Don’t Know Much
I keep telling my middle school kids that I really don’t know much. I shared a flowchart that was making the rounds on twitter a while back to emphasize the fact that I don’t know all that much as it is much the way I approach most problems: though I think I go to google much earlier. We looked at it together and discussed how the cartoon might apply to their classroom situation.
The other day I asked them to take a spreadsheet I had published to the web and add the spreadsheet data to Tinkerplots. When I was asked how they were to do this I told them I didn’t know and their job was to find out how and then do it. Keep hoping that they will become more independent and use the tools they have in front of them to answer their own questions.
Saw a bit of light yesterday as we were looking at a Gapminder graph. We looked at the graph data and discussed what the chart was displaying, oil production, oil consumption, time, geographic location and oil reserves. They thought it was cool that you could display that much information in one graph. We looked at different bubbles and speculated what country was represented by the bubble. Then I turned on tracking and we looked at how oil production versus oil consumption in the US has changed over time.
The last thing I did was turn tracking on Saudi Arabia and watched change over time. The kids noticed something strange in the graph so I played it again and asked what happened between 1980 and 1985. A number of ideas were given but as these suggestions came out I noticed two students busy on their computers a few seconds later they had a suggestion “Mr. Bertoia we think it has something to do with OPEC”….. made me happy.
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