 In a sixth grade advisory, student shared puzzle pieces decorated with personal symbols. |
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 A student had used three flags to represent his ethnicity.
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 Not everyone recognized the third flag.
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 That's the English flag, he explained, then moved on. |
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 In a fourth grade classroom, they had been discussing flags.
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 They were able to explain the difference between an English flag and the flag of Great Britain.
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It turned out the classic "Union Jack" is based on each of the United Kingdom's flags, laid upon one another.
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 Back in sixth grade, students had moved on to statistical analysis.
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 Their homework had been to determine the mean average height of the students in the class. |
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 First came a review of the difference between mean average and median, with a brief discussion of highway medians and the difference between white road stripes and yellow ones.
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 The worksheet had exercised a number of skills, asking students to record their guesses before they made measurements, and having them explain what their guesses were based on.
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 The question of what constitutes a good guess kept coming up.
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 Students reported in their answers. |
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 Suddenly it looked like a multiple-choice question.
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 Which choices could they eliminate right away? |
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 It was a question equally relevant on standardized tests and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? |
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 One guess was way off. |
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 Or was it? |
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 Was it sixteen times too big, or just one step away from the correct answer? |
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 All the time, the teacher kept feeding them a new vocabulary for what they were doing. |
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 A student who had diagnosed one incorrect answer sat up a little straighter when he heard he was "performing error analysis." |
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 Another student didn't simply need to speak up; she needed to "demonstrate more confidence in her mathematical prowess."
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 A question about decimal places led to a discussion of the difference between "precise" and "accurate" and, again, when a good guess is just as useful as an exact result. |
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 Eventually they moved on to another way to represent the height of the class as a whole: the bar graph.
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 They were less than one hour into the second day of the year.
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 It's going to be a big one.
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