School portraits / Fifth grade, one television season
A Bank Street Fifth Grader Graphed the Tears on Top Model
At Bank Street School for Children, math is taught through projects where students pick the topic. One student picked reality television, and kept picking it for four years.
In 2014 a graduating eighth grader at Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan gave a short speech, later posted on the school's website as "The Last Word." When adults make conversation with a student, she said, they ask the same three questions: what grade, what school, and what's your favorite subject. When she answers "math," people raise their eyebrows.
At Bank Street, she explained, math is taught through projects in which students get some choice: a proportional baseball diamond, a school menu made by quadrupling recipes, a probability board game. And her projects, she admitted, were usually about reality television.
Her final fifth-grade math project was titled "Runway of Tears." Her question: does the number of episodes a contestant survives on America's Next Top Model have a relationship to the number of times she cries? She learned about correlation and causation, graphing, statistics and data analysis. Her finding: the contestants who lasted longest were the outliers, "the ones who cried the least and the ones who cried the most."
Cried the least, or cried the most. I have seen the same pattern at my own dinner table, during homework.
It became, she said, a tradition. She learned scale factor by drawing what she called the "Mini Mardashians." Her spinner for the sixth grade's Casino Day was Top Model themed.
Then, in eighth grade, after one more Kardashian project, her mother suggested that this might be the last time. High school teachers would be less impressed, so she should make the most of it while she could. She agreed. Even without reality television, she said, math would stay her favorite subject: enjoyable, satisfying and clear.
A mother who said "enjoy it while it lasts" about a Kardashian math project. That is a parent with a long view and a sense of humor.
The middle one's seventh-grade math teacher let the class choose a topic for a statistics project. He chose the dog. For two weeks he recorded every time the dog barked, the time of day, and who was at the door. His finding was that the dog barks most at the mail carrier and least at me, which he presented as a measure of my importance.
He got an A. The dog has not been told.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Bank Street: second-grade curriculum school.bankstreet.edu
- Bank Street: Lower School school.bankstreet.edu
- Sandra Pinnavaia: A Parent’s Point of View school.bankstreet.edu
- Bank Street public parent and student reviews niche.com
- Bank Street admissions FAQs: literacy school.bankstreet.edu
- Irene Loewenson: The Last Word III school.bankstreet.edu