Community Day!

This past Tuesday there was an event at Windward Community College called Ka Pilina Community Day.  The event took place in the evening from 6:00pm-7:30pm and consisted of booths put on by Ka Pilina and partners from the community.  All booths were STEM related and tried to focus on showing that math is in everything.  Participants at the event collected stamps on a stamp card by participating at different booths.  At the end of the night people turned in the stamps for prizes and raffle tickets.  We raffled off gift cards and a grand prize of a Dell Venue 8 tablet.  There was also pizza and water for people to enjoy.  The event was free and open to the Kamakau Community. 

I was very blessed and thankful that a few STEM^2-ers came out to support this event.  Big Mahalo to Waynele Yu, Hayden Atkins, and Ka’ai McAfee- Torco.  This event wouldn’t have been as amazing as it was without them.  We had many different activities for people to engage in:  Watersheds, conservation, aquaponics with alternative power sources, healthy hearts, fractions with minions, Java programming. 

When the event first started I was a little bummed because the turnout was so small, but everyone else seemed so excited.  Then I realized it is all about perspective.  The whole half glass full idea.  It was small but that just meant we could be more attentive to the students that were there and give them a more individualized activity.  We could let students launch more water balloons then they were supposed to at their math mentor, which students were definitely happy about.  Then about 30 minutes into the event more people started showing up, so all my disappointment in the beginning was unnecessary. All in all it was a great event and a lot of fun for everyone.   To see all the pictures from this event and or to see pictures from other previous community days you can follow this link: Past Ka Pilina Community Days.  

A Strong STEMS^2 Unit

A strong STEMS^2 unit could have many different forms, but there should be a general outline.  The first big step would be to plan our goals and objectives.  It would be difficult to accomplish something if you don’t know what it is you want to accomplish.  So a strong STEMS^2 unit should have clearly written outcomes. 

Once you have that the rest of the unit should have certain qualities.   A unit should have culturally responsive concepts, which includes math problems/activities that involve ethnic components, local Hawai’i context, or daily life materials.  Since I still believe in “one shoe size doesn’t fit all,” STEMS^2 can benefit greatly from incorporating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) concepts.  For a unit this means incorporating three aspects, and they are as follows:

1.      Multiple means of representation- Using multiple tools to convey a lesson, topic, or vocabulary.

2.      Multiple means of expression- Having students demonstrate their knowledge in multiple ways.

3.      Multiple means of engagement- Giving students options to engage in the lesson or activity that stimulates them.

In our day and age it could also help greatly for students to be able to include technology in any, or all, of the three previously stated UDL concepts. 

Lastly for qualities, I feel the STEMS^2 units should allow for flexible grouping.  Some parts of the unit should allow for students to work in groups or as individuals.  In any lesson it is also important to have additional resources/tools for students that need extra help or more of a challenge.  This should also extend to the student’s homework and test as well.  These last few qualities keep in mind the students who may need more help in understanding certain concepts. 

Experiences can help tremendously in making things memorable. The experience doesn’t need to be something everyone is familiar with.  It really depends on what your goals and objectives are.  If your goal is to expose students to different careers and how those careers use math then students will be engaging in possibly new experiences depending on the career they are being introduced to.  However, you could have students and teachers engage in experiences that are familiar, but show something different and or in depth about it.  For instance, some of my students are into skate boarding so when they had to learn about quadratic equations I used skateboarding as an example.  I couldn’t get them to use actual skateboards, but tech decks were good substitutes.  In any case the experience should be meaningful to the students. 

Time is also something that will depend on your goals and objectives.  Some goals and objectives can be accomplished in a fairly short amount of time where others will take longer.  For instance, if your objective is just to create a way to make students more comfortable with each other a good community building exercise will suffice to complete your goal, and community building activities can take up only 10 minutes.  On the other hand, if you wish to change a person’s attitude toward mathematics that could take a substantial amount of time more.  If I had to put a time limit on learning experiences I would say one week per math concept.

