Special Relativity and a First Grader's Pumpkin
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
With my patient schedule and personal weakness and need to pretend I am still a professional, I do not get/take a lot of time to volunteer in our middle son’s first grade classroom. I should do it more often because the kids always enlighten me in some profound way.
So, when Monster Math rolled around this Halloween, I volunteered. It always amazes me how I can know what to say to a patient struggling with the ravages of ALS, but when it comes to a group of children I am petrified. Kyle’s fabulous, saint-like, first grade teacher gently laid out our assignment of math tasks to perform, and together with a table of six six-year-olds and a selected pumpkin I dove in.
The first assignment was to measure the dimensions and then guess how many seeds were in the large squash before we sliced the poor thing open to verify the truth. One might think the guessing of concealed contents would be the tough part, but all of the six-year-olds at my table were quite certain of the number of seeds inside. It was the measurement of the outside of the pumpkin that was the topic of debate. How could this be? Were we not all looking at the same pumpkin?
In Ms. Hedge’s classroom, the first grader’s use a measurement tool called Unifix Cubes. They are brightly colored, uniform cubes that interlock together like Legos. First you capture the height or width dimension of the pumpkin using the cubes, then count up the number of cubes and there is your precise measurement. Each child wrote down their answers and compared. There were a lot of different answers.
The six-year-olds proceeded to discuss, jockey for position of correctness, change answers to match others, all of the “normal” activities we humans engage in to determine who is right, and who is wrong. The result was a table of first graders with varying degrees of tiny puffed-up egos and mildly hurt feelings. I could have simply let it go, but I felt both sides needed a reality or “relativity” check.
I knelt down behind each child’s chair and quickly measured off my Unifix Cubes to determine the height and width of our pumpkin from the different perspectives. I took special care to reassure the table of six-year-olds each measurement given was a perfectly “true and correct” answer. We discussed briefly that each chair was a perfectly fine place to do this experiment from, and that no chair’s perspective was any more right than another chair.
This is the essence of Special Relativity for measuring a pumpkin. Is it ever too earlier to touch a child with the importance of seeing the truth from another’s perspective?
This needs to be a core value in the hearts of our next generation if they are to have the courage and creativity to climb higher. I hope they invite me back.
Have a fantastic week and stay safe, warm, and dry.
I always look forward to your comments.
Michele
So, when Monster Math rolled around this Halloween, I volunteered. It always amazes me how I can know what to say to a patient struggling with the ravages of ALS, but when it comes to a group of children I am petrified. Kyle’s fabulous, saint-like, first grade teacher gently laid out our assignment of math tasks to perform, and together with a table of six six-year-olds and a selected pumpkin I dove in.
In Ms. Hedge’s classroom, the first grader’s use a measurement tool called Unifix Cubes. They are brightly colored, uniform cubes that interlock together like Legos. First you capture the height or width dimension of the pumpkin using the cubes, then count up the number of cubes and there is your precise measurement. Each child wrote down their answers and compared. There were a lot of different answers.
The six-year-olds proceeded to discuss, jockey for position of correctness, change answers to match others, all of the “normal” activities we humans engage in to determine who is right, and who is wrong. The result was a table of first graders with varying degrees of tiny puffed-up egos and mildly hurt feelings. I could have simply let it go, but I felt both sides needed a reality or “relativity” check.
I knelt down behind each child’s chair and quickly measured off my Unifix Cubes to determine the height and width of our pumpkin from the different perspectives. I took special care to reassure the table of six-year-olds each measurement given was a perfectly “true and correct” answer. We discussed briefly that each chair was a perfectly fine place to do this experiment from, and that no chair’s perspective was any more right than another chair.
This is the essence of Special Relativity for measuring a pumpkin. Is it ever too earlier to touch a child with the importance of seeing the truth from another’s perspective?
This needs to be a core value in the hearts of our next generation if they are to have the courage and creativity to climb higher. I hope they invite me back.
Have a fantastic week and stay safe, warm, and dry.
I always look forward to your comments.
Michele
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