South Middle School
Staff Weekly Newsletter: November 25th - November 29th
Week at a Glance
- Annual IEP for JC (Room 4, 7:45 a.m.)
- Meeting for TP (Room 1, 7:40 a.m.)
Tuesday, November 26
- Annual IEP for JGW (Room 1, 7:40 a.m.)
- C2G - Commit to Graduate! (All Day)
- Board Meeting (DO, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.)
Wednesday, November 27
- Staff PD (Room 22, 8:00 - 11:00 a.m.)
- Staff Pictures (SMS Gym, 11:15)
- Clerical Day (Classroom, 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.)
Thursday, November 28
- Gobble, Gobble, Gobble
Friday, November 29
- Don't spend too much money
Supervision Schedule
Supervision Schedule (8:10 - 8:25 a.m.) - 15 minutes a day as assigned.
Team 1:
6th Grade Hall: Blank
T @ 7th/8th Grade Hall: Ransom
8th Grade Hall: Petty
Large Gym: Bigelow/Baertschiger
Parking Lot AM: Lingo
Parking Lot PM & Buses PM: Pieper & Hanson
Daily Supervision Schedule:
Parking Lot/Exit AM: Aguilera, Huerta & Admin
Parking Lot/Exit PM: Aguilera, Kindrick & Admin
Cafeteria AM: Miller/McCarty & Hopkins/Karbowski
Bus PM (3:09 - 3:25): Hopkins, Admin & Team Teacher
Staff Shout-Out
Sheri Heisner
Great job putting on a fantastic Book Fair this past week - and we still have a few more days to go! What a transformation in the Library this past year. Since Sheri has been at South, it has retained the feel of being a good space for students and staff to come to. This year, she has went above-and-beyond with creating a space where all students feel welcomed! Great job, Sheri!
Weekly Article
Staff,
I don't oftentimes give a "math-focused" weekly article - but one is! enjoy...very entertaining!
Using Barbie, Batman, and Bratz Dolls to Teach Proportional Reasoning
In this Rethinking Schools article, Flannery Denny describes spending several years trying to figure out how to teach proportional reasoning to her New York City middle-school students. She believes this is one of the most important math concepts for the age group, with all kinds of real-life applications: cooks scaling recipes to feed different numbers of people; farmers planning seed orders for their fields; and anesthesiologists determining dosages for different patients. Denny liked the idea of using Barbie dolls, but worried that girls might compare the doll’s “idealized” proportions to their own, and boys might fixate on certain features.
Then in a workshop with teachers from other schools, Denny hit upon the idea of using action figures. She reached out to her school community and gathered a diverse collection including Buzz Lightyear, Bratz dolls, G.I. Joe, Batman, Robin, Ant-Man, Aquaman, Ariel, and, yes, Barbie and Ken. Over three days, students worked in groups of three measuring foot size, height, waist, and shoulder width and using charts of human measurements to extrapolate what the action figures would be like if they were full size. Three question for students working with Barbie:
- Size 8 is one of the top-selling women’s shoe sizes. If Barbie’s feet were that big, how tall would she be?
- What size shoe would Barbie wear if she were 5’4” tall (the average height for women in the U.S.)?
- What would be the circumference of Barbie’s waist?
Students were able to calculate that given the size of the doll’s feet, a Barbie with human size 8 feet would be 11 feet 4 inches tall!
Students answered similar questions for other action figures, read and discussed articles about dolls and body image that Denny posted on the class homework website, and on the third day completed life-size posters for a hallway display with some eye-opening discoveries on how disproportionate these iconic bodies are – including 33-inch-wide Batman shoulders and a 19-inch Barbie waist circumference.
“‘Do You Have Batman Shoulders?’” by Flannery Denny in Rethinking Schools, Fall 2019 (Vol. 34, #1, pp. 22-27), no e-link available; Denny is at flannery.denny@gmail.com.
November Birthdays!
- Cindi Long - November 9
- Tabitha Curry - November 17
- Robert Lingo - November 20
- Laura McGarry - November 23
- Marcus Karbowski - November 25