This is the first part of our series about what’s going on in great schools near universities whose men’s basketball teams made the Final Four this year. First stop: The University of Wisconsin, Madison. The 2012 enrollment was almost 43,000, and the university accepts a little more than 50 percent of its applicants.
Its La Follette School of Public Affairs offers five graduate degree programs:
- Energy analysis and policy
- Urban planning and public affairs
- Law and public policy
- Neuroscience and public policy (combined with a PhD in neuroscience)
- Public health and public policy (combined with an MPH)
At La Follette High School in the Madison Public School District, students in Todd Faulhaber’s introduction to construction class are combining homelessness lessons with math and construction techniques as they build a small house for the OM Build project, which is run by the nonprofit Occupy Madison.
Mr Faulhaber described this year’s project as “a little higher stakes” than the class’s usual project of building a shed, “because someone’s going to be living there,” the Capital Times quoted him as saying.
Photos from the group’s Facebook page.
The tiny houses, all 96 square feet of them (8.9 m2), are part of Occupy Madison’s project, which has caught on in other states as well, as the Christian Science Monitor reported last month.
One sophomore told the Capital Times he’s always been interested in construction and likes the connection to math. “There’s a lot of geometry in this: angles, length, area, perimeter,” the Capital Times quoted him as saying. “I know it’s going to change somebody’s life.”
Want to help?
The class has launched a Facebook page and other sites and is trying to raise money for materials for the house. They’re selling t-shirts and accepting donations.
