Ms. Day agreed to let me make long paths of masking tape on her carpet before school. In minutes, I had one 3-meter squiggle and one 5-meter zigzag running across the middle of her brightly colored meeting carpet. Her 2nd grade students would no doubt wonder what we were up to. Later that morning, I brought her class in from recess and asked them to sit in a circle around the tape. This may sound like an easy task to accomplish. It was not. Several students froze in a standing position on the carpet, like deer caught in the headlights. I guided the confused to the perimeter of the carpet. Shilo was sitting in between the tape paths staring straight ahead. I asked him to return to his seat. He started screaming repeatedly, ‘I DIDN’T TOUCH THE TAPE!’ Clearly Ms. Day had gone over the ‘don’t touch the tape’ directive I had requested earlier. I didn’t engage. I had bigger fish to fry. The class and I discussed and recorded reasonable estimates for the lengths of the two tape paths. Then I pulled out my red yarn. “How could I use this piece of yarn to measure the squiggly path?’ Many hands flew up in the air. I called Jaylani up and handed her the yarn. She took one end and placed it by the beginning of the squiggly tape path, then carefully stretched the yarn into a straight line until it reached the end of the path. I asked her to sit back down so everyone could observe. I wasn’t sure what to say next. The class I taught this lesson to yesterday just measured it the way I expected them to measure it, by covering the path with the yarn exactly so they could get an exact measurement of the length of the path. I didn’t explain anything. I asked if anyone else wanted to try it a different way. The next student walked over to the beginning of the path and pulled the yarn a centimeter closer to the end of the path and sat back down. The next 3 kids did the exact same thing, but the last one went a step further and rolled the excess yarn that had now developed into a neat little ball. I giggled silently into my mask. ‘Guys, we’re going to need to do something VERY different if we want to measure this path accurately. Does anyone else have any ideas?’ Dallas raised his hand, and had a confident smile on his face. He always does, and his answers never make sense, mathematically. I had a good feeling this time though. He came up, picked up the red yarn, placed the end at a random spot on the squiggly path, and laid the yarn down precisely over the tape. I assisted him. And now Ms. Day’s class knows how to measure squiggly lines. We still had our problem set to complete, but the kids were too antsy to focus any longer. I had several students pull up the tape paths and we scrunched the masking tape into a little ball. I lined the students up and brought them outside. Again we had to form a circle, but this time there was no descent. We took that tape ball and played a raucous game of ‘hot potato.’ The kids loved it. Whenever someone dropped the ball, that person had to sit in the middle. They screamed in glee.
Moral: Masking tape is more fun than we realized.
