The Ladies Chained

Sticks and Shapes

To celebrate the last day of classes, my students played with sticks. To quote one of my kids, “this is something we’d do in a Waldorf school”. I don’t teach at a Waldorf school.

Here are some pictures of my calculus class making a six-pointed star and raising two tetrahedra.

If you look carefully you’ll see that the kids aren’t holding the sticks. These are push-sticks. I am pretty sure I’ve played with them long ago but it wasn’t until a yoga workshop with the wonderful Circus Minimus last Sunday did I actually realized that I could use them in class. Or, at least, I can have kids play with them. Push-sticks are basically wooden dowels. What makes them special is that they are held up by two people each putting an index finger on each end. It’s a wonderful exercise in movement and trust. It’s also wonderful for doing things like making pretty things.

For the tetrahedra, the kids started out as groups of six and were connected to each other via sticks in a circular pattern. Their job was to collapse the large hexagon into a tetrahedron without dropping the sticks. For the star, two groups each with a triangle already made needed to superimpose them on top of each other without hitting each other or bumping into each other too much. I love how this group did it with three kids “trapped” in the star.

Not calculus, really, but they earned it after an especially tough test—if I had given that same test to my university calculus students from the past I’d expect the average to be about 50 to 60 out of 100—and they really, really could get out of their little cliques and have fun and trust people I tossed them with.

Here’s a picture of two intersecting tetrahedra.

One of the “vertex supporters” was not quite tall enough. And they are actually holding three sticks in each hand. From experience three is the number of sticks you can reliably hold and still control the angle somewhat.