Flatland

Best teaching day ever!

We’re at the end of the second term and I’m in exams now. I had my last classes of the term last week. In my Form One class (first year students) I’ve been teaching Geometry. I wanted to try to adapt a project that is being done at Richard Montgomery and use it with the students here.

There is a short 80-page book called Flatland ,written in 1884. It is sometimes used in Geometry classes in different ways. It’s basically about a civilization that lives in two dimensions. One of it’s citizens (A. Square) discovers a third dimension and is shunned by the other disbelieving citizens. It’s vocabulary is tough but good and the writing style takes some getting used to, but it’s a great book for thinking about Geometry in a plane and in space. It also has underlying comments on society/roles of classes etc. because the polygons are ranked in society according to the number of sides they have…I digress…

I brought two copies with me and decided that during the Geometry unit I would read a few pages each day to the students at the end of class. During the past several weeks we’ve been reading the book and most of the students have really been into it. (Aside- one of the things I’m noticing about Ghanaian education is that there are not enough opportunities for the students to be creative. They are great at memorizing/reciting and methodically working through problems in a prescribed manner but when asked to picture something out of the norm or solve problems unlike any they’ve seen, or to generate ideas for a problem solving approach, they have difficulty. I’ve been trying to focus on creativity and ‘thinking out of the box’)
(Below is a student looking eye level at a Q-tip from different angles to imagine what a line looks like in two dimensions)


So, on the second to last day of teaching before the end of the term I told them I’d show them the 40 minute movie of Flatland. Out of the three classrooms that I teach in, theirs is the room with a plug. I have the DVD, I have a computer and a projector and ELECTRICITY! Also, I figured I’d have Tony here that day and the two of us could set up all of the plugs and adaptors and computer and wires that were needed to make this thing happen.

The kids were very excited. While Tony and I were setting up, I had a few tall boys hang a sheet on the back wall (screen). They were very serious about it, the rest of the class readied the room for the movie. We couldn’t really get the room very dark (there was no way I was going to shut the door or cover the slits in the wall because of the heat, but the kids didn’t mind. When I was finished setting up the projector, I noticed there were about 75 kids in the room (there are 48 in the class) and others were sneaking in. I had to shoo away the extras (wondering why their teachers hadn’t noticed them missing).

The students enjoyed the movie-it was animated and well done. They cheered and applauded when it was over. I showed them the ‘extras’. There were interviews with the actors (Martin Sheen was one) and they saw clips of an animated movies being dubbed. Also there was a great understandable interview with a professor from Brown who spoke about, and showed diagrams about, trying to imagine a fourth dimension (OK OK I know this is a bit too much math for some of you but…hey-it’s my thing)





Then, to make ‘Flatland Day’ complete I had one last surprise.

I had each of them write their name on a slip of paper. I had ordered 20 copies of Flatland ($1.50 each from Amazon!) and I drew names of 20 students. As each name was called the kids cheered and hugged the winner. I gave consolation prizes to the ones that didn’t get a book. Several of the students asked me to autograph their books. Very cute.


During the past weeks I've had all sorts of 'bloggable' moments but I have to be true to my pledge of not writing too much that you will all lose interest. So we'll have to save the following for stories when I get home...I'll tell them to you over tea or coffee, or around the lunch or dinner table! So here are the teasers:
*Riding in the back of a taxi with a police officer holding a large kalashnikov rifle between his knees as we took the driver to the station because he made an illegal U-turn
* Throwing up in the moat of a slave fort
*Being invited to a 'state funeral' and wake for Guy Warren(aka Kofi Ghanani)-famous Ghanaian drummer/musician with ties to the US-Billie Holliday era. (That is him, yes HIM (laid out), below-the drum behind him is his coffin)


*Stopping our car to watch a family of baboons playing by the side of the road
* Giving an 8AM exam at 1PM because of copying/collating issues
*Somehow becoming a mother to a family of wild dogs



No teaching till May 6th. April will be full of adventures, including a trip to Rome with son Eric and a visit from my friend-since-playpen, Nancy.