Some small teams of students at Pana Junior High School in Illinois were studying the erosion that a hurricane can cause to the ocean floor last week, writes Rachel Rodgers in the Decatur Herald-Review.
But, since an ocean isn’t exactly easy to get to from central Illinois, they drafted a storage table into service and simply used mathematics to calculate the results of their project to the real-life scale.
“The project was really fun, but it was a lot more advanced than what we are used to so we really had to step it up and think,” the paper quoted one eighth-grade student as saying, referring to the need to abandon Web search engines and dig up a few college textbooks on stratigraphy.
The discipline involves the study of rock layers on the earth and endeavors to determine what those layers tell us about the geological time scale.
For archaeologists, studying soil or rock layers can help them understand their sites, including those under the ocean. The arrangement of layers gives them a start when it comes to dating their finds. Of course, there’s some erosion and movement, which is what the students were learning about, so not everything at the same level or in the same layer is necessarily from the same age. But studying the layering, or stratification, of rock can lead to new scientific investigations that will help them zero in on the date.
Other student groups worked with Lego robots, remotely-operated, underwater vehicles, and an antenna that can be used to bounce a signal off the moon.
In addition to using mathematics to describe and develop models for real-world systems (see the introduction to eighth-grade mathematics: “use functions to model relationships between quantities”), the Common Core has officially penetrated the industrial arts curriculum, at least at Pana Junior High.
“It’s all about teaching the students multi-step instruction and problem solving,” the Herald-Review quoted industrial technology teacher Steve Bonser as saying (see Common Core seventh-grade math standard 7.EE.B.3: “Solve multi-step real-life and mathematical problems posed with positive and negative rational numbers in any form (whole numbers, fractions, and decimals), using tools strategically,” e.g.).