The "Ah-Ha" Moment

Over the last month I have been going to different schools and doing different activities with students in grades ranging from 7^th – 12^th grade.  I have ran 3 different activities during this time and had the pleasure of experiencing the “Ah-Ha” moment with students.  The three different activities were “Tower Building”, “1=2!?”, and “Predict a Pair.”

The first activity tower building is the same activity that I did in my first summer course in my STEMS^2 master’s program.  The activity consists of building a free standing structure made only of tape and straws (in my summer course we did uncooked spaghetti noodles and marshmallows).  All the kids have a blast doing this activity.  After they build their towers I give them a minute to look at everyone else's towers including their own and ask students to think about what they thought about the activity, what worked well, what was a challenge, what did they notice about the tower or materials.  I guide the discussion a little when then say things like, "The straws were colorful," or "The straws had the bendy part,"  I ask them did those things help or hinder you.  The answer we came to was that it all depends.  A few students said, "The colorful straws made their towers prettier," most students said, "The color straws didn't help or hinder their building."  So now what about the bendy part of the straw?  Some students said the bendy parts in the straw made their tower weak at those points.  Other students said it helped because they used the bendy parts to make angles to construct the tower or they could extend the bendy part of the straw to make the tower just a little taller.
Now I say, "So it's pretty important to recognize what materials were given to you and how they can be used?" Of course this question is a leading question, but nonetheless they all say yes. This is where I begin to drop the math bomb.  I tell them, "Just like when you do math it is important to recognize what is given.  You need to look at a problem and see what are the givens and how you can use the givens to solve a problem.  This also applies to life, in life when you have a problem it is important to look at what you have, what resources are available to you, and use those givens to solve your problems."  The students weren't expecting this activity to relate to math and then have math relate directly to life.  I could see in their faces that I had their attention.
One of the best moments for this activity came when we talked about how every team used some sort of shape in their structure.  I asked, "What shape is the strongest?"  In every class a hand full of students knew it was a triangle.  So I ask them if triangles are the strongest shape why do we build houses and buildings with squares and rectangles?  Many students are unsure, one said maybe its because using rectangles give you more space.  Students, including myself, starting thinking like yeah that's a good point.  I tell them I thought about another point.  I asked what would happen if I drew a diagonal line from one corner of a rectangle to the other?  I used the white board as my rectangle and drew a diagonal line.  A kid blurts out before I even finish drawing the diagonal, "It makes TWO triangles!"  I said, "Yeah it does! Maybe it is for these 2 reasons we mentioned that we build houses with rectangles instead of a triangle even though a triangle is a stronger shape.  I am not sure, but its interesting and worth thinking about."   Leaving that class with the little spark of interest and wondering made all the work leading up to that point worth it.
1=2!? is a brain teaser where you lead the reader to believe that you have proven 1=2.  The Brain Teaser is below.

So I go through all the steps with the students to make sure they see how the whole processes takes place.  I ask them so does "1=2?"  They are usually baffled at this point and I say, "Well the answer is obviously no right?  Would it be equal if I gave you one dollar and expect you to give me two?"  Long story short. I show them that in step 8 we did something not allowed which is we divided by zero since in step one we said a^2=ab.  I point out that this is why we say a number divided by zero is undefined we get fallacies.  When we divide by zero we can get weird things like proof that 1=2.  All the students went "oooohhhhh!"
The last activity predict a pair is a magic card trick where you predict the value of two playing cards (not the suit) that students pick at random from a standard deck of 52 playing cards.  How it works is you let a student pick one card from the deck.  Then the student multiplies that cards value (picture cards are worth 10 and aces are 1) by 2, then add 5, then multiply by 5.  Next the student picks another card from the deck at random and adds the second cards value to the total the student got from the previous steps.  The student then gives me the grand total.  And I "magically" predict and tell him/her the value of both cards and which card he/she pulled first and which he/she pulled second.  When I did this with a student during a tutoring session I looked at him when I told him his cards he said I was right, but just kept looking at his cards.  I thought, "oh man he's totally not impressed and or he thinks its completely lame."  Then a few seconds later he looks up at me and goes, "OK how'd you do that?," with a big grin on his face.  I smiled back and said, "Your job is to figure out how I did it."  He goes, "oh man come on just tell me."  I respond, "Nope you go home work on it and next week you show me what you worked on and then I'll tell you how I did it."  He replied, "Deal!" then shook my hand and left.

