Meeting #3, January 26, 2009

We turned a corner this week – the girls are getting really excited about what we’re working on and some of them are overflowing with ideas. We had a special guest speaker today, Jana Underwood. She is an occupational therapist for JCPS and serves Westport as one of her schools. Jana was inviting and thoughtful, sharing a wealth of information in a way that the girls understood. She talked to them about universal design and access for students with disabilities. Since we’ve spend part of two afternoons in Ms. Stark’s classroom she talked about the specific issues in her room. These include major obstacles like the post inside the door to things that most of us wouldn’t notice, like the faint flicker of fluorescent light that can be profoundly disturbing to a child with autism. The girls were empathetic, and began identifying the many inconveniences and small changes they might include in their designs. We also talked about some of the technologies that have been developed for students with disabilities.

One of the areas we talked about is the entrance to the building by Ms. Stark’s room. In poor weather, students get off the bus and wait in an area that isn’t covered while the doors to the building are opened. Even in good weather, the area isn’t exactly the most inviting…..it has a lovely view of the dumpsters and the parking lot.

Next we went to Ms. Stark’s room for a tour. Even though we’ve been in the room doing measurements, we haven’t really looked at it through the eyes of the children who spend much of the day there. Ms. Stark identified the amount of visual clutter as a real dilemma and distraction. She needs a large amount of storage for the variety of supplies and texts she uses to individualize instruction, but many of her students are overwhelmed by the stimulation from things like books on shelves, bulletin board displays, and stacks of bins and books along the walls. We talked about her need for a more calming environment, with basic needs like simple closed cabinets that are consistent throughout the room and fabric curtains that can easily be moved to cover and uncover the bulletin boards as she uses them. Her students also need a quiet, more secluded area for self calming. Ms. Stark needs to be able to see into this area for supervision, but it could include a translucent screen from the rest of the room and a variety of textures and fabrics for sensory stimulation.

See the document here that is my compilation of the students’ notes from our talk with Ms. Underwood and Ms. Stark.

Week #2, January 21, 2009

This week we started with a formal lesson on scale factor. Rachel Cox, a 7th grade math teacher at Westport, taught this lesson since scale factor is part of the 7th grade core content. I think it was good for the girls to meet a teacher they will have next year, and they quickly realized that they could apply their 6th grade skills with fractions and decimals to solve scale factor problems.

We also looked at a set real architectural plans of a proposed addition to Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church. We looked at the extraordinary number of layers involved in archictect plans (it's about an inch thick with diagrams from multiple viewpoints and at multiple scales) and we talked about the way scale and proportion are indicated. I have another set of plans to show that are more complex of a science building at Lindsey Wilson College.

After our formal lessons and discussion, we returned to our scale drawings of Ms. Stark's room. She is a gracious host for a group of high energy girls at the end of a long school day. It seemed like they had a much easier time with this task after our work upstairs.

Meeting #1, January 12, 2009

Our first meeting! All of the girls were a little uncertain....it's hard to know what to expect when you first join a new group. I explained that our group has a several goals:

• Create a peer group of strong mathematics students, so that they will be able to support and encourage each other through middle school to achieve academically
• Build lasting friendships between wonderful girls who might not get to know each other in the normal school day
• Explore math through service oriented projects and projects that the girls initiate as they gain more experience working together
• Meet mentors to support them as they move closer to high school, and meet professional women who use math as a part of their daily work
• Become mentors and tutors to girls who are invited to join our group next year as incoming sixth graders

We talked about our first project.....a design for remodelling Ms. Stark's classroom. Ms. Stark teaches students with severe disabilities, so access and accommodations to serve her students are important issues in the physical design of her classroom. This project will likely carry us through the end of the year.

Today I introduced scale drawing, and we set a scale of 6 inches = 1/4 cm for our drawings. We made our first visit to Ms. Stark's room, and worked in teams to start the scale drawings of her room that we'll use as the basis for our designs. It surprised me to see just how challenging this was -- the process of translating the actual measurements to a graph paper drawing of her classroom. The girls also were uncertain how to work as a part of a cohesive group, which may end up being one of the most valuable skills we learn together.