GETTING REAL (part one)
Metro has remarkable partners who contribute to our innovative learning experiences. Annalies Corbin and Sheli Smith of the PAST Foundation (Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology) are those kinds of partners.
"Science, math and technology do not exist in a vacuum. They are inextricably tied to all facets of life and culture," Sheli says. "They cannot exist without culture and culture cannot exist without them. The more widespread association students get in terms of tying their lives together, the better off they will be."
GET REAL is a two-year program that began last fall with "Get Real - Get a Life." Each student was assigned a fictitious character and rolled dice to determine the character's marital status, occupation and number of children (like the "Game of Life" we all played as kids.)
These characters' circumstances may or may not be similar to the students' and the alter-egos allowed them to question choices and situations without feeling personal ridicule. (For example: "How can you raise six kids on this low salary? Why wouldn't this person have finished school so they could make more money? I would NEVER make such bad choices!")
This part of the project focused on math as they calculated paychecks, take-home pay, day-care expense, renting versus buying, mortgage payments, interest rates and utilities.
Each character had to solve transportation issues by purchasing or leasing vehicles they could afford on discretionary income-with some realizing they had to forego the Lexus, because a COTA pass was all they could fit in their budget.
Sources from the community were used to gather real-world data such as housing costs, car prices and utilities.
This was an eye-opening project. A few months later, Language Arts came into play as the task was to project their characters 10 years into the future-time to get real again. More about that in my next entry...
--- Posted June 1, 2007---