A Piece of Pi and a Poem
Dear Families,
It has been a busy week in the Middle School. With many of our classes focused on writing poetry, I hope that you were able to spend dome time on Monday night reading as a family and perhaps enjoying a poem or two. Poems were certainly in abundance in the halls and classrooms for Tuesday’s Poem In Your Pocket Day. My pocket featured Philip Levine‘s “M. Degas Teaches Art And Science At Durfee Intermediate School–Detroit, 1942” (click here to listen to the author reciting the poem). I like this poem for the way that it reveals the power of a particular learning moment and the possibility for that moment to transform not only how we look at the world, but how we commit ourselves to an ongoing search for meaning. As you participate in your family conference, I think you will find that these moments occur with astonishing frequency in the middle school and, as a result, create a profound poetry of their own.
Poem In Your Pocket Day was followed by our belated celebration of Pi Day (usually held on 3/14, postponed to 4/15 [the 3rd-5th digits of pi] and subsequently rescheduled for this past Wednesday, 4/22 [the 1,840th-1,842nd digits of pi]. While Pi Day provides an opportunity for us to celebrate the importance and “poetry” of math, a favorite highlight is the much-anticipated Memorized Recitation of the Digits of Pi Competition. This year, we heard from four competitors at our Wednesday Middle School Meeting. Fifth graders Alessandro and Pia recited 54 and 112 digits of pi respectively; these were impressive first efforts. Sixth grader Odelia improved her effort from last year with an amazing recitation that ran to 438 digits of pi. To give you some sense of what that looks like, here they are:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307
8164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505
822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644
288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104
543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540
9171536436789259036001133053054882046652138414695194151160943305727036
575959195309218611738193261
Our final contestant was math teacher Margaret Andrews who turned in a respectable effort of 86 digits. However, it was revealed that Margaret’s effort could not be entered into the Pi Day Archives as she had achieved it through the use of a bluetooth headset hidden under a scarf through which she received the digits from a mysterious Mr. Pi. Any information regarding the identity of this surreptitious mathematician should be reported to the other members of the math department.
On other fronts, the seventh grade spent Thursday in Philadelphia exploring Independence Hall and the National Constitution Center as part of their on-going inquiry into the birth of our nation and the drafting of the Constitution. Click here to view some photos.
Be well,
Mark