Minor Details - October 13

October 13 - 16, 2020

Our Amazing Class

I am bursting with pride when I think of the improvements every student in our class has made in his or her oral presentation skills!

To be honest, I have been accused of bragging way too much about my amazing class over the past few weeks.

After only 2 presentations, anxiety has decreased and students are feeling more comfortable to speak without notes. It is truly exciting to see such progress! This is another way that they are showing their optimism, growth mindset and perseverance.

I am so grateful to be able to spend each day with these wonderful young people.

What is a Billion?

When we see numbers like "$2 billion", it's hard to visualize what that number actually is. As a number, that would be $2,000,000,000. Or 2 thousand million.

William L and Logan were inspired to do their own research into the questions that we investigated in Math today (see image to the right). They wrote the rