locks, 16 lakes, two rivers, and a 360-foot-long (110 m), 60-foot-high (18 m) dam at Jones Falls (Jones Falls Dam)”

I found Jones Falls on Google Earth, and now, thanks to this compelling drawing from Ben’s book…

I have expanded my global knowledge about canals and locks in Canada.  The zig-zaggy yellow line on the left traces the basic route of the Rideau Canal from Ottawa to Kingston:

According to the article about the Rideau canal,

Tens of thousands of British immigrants traveled the Rideau in this period. Hundreds of barge loads of goods were shipped each year along the Rideau, allowing Montreal to compete commercially in the 1830s and 40s with New York (which had the Erie Canal) as a major North American port.

My grandmother Bertha (in whose honor Ben is named) is from Montreal, and I’d never stopped to think about what made Montreal such a big deal city.  Apparently, part of the story is the Rideau Canal…

It would be good for students to consider that before airplanes (1903), the main way to travel long distances in the world was by boat — mainly on rivers. So these canals were a huge deal in the 1820s and 1830s.

At some point in my high school education, I know that I learned that the Erie Canal was a big deal in US History. I’m sure I answered a multiple choice question about it. I learned some fact or other about the Erie Canal without any context; I learned it (and promptly forgot it) because a teacher made me learn it. I never cared much about the Erie Canal.

Somehow, reading these sentences from the Wikipedia article about the Erie Canal helped me see why the Erie Canal was such a big deal:

It was the first transportation system between the eastern seaboard (New York City) and the western interior (Great Lakes) of the United States that did not require portage, was faster than carts pulled by draft animals, and cut transport costs by about 95%.

The canal fostered a population surge in western New York State, opened regions farther west to settlement, and helped New York City become the chief U.S. port.

Wow — cutting the cost of transportation by 95% would be huge. When I fill my tank with gas these days, it can cost nearly $50.  Imagine spending 95% less on gas — what would 5% of $50 be? (We will do applied math all the time at TLC).

Well ten percent of $50 would be $5, so five percent must be half of that — imagine spending $2.50 to fill your tank with gas.  That’s the sort of change the Erie Canal made back in the mid-1820s.

I want to learn more about the Erie Canal. And I want to check out that YouTube video of the world’s most dangerous airports — the one with more than 9 million views.

The beauty of the learning model at Triangle Learning Community Middle School is that every day, students will have time to explore areas they find interesting from around the world. They will then blog about what they learned so that they develop strong communication skills along the way.

Here’s a blog post from a few months ago that describes in more detail how typical mornings will work at TLC.

Let’s look at this recent NPR feature about grapes, which caught my attention both with the picture and the clever headline:

At TLC Middle School, here’s how we might discuss this article.

First, we would all read the NPR article (go ahead and read it — it’s not long).

The article describes how one part of plants work:

Plants have two types of pipes in their stems: the xylem and the phloem. The xylem pumps water to the leaves from the roots, while the phloem sends food from the leaves back down to the roots.

After we read that, I’m pretty sure we could find an image of xylem and phloem from an online biology text…  Yep — that was easy — I just typed in “xlyem phloem” to Google:

This is a crucial element of TLC — we will empower students to learn on their own.  There’s no need to ask a teacher for some basics that are widely available.  The key is teaching students how to be effective online researchers. We also want students to know when it’s time to ask for help from a teacher, and when it’s time to visit the library, which we’ll do on a regular basis at TLC.

The NPR article goes on to describe the ancient Greek practice of “girdling” — here’s a picture from the NPR article:

The text reads “Put a ‘girdle’ on that vine.  By scraping off a small section of the grapevine’s trunk, a farmer in California hopes to fatten up the fruit growing at the top.”

There’s also a link in the NPR article to Theophrastus, an early Greek horticulturalist.  According to that link (which takes us to a page at Ohio State University),

Theophrastus had a tremendous amount of knowledge, accumulated for him by students and staff of the Lyceum. His knowledge of foreign plants was likewise outstanding. Alexander the Great, while carrying on his military expeditions as far as the Indus River in India, sent him many plants.

If we had not yet talked, as a class, about Alexander the Great and some of the Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, this would be a good opportunity to begin that discussion.

TLC students would surely ask “what’s the Lyceum?” (because we’re curious about the world that way) and they would learn that it was the school Aristotle set up, and that Theophrastus took over when Aristotle had to flee Athens.

By the way, Plato’s school was called “The Academy,” which is why we have schools around here called “Durham Academy” and “Cary Academy.” This discussion might spark some interest in what else the ancient Greeks knew about…

Many middle school students are already fans of ancient Greece thanks to the Percy Jackson series of books, so this NPR piece about grapes could lead us to have a future discussion about ancient Greek history.

In such a discussion, we’d look at Alexander the Great’s conquests, which had the effect of spreading Greek culture all over his empire (pictured below). Why did Alexander know so much about Greek culture?  Well he was from Macedonia, which is just north of Greece, and his private tutor in his teen years was none other than the famous philosopher Aristotle (the guy who opened the Lyceum).

Alexander the Great’s empire

So now we’re not only learning about science, we’re also learning a bit about Greek history.  And we’re also learning new vocabulary words, such as horticulture.

Part of the reason for reading articles from NPR and the Wall Street Journal and the BBC is to help students build their vocabulary in an authentic context.

We might also have a discussion about the bio-ethics of  using plant hormones.  According to the NPR article, it sounds pretty benign (some students might have to look up benign)…

To pump up the fruit even further, farmers turn to a more common trick: hormone therapy.

Just as sex hormones are used to fatten up beef cattle, a plant hormone called gibberellic acid can beef up berries.

Grapes are so distantly related to humans that their hormones don’t raise concerns about how they might affect us, Fidelibus says.

But these hormones have a big impact on growing fruit. Farmers can even control the shape of the berries. Gibberellic acid makes the grapes long and cylindrical, while other chemicals can give them a rounder physique.

California classifies plant hormones as pesticides, but Fidelibus says that’s just a legal definition. “It’s not at all toxic to people,” he tells The Salt. “Gibberellic acid is widely used in agriculture, and seeds make it naturally. So people would be eating it anyway.”

But I can imagine some people being quite upset about having their grapes treated with Gibberellic acid, even though this man named Fidelibus says it’s safe. The teacher’s role at TLC is to put such a discussion in context, and to help students connect that discussion to the larger discussion about GMO foods.

The Wikipedia article on genetically modified food, for example, notes that

While there is broad scientific consensus that food on the market derived from GM crops pose no greater risk to human health than conventional food, critics have objected to GM foods on several grounds, including safety issues, ecological concerns, and economic concerns …

Again, if students got into the idea of GMO food, we would not stop with a Wikipedia article — we would visit the various libraries in the area and would find experts around the world who could help us make sense of the debate around GMO food.

The point is that at TLC, a simple article about grapes could lead to discussions about science, history, and even bio-ethics.  It also serves as a vocabulary lesson (did you look up benign yet?)

At the end of our discussion, students will take time to reflect and write about what they found most interesting in our discussion — some students might focus on the science while others focus on the GMO aspect.  Another student might use the article as a springboard to learn more about ancient Greek scientists. Whatever they choose to write about (or make a podcast about, on occasion), they will all improve their communication skills as they learn about the world and make all sorts of connections.

And that’s the whole point of reading the “multi-disciplinary news” at TLC Middle School.

Ken lives in Kenya, and he will be visiting Triangle Learning Community middle school for at least eight video-conference sessions over the course of the 2013-14 school year. By visiting with us on a regular basis, Ken will help us gain a deep understanding of life in Kenya. He will also challenge us to have a broader global perspective, and will specifically give us an idea of what life is like in Kenya and other regions in Africa that he knows about.

Ken is in the news lately — at least in Kenya — because he’s running for a seat in Kenya’s Parliament.  Here’s the campaign poster from the Facebook page for Ken’s campaign:

The Kenyan general election will be held on March 4. Ken won his party’s primary election, so he has a good chance at winning. If Ken wins, he will represent an area in Kenya called Kibera (also spelled Kibra, apparently), a slum located just outside of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

Here’s a map of Kibera from Google Earth:

As you can see, Kibera measures 2 miles long by about half a mile wide. The green to the right of the letter “a” in Kibera is a golf course. Kibera is an appealing place to live because it’s about two miles from downtown Nairobi. People who live in Kibera tend to walk to work in Nairobi rather than take the bus so they can save money.

A recent article from The Economist magazine about Kibera, titled Boomtown Slum, noted that

Kibera may be the most entrepreneurial place on the planet. Residents have no choice but to look after themselves. If they want to escape poverty—and have the necessary drive—they will try to strike out on their own.

I asked Ken recently about Kibera’s population — he said it’s about 850,000 people. For context, the city of Durham, NC, where Triangle Learning Community middle school is located, has a population of a bit more than 230,000. How did I find that out?  Well there’s this thing called Wikipedia…

Below, I’ve made a purple shape on Google Earth that shows how big Kibera would be if you put it in Durham, NC.  Traveling from the golf course on the left to the Northgate Mall is about two miles — the same length as Kibera.  And it’s a bit more than half a mile from the mall down to TLC in the lower right corner.

So this purple shape is about the size of Kibera:

(NCSSM is the North Carolina School of Math and Science, and is just there as another landmark to help orient people who are familiar with Durham)

Now imagine more than tripling the population of Durham, and cramming everyone into that one purple square mile (2 miles long times 1/2 mile wide equals one square mile)…

Now remove running water and electricity.  That starts to give you an idea of the conditions in Kibera, where Ken grew up.

If you click on Ken’s name in this sentence, you can read a profile from Georgetown University, where Ken attended graduate school. That profile explains how Ken grew up in a 12-foot by 12-foot, one-room house in Kibera. Here’s the start of that article:

From Ken’s Facebook page, here’s a picture of the house he grew up in.  In this particular picture, President Obama is visiting Ken’s old neighborhood:

I’m excited for Ken, but also a bit anxious, because Kenya’s elections have been in the news lately, and there’s a fear that violence may accompany the election. This piece from the BBC, titled Kenya: fears of electoral violence explains how the city of Kisumu was one of the hardest-hit in terms of electoral violence:

So where is Kisumu, relative to Kibera and the capital of Kenya, Nairobi?  Good question!

On this map, Kisumu is about 150 miles from Kibera.  If you look at all of Kenya, you can see that you would have to travel about 250 miles to get from Kibera to Malindi, a place I’m pretty sure most readers have never heard of…

Why am I thinking about Malindi?  Well, the New York Times’ East Africa writer, Jeffrey Gettleman, recently filed a story from Malindi, titled Neighbors Kill Neighbors as Kenyan Vote Stirs Old Feuds.

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Ever since vicious ethnic clashes erupted between the Pokomo and Orma several months ago in a swampy, desolate part of Kenya, the Tawfiq Hospital has instituted a strict policy for the victims who are trundled in: Pokomos on one side, Ormas on the other. The longstanding rivalry, which both sides say has been inflamed by a governor’s race, has become so explosive that the two groups remain segregated even while receiving lifesaving care. When patients leave their rooms to use the restroom, they shuffle guardedly past one another in their bloodstained smocks, sometimes pushing creaky IV stands, not uttering a word.

“There are three reasons for this war,” said Elisha Bwora, a Pokomo elder. “Tribe, land and politics.”

Every five years or so, this stable and typically peaceful country, an oasis of development in a very poor and turbulent region, suffers a frightening transformation in which age-old grievances get stirred up, ethnically based militias are mobilized and neighbors start killing neighbors. The reason is elections, and another huge one — one of the most important in this country’s history and definitely the most complicated — is barreling this way.

In less than two weeks, Kenyans will line up by the millions to pick their leaders for the first time since a disastrous vote in 2007, which set off clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.

I’m hoping that there won’t be much election-related violence in Kibera. Ken is a member of the Luo tribe, and members of that tribe had some conflicts with members of the Kikuyu tribe after the 2007 election, as detailed in this article titled Looming Election Threatens to Shatter Kibera’s Relative Peace Once Again.

