MAY 28, 2024 – What delights Beth (a former teacher) and me (a former student, who by and large enjoyed school) is that our second-grade granddaughter likes school so much, one of her favorite after-school activities is . . . playing school.
Half the fun for all of us is the set-up. Emulating what she observes at her real school, Illiana invariably arranges a bright, cheerful, well-organized classroom within the confines of our living room. It’s well stocked with academic materials—pens, paper, workbooks—and includes an exceptionally quiet and well behaved group of students: Beth and I, along with “Owl,” “Munchie” (I think it’s a cat, but I’m not sure), “Whitney” (definitely a feline, but is it a snow leopard or a Siberian tiger cub?), the bespectacled “Elephant,” and occasionally, the “Hare,” who is either big for its age or old for his class.
Illiana always fills the role of teacher, and you can tell which “desk” is her command post, because that’s where you’ll find a toy alarm clock, a music box in the form of a miniature Swiss chalet, and a toy laptop—a holdover from an earlier age—on which Illiana pretends to type her all-important teacher notes.
Today on each of the student desks was an attractive set of artificial flowers, pulled from somewhere-I’m-not-sure, which is the hidden storehouse of such things that Beth maintains for Illiana’s regular forays into the World of Pretend. I must say that today’s added floral touch put me in an especially favorable mood.
The teacher is exceptionally kind, gracious, patient, and caring. Today the main subject was math, and the two human students in the class got 100 on their answers to a page worth of problems. The teacher was very pleased.
But then as often occurs, one of the students got a little distracted. Today’s diversion was the large faded red exercise ball that Illiana had earlier retrieved from an area of the basement where Beth stores much of her book sales inventory—and the aforementioned hidden storehouse of props, costumes, and artificial flowers (for example). Before class got underway, the big red ball had been rolled off to the side.
The ball is a frequent guest on the first floor of our house, and its appearances, I’ve noticed, tend to coincide with Illiana’s visits. It so happens that whenever the student in question sees that big red ball, said student thinks immediately of a scale model of the solar system with the red ball playing the role of the sun.
Today in the middle of class, the student raised his hand and called out to be recognized. “Teacher, teacher!” he said.
“Yes,” the teacher answered very patiently. “You have a question?”
“I have a suggestion. How about making today a science field trip day outside where we could make a model of the solar system?”
The teacher tried her best to deflect the student’s request without discouraging his enthusiasm. The student, however, chose to ignore the teacher’s lack of enthusiasm.
“I know,” said the student. “We could turn this into a math problem, then solve it.” No sooner had the reckless words left the student’s mouth when the other student was distracted by a text or email or phone call. Class was temporarily interrupted, giving the first student a chance to lobby the teacher further.
“Teacher!” he said, “One of my favorite subjects is astronomy, and that big red ball would make the perfect centerpiece for a model of our solar system. How ’bout it?”
The student pulled out his phone which was strictly against the rules, he knew, having been reprimanded for checking his email—furtively, but not sufficiently so—at the outset of class. This time he eschewed his email and went straight to “utilities” where he opened the calculator.
“We need to run some numbers,” the student said to the teacher. “But first, we need to measure the red ball. This step was undertaken quickly, and it yielded an answer of 24 inches. The student then Googled, “What proportion sun diameter to earth?” What popped up in the next screen was “109 times.”
The student then divided 24 by 109 to get .22—the size of earth relative to the (big red ball) sun. He reached into a conveniently placed decorative plate filled with antique marbles and found a dark blue sphere roughly a quarter inch in diameter. Plucking it from the “orb garden,” he held it aloft and said to the teacher, “Look! If that big red ball you’re sitting on were the sun, the earth would be the size of this little blue marble!”
“Hmmm,” said the teacher, less impressed than the student thought she should be.
“Next,” said the student, ignoring the teacher’s ambivalence, “we need to determine the proportion of size to distance.”
The teacher now looked lost in space, hoping the student would give up on his astronomical diversion.
“If the big red ball is the sun,” said the student, “24 inches in diameter, and the earth by comparison is this little marble, a quarter inch in diameter scaled down from the earth’s actual diameter of 8,000 miles, and we put the marble out in front of the house, then how far down the block would we have to place the big red ball to depict 93 million miles—the distance from earth to sun; sun to earth?”
The student ran more calculations, dividing 93 million by 8,000 to calculate the ratio of the earth’s diameter to the planet’s distance from the sun: 1:11,625. He then applied this to .22 inch (x 11,625 inches) to get 2,557.5 inches and divided by 12 to convert to feet: 213.125, then further divided by 60—the width of each lot on the block—to reach 3.55 lots.
Student and teacher then exited the classroom and ventured outside. The student placed the earth on the sidewalk in front of the house and asked the teacher to carry the sun past three houses.
What the experiment revealed was that the big red ball was much easier to see from the little blue marble than vice versa. But by that time, the teacher was testing the elasticity of the big red rubber ball relative to the inelasticity of the concrete sidewalk. The outcome: lots of bounce—until the rains came, forcing teacher and student to dash back to the classroom.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
