The Hechinger Report – Alexandria Neason
“NEW YORK — One morning, just before classes at New York City’s Quest to Learn Middle School broke for lunch, Etai Kurtzman found himself transformed into a lemon tree. It was a warm day in late April, and his chatty sixth-grade class had been corralled from a narrow hallway into a classroom at the end of a short hall. Etai, tall and lanky, lugged a gray backpack to a desk that had been pushed up against a wall. Each student had been cast for a role-playing game either as a honeybee sent out from the hive or as a plant. In a flurry of organized chaos, the students simulated the pollination process: student honey bees, wearing pipe-cleaner antennae, approached classmates pretending to be plants and received small, colored building blocks. When a plant ran out of blocks, it meant their flowers had been pollinated. But the bees had to be careful: some of the plants randomly gave them white blocks, which represented pesticides and caused the bees to die. Their teacher, Kate Selkirk, was using this game as a starting point for an eight-week unit on math concepts — data analysis and graphing, proportions, probability and slope. But what does a beehive or a lemon tree have to do with any of that?.”(more)