So let’s try putting this together — there will be elections all over Kenya on March 4.  There will be elections for governors of the various states withing Kenya.  The map below shows some of Kenya’s states (Kibera and Nairobi are part of the Nairobi state):

There will also be a presidential election; and there will be elections for Parliament — Ken is running for one of those seats in Parliament.

Here’s a picture of Ken campaigning with Raila Odinga, one of the leading candidates for President (this was taken in October 2012 and comes from Ken’s Facebook page):

And here’s a Q&A feature from the BBC about Kenya’s elections:

This election seems to be a bigger story in England than in the US, based on my initial research. Part of the reason is probably that Kenya used to be part of the British Empire. It became independent, along with many African nations, in the 1960s.

Here’s a summary of the last 100+ years of Kenya’s history, taken from the end of a recent article in The Independent, a UK publication. This article is looking at the Kenyan presidential election, and is a bit worried about what might happen if the candidate Raila Odinga does not win.  The title is: If Raila Odinga wins Kenya’s elections, Britain’s interests are secure, but if Uhuru Kenyatta wins…

Kenya’s long road to independence

The Berlin Conference of 1885 imposed formality on Europe’s Scramble for Africa, designating the 250,000 sq miles chunk from the Indian Ocean to beyond Lake Victoria as British East Africa. Today, it forms Kenya and Uganda.

The Scottish ship-owner Sir William Mackinnon set up the Imperial British East Africa Company and established trading activities. Fighting off tribes, and the two infamous lions the “Man-eaters of Tsavo”, he oversaw the construction of the railway from Mombasa on the coast 660 miles inland to Lake Victoria, at a cost of 2,500 lives.

High taxes, low wages and hardship after the First World War politicised a generation of would-be Kenyans. By the Second World War, Kenya was of strategic importance for campaigns against Italian forces. Nearly 100,000 black soldiers, askaris, fought for Britain in the King’s African Rifles. At the end of the war they wanted to keep their improved status, and became a vanguard for African nationalism.

Jomo Kenyatta, the charismatic son of Kikuyu farmers educated at the London School of Economics, demanded a political voice for Africans. He would go to prison for leading the Mau Mau uprising which began in 1952. Thousands were killed on both sides. In 1957, the first native Africans were elected. Rather than placate nationalist fervour, it fuelled it, and in 1963 Kenyatta’s Kenyan African National Union formed the first government. He proclaimed the Republic of Kenya a year later.

So now we have a bunch of questions.  What was the Mau Mau uprising? Who was Jomo Kenyatta? Was Kenya named after him? Will Ken win? Will Ken be safe? Who are the candidates for the 2013 presidential election in Kenya? What are the major tribes in Kenya? What language(s) do people speak in Kenya?

The whole idea behind TLC is to present students with compelling stories that they can empathize with, so that they generate questions they want to answer on their own (or with some help from teachers).

This is the sort of question-asking we will do on a regular basis at TLC middle school as we work to make sense of the world. Our curriculum in the morning will be based on whatever is going on in the world, whether that’s electing a new Pope, elections in Kenya, or some other issue that students seem interested in learning about.

The current elections in Kenya seem like a unique chance to see the world — particularly the country of Kenya and the slum area of Kibera — through Ken’s eyes.

Ken is a little busy right now (as you can imagine, with the election coming up in less than a week), but perhaps he will comment on this post soon after the election to let us know what happened…

In the meantime, GOOD LUCK KEN!!!

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Post Script — Ken left this message on my Facebook page:

Steve, this is an excellent post. It is the end of my day here… Got up early for a short meeting with my campaign team this morning, attended a debate for Kibra MP aspirants (the first such debate in all of Kenya), rushed home to change into different clothes after the debate, went on a four hour door to door walking campaign across Lindi Ward in Kibra looking for votes. I had some other meetings before coming home tonight, and now am decompressing online catching up on email and social media. Tomorrow is another very similar day! Ken

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Another post-script — here’s a picture from Ken’s campaign Facebook page.  In case you don’t recognize his back, he’s the one signing the pledge

Update on March 5, 2013 — KEN WON!!!