Day Three - Tools and such

Today started with breakfast at 7:30; Joey was already working on blueprints for the bookcase and the chalkboard stands he’s going to build with three or four students. They spent the day choosing the wood, negotiating the price and then later Charles and Joey took them to the carpenter to plane and finish the wood.

Greenie and I spent the day at the school, observing in various classrooms. At lunch she shared the story ofhow she met Charles in more detail. I’ll be sure to include that here soon. For my part today…I observed several math classes, including two with Belinda who teaches JHS1 and JHS2 math and science. Those grades are equivalent to our 7^th and 8^th grades respectively. In the JHS1 class the students were working on converting decimals into fractions into percents into decimals into fractions and so on. She gave a few tough ones – converting 25.5% into a fraction. The students were attentive and really stuck with this. I’m trying to brainstorm some small group problem solving with practical applications for this work...as I said…I’m brainstorming!
In JHS2 they were learning about bearings. They had already covered the direction bearings (cardinal and intermediate) and today they were finding the bearings of set points. There is a high degree of precision required from the students; when they are explain what they’re doing up at the board there is little room for error in large part because they are attentive to one another and call out “You’re wrong” and then have to go to the board and explain it themselves, with that same degree of attention to detail.

Joey and I had a discussion about this later tonight, namely the use of “That’s wrong.” We spend a lot of time transforming student errors into teachable moments, which is critical to exploratory learning. At the same time, we have kids who don’t know how to accept that something they’re doing is actually wrong. Not that they want to talk their way out of it necessarily but more…..Are we overly protecting kids from the notion of being wrong? It’s good to be wrong, as long as the correction is a learning process not an inadvertent means of silencing risk-taking.

Anyway, it’s getting late and I am waxing (not quite) poetic. Charles and Joey presented the tools Joey brought over for the school. Home Depot donated a bunch of great materials, as did some vendors Joey works with, and the school matched that. Generosity abounds…..Shop Home Depot to help express our thanks this summer!

The view from outside our hotel...

Joey was asked to keep his curtains closed today because the people across the street can see in his window. He theorized that the glare of the sun off his abruni skin reflected a powerful glare to the store-front across the way.