Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Tuesday, March 18, 2003 Page: 7A
OPINION
IT WOULD BE EASY TO SCOFF AT THE FRONT-PAGE PHOTO IN SATURDAY’S EDITION OF
STUDENTS’ FACES SMASHED INTO PIES. How much learning could kids at Dallas High
School be doing if they spent the day eating pie?
It’s a valid question. We hope you read Mark Guydish’s story to find the
answer.
The students were celebrating Pi-day – March 14 – because the date in
numbers – 3.14 – is the first three digits of Pi. Remember Pi? Pi times the
radius of a circle squared gives you the area of a circle.
Yes, there were many pies on Pi-day. Students entered a pie-making contest
and pie-eating contest (we say the true winners were the eaters). A pie king
and queen were also named.
Mixed in, ever so painlessly, were lessons.
Students recited as many digits of Pi as they could remember. (They could
go on forever, since Pi is infinite and never repeats a pattern.) Students
also sang a mathematical rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie”:
Find, find, the value of Pi
starts 3 point 1, 4, 1, 5, 9.
Good ol’ boys, gave it a try
but the decimal never dies
the decimal never dies. …
There was also Pi trivia and a group of students created a paper Pi chain.
Made from 10 different colored papers, each color represented a digit from 0
to 9. The loops were linked in the order of the Pi digits.
Infinity is a tough concept to comprehend, but must be clearer to the kids
who spent the morning taping together a paper chain nearly a half-mile long,
only to realize they could never come close to the end of Pi, since it doesn’t
exist.
No, events such as Pi-day shouldn’t happen every day.
But what’s the harm in occasionally combining learning with fun?
Planning Pi-day took initiative, creativity and people willing to bypass
routines. Thank you, Dallas administrators, teachers and students, for showing
us and other districts how to have the strength to play – and learn –
together.