In all of these instances I feel I had the great opportunity to affect the lens in which students view  the sense of place as it pertains to their math class.  I got to generate genuine interest and help develop an understanding of why we say or do certain things in math,  It made me happy to think that I had some hand in changing a very negative space to a positive place, even if it was just for a little while.  This in turn made me realize that maybe we also need to be aware that we cannot affect ones sense of place without inadvertently effecting our own.  If I ran all these lessons and was met with disappointment I would be worried about the next time I ran a lesson with the students.  Lately my lens for math and my sense of place in the math world has been indifferent at best.  However, these students have positively affected my sense of place.  At the end of this experiences I feel the math classroom became a positive ideological and political space.  We generated interesting conversations where people expressed idea's and debated freely with no anxiety of being wrong.  A place where everyone can feel respected for their opinion.  They used their physical sense to help make sense of problems.  Its hard to describe the feeling or to accurately describe what took place, but being aware of sense of place and the affect we have on others as well as others has on ours makes teaching and learning more meaningful and enriching.  

Importance of sense of place and recognizing multiple sense of place

      Sense of place is important because it can build a pathway towards self-motivation for learning.  It is no mystery that motivation is a good tool for learning.  If you can motivate students to take charge of their own learning they will go further then we can imagine.  I hate talking about my judo career but I learned so much from judo.  I am able to apply so many aspects of judo into other areas of my life.  I feel a big part of my “success” in my judo career has a lot to do with my motivation.  When I first started I was uncoordinated and un-athletic. I was told by the veteran players on the team that I had no natural talent at all.  Certain events happened in the span of one month in the beginning of my judo training and it sparked a motivation in me that I couldn’t control.  I trained hard and dedicated myself to my training to the point where my parents had to tell me, “You know Jerrik, there is more to life than training and winning.”  My sensei’s poured knowledge on me and I couldn’t wait to gain more, to learn more.  Being able to apply what you learn in one subject (in this instance, for me judo) and applying it to other real world scenarios and subjects should be the aim of teaching.  I apply things I learned in judo like perseverance, the ability to analyze situations, and strategy to my everyday life.  What if we could instill this type of motivation into students?  Ok, maybe not to the extreme that I took it, but maybe close to it.  How could we achieve instilling this motivation?  I believe the answer is in building students sense of place through place based education.

      For me, at a particular time in my life, the judo mat was my strongest sense of place.  It’s where I felt I belonged and where I rooted my learning.  To qualify to compete in high school tournaments you had to submit grade checks weekly that had passing grades marked on them by your teacher from each class.  I passed all my classes and found motivation to study through my desire to compete.  A sense of place that leads to a motivating desire to learn could, and should, leak into other areas of students’ lives.

      There will most likely be multiple senses of place for any given space and moment, by our own (or others) different understandings or perceptions of a place based on different dimensions of the place and time.  It would be difficult to find a place that incorporates only one of Gruenewald’s five dimensions of place.  You would be particularly hard pressed to not find all five of Gruenewald’s dimensions of place in a classroom.  The different dimensions and multiple sense of place are there whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.  Students bring so many different dynamics into the classroom. When students walk into a room they come with their own views, ideas, dreams, culture, social and home life.  The simple act of introducing a new student affects everyone’s sense of place of a place.  The new student definitely has a different sense of place from the other students.  The multiple sense of place is evident in Tara’s story of students investigating their city and air pollution.  The student’s perceptual, sociological, ideological, political, and ecological sense of place radically changes from one moment to the next.  Everyone in that story had a different sense of place at a given moment.  For the students it was home in every sense of the word and what parts in the city are of importance and to their home view were different.  Teachers meant well and hand nothing but good intentions in trying to take a serious health concern and use it as a teaching space, which was their sense of place.  I guess to me the situation went like: Teachers came to the students house and said, wow this is a great house let’s make it better together, and students heard wow this is a great house, but your house has flaws.

