7.2: Community Resources
As a focal point in the community, schools should remain highly interactive with their surroundings. Teachers hopefully are willing and encouraged to reach out into the community in many ways. I believe there are three ways that the classroom can interact as part of the community. They can seek a resource, they can be a resource, and they can initiate contact that builds community.
Most commonly, I think teachers utilize the community as a learning resource for the classroom by taking advantage of demonstrations or other day-to-day field-related activities such as field trips or extra-curricular activities. Rarely will a teacher call upon part of community to go beyond its routine to assist with the learning process. A more collaborative approach may be necessary to sustain the quality of the experience, but the result will be more rewarding for the community and students alike. If the teacher needs help explaining or the students need help understanding, there should be freedom to seek that help outside the school. Calling upon professionals, government or volunteers should be mainstream instruction that is welcomed and expected of schools by the community.
I have always been a proponent of seeking community resources. When the question arose at work about building sales through hotels and businesses, I think the entire management team had some idea of the work that needed to be done. Not one of us had the time on top of our schedules and work loads to take on the job. I asked the General Manager if I could reach out to the community for assistance. I contacted Marketing Instructors in three local community colleges. To my disappointment only one replied with interest, but it turned out to be a quality match. Basically I was unashamedly looking for a cost-free marketing plan, but I also thought it would be a rich experience for his class. He agreed, and we kicked off the project with dinner at PF Chang’s to teach our new marketing team about our concept and introduce the objectives.
After a few more meetings with the class to answer questions and direct their progress, the team embarked on a mission. Several weeks later I received a phone call asking if the class could visit me at PF Chang’s to make a presentation. The information they obtained and organized in this short time was critical in making timely decisions about impacting our sales. They found and assembled more data in a few weeks than any PF Chang’s Manager could had the time to acquire over several months.
Soon after the completion of the project, sweeping management changes would be introduced into the restaurant, and the IBC Marketing Proposal (excerpts offered as evidence) was still recognized as a professional tool for new management to use in understanding the local marketplace. The information is still used today in decisions about creating and presenting catering menus to business clientele in the immediate area.
Obviously this project describes my willingness and ability to reach out into the community for direct support, but this experience was likely more valuable to the marketing students than it will ever be to PF Chang’s. As a teacher, recognizing the potential your class has as a community resource in itself can provide them with the same rich experience these students from Indiana Business College received from PF Chang’s. Because nobody is probably banging down your classroom door for help, it is important to be aware of appropriate content-related projects that are underway in the local community. Making your class available to assist with meaningful tasks gives them a tangible connection back to the community and a fulfilling and rewarding feeling of accomplishment in mathematical applications.
Several years ago my wife worked at Conner Prairie. Among the many, many things I was called upon to “volunteer” for, two in particular always come back to mind as enriching math class experiences had I been a teacher at the time. First, every year my wife produced the Prairie Town Market Arts & Crafts Show in the museum building. She always had about two hundred booths to arrange in the exhibit spaces and corridors of the museum. It was my annual task to measure, map, and lay tape on the floor to mark all of the vendor spaces prior to the event. Each vendor was guaranteed a certain amount of square feet, and not all spaces were conducive to a nice square or rectangular display. The benefits to a classroom are endless in this project. There are problems with measurement, accuracy, conservation of area and perimeter, visibility, reducing congestion and traffic flow, etc.
A second and more creative project involved her ambition to create a life-sized Candyland game for children at a Christmas event. Oh how I labored over measuring, assembling, painting, and decorating empty donated refrigerator boxes and colored square pathways. A project much better suited for a math class, again if I only had one. From a mathematical standpoint, this project was about creating proportional spaces for children to “be” in Candyland. Questions of area, volume, roof pitch, and walking distance had to be addressed. For Conner Prairie, I had to create something that would be easy to disassemble, store and reassemble in future years, putting many constraints on complexity, creativity and materials.
Finally, an ambition I hope to carry into the classroom is the “YOU NEED MATH!” FLOAT. As students and community come together during the annual homecoming festivities, I think it would be fun to construct a float that demonstrates math skills required in a different community-based career path each year. This collaborative effort between students and community would be entirely student designed and driven and supported by the community. As an alumni fraternity volunteer and the husband of a not-for-profit volunteer-in-law, I have creative practice seeking community support in-kind for labor, finances, equipment, and other resources.
In conclusion, I believe the symbiotic nature of the community and the school needs to become more commonplace. Good citizens are active and voluntary participants in their community. Teachers must be willing to reach out into the community to assist with the concrete application and instruction of their students. Likewise, professionals, officials, and other community members should look more readily to our schools and classrooms with skills and other untapped resources they could benefit from. Successful contribution to the community as early as adolescence will create connective bonds, raise awareness about local needs and foster a sense of belonging that may soon begin to erode the brain drain from which this state suffers so greatly.
