Measuring Up

I have two sections of ninth grade students taking a course I helped develop at the county level called Natural Resources. It is available for students to take as either a science credit or a CTE (Career Technical Education) credit. It is oriented toward the students who are not planning on attending a four year college. The past two weeks we have been doing drafting with drawing boards, T-squares, architect scales, and other equipment.

The first disaster was an assignment to draw a 4”x6” square centered on a sheet of paper. I thought most of the students were just being difficult when they said they could not do it. After the third disastrous drawing, I had them do a scale drawing of the front of the high school building. Then I discovered the reason for the difficulty: most of them could not read a ruler. It was like beating my head against a wall as I showed student after student the 1/8 and ¼ marks on the scale. They had no comprehension of the fractional divisions on a scale/ruler.

Then this one girl asked to be excused on the first day of the scale project to go work on a history project. I told her she would fail the drawing if she missed the introductory information. She said she didn’t care. She missed day one. Then on day two she showed up in the middle of the class period. On day three she just sat in the corner of the classroom with two other girls and ignored what the rest of the class was doing. When class ended for the day, she came up to me and said she wasn’t able to complete the assignment because she was absent and didn’t understand it. I was very sympathetic and was moved to tears as I told her that was her choice and have a nice day.

Meanwhile my physics students are studying triangles by triangulating the distance to Mount Rainier from our football field. Then they have to determine the height of a radio tower on a ridge about two miles away. I have two theodolites on permanent loan from a local surveying company. They were just collecting dust in the owner’s garage. Some of the students are really getting “into it”. Meanwhile, my ninth graders can’t even read a ruler and they don’t think that is a problem.

Their math teacher is doing algebra (no one gets general math anymore) and rulers are not part of the curriculum. Whenever they were taught to use rulers, it obviously didn’t stick. Meanwhile the state wants all students to take math through geometry to graduate. I doubt they will “measure up” and are in danger of becoming dropouts.