      The aspect of multiple sense of place I am beginning to find most interesting and also troublesome for teaching.  Is the aspect that everyone has a different sense of place and hence there are multiple senses of place at any given time and that sense of place is in a constant state of change.  Every event, whether big or tiny, shapes and molds a sense of place for each individual.  Now as a teacher we need to constantly be aware of the changes and be flexible to adapt our teaching and lessons to continually be in tuned with the changes, especially with incoming classes.  What worked for one instance or for one class may not work for the next.  If we begin to go off on a tangent and let one sense of place take precedence and overshadow the multitude of senses of place we will then begin to negatively affect the space of learning.  What I perceive as important or interesting in a space may not be important or interesting to students due to the fact that there is multiple sense of place for a single space.

Hello All,

I wasn't sure how to upload my PPT presentation into the blog I also tried to share it through other means, but this is the only way I could make it work.  So sorry...  Here is a link to my PPT.
Center on Disability Studies (CDS)

Mahalo for reading!

Hitting the Ground Sprinting

I have been very busy working for the Ka Pilina Project.   I have been spending most of my work days trying to recruit teachers and students for my project.  Recruiting students has been the highlight for most of my days since DOE schools started.  To give students a better understanding of what my project is about and what students could possibly do as a participate of my project I have been running a short activity with them.  I have been running the tower building activity with them like we did in summer with the STEMS2 program but instead of marshmallows and spaghetti we used tape and straws.  It is so interesting to see students structures.  Some built structures that had strong bases some didn’t. Some built structures like triangles, rectangles, polygons, and some incorporated many shapes.  Some stood some didn’t.  But more importantly everyone had fun.  After they were done building their towers I related the activity to math.  I asked them to think about tall building they know of in the real world.  I got answers like pyramids and the Eiffel tower.  So I asked do they know what the strongest shape is.  Most, if not all, of them didn’t know it was a triangle.  

I told students a group ran this tower building activity with K-professionals (kindergarteners to Professionals)and asked them, "Guessed who did the best?"  Some knew it was kindergarteners!  But they didn’t know why it was kindergarteners.  I told them “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”-Walt Disney.  And this is why kindergartners do so well.  They don’t spend a lot of time talking about what they should try to do or plan, they just do.  They try anything to accomplish their goal of building the tallest tower.  Then I said just like when you are doing math. You cant ever solve a math problem by just talking about it or complaining that you don’t know what to do.  Just try to solve it.  Try anything. You can never solve it if you just sit there.  I also pointed out that I liked how every tower was unique no tower was the same.  I pointed out that in math there isn’t always just one way to solve a problem.  There are usually different ways you can solve the problem.  I mentioned that in the directions I never stated how to build the tower just that they had to build the tallest one.  And everyone went about building their tower differently.  Some used triangles some used squares, some used all kinds of shapes, some just put bends here and there and the tower stood with no real definite shape. 

All in all the activity was fun and a push towards a positive attitude in math.  The atmosphere of the class changed from being quietly dead and a collection of individuals to a lot of good discussions and a team.

The other part of my job required me to help put on a professional development and two mentor trainings.  During the professional development we covered the topics of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and differentiated learning.  We also had teachers try out a program called Glogster.  Glogster is a graphic blog that they can use to make presentations.  In my personal opinion it is like making a poster board on the computer.  It is quite fun since you can pull anything off the internet and insert it into your glogster. 

For the mentor training we covered their roles as a mentor.  One of their biggest roles is to be a positive role model for students.  We also covered FERPA and the do's and dont's as a mentor.  Instructing them what to do in certain situations, what to report, and what is should be kept confidential.   

It has been a very busy few weeks, but I am hopefully that all the hard work will pay off in the end and that we will help many students now and in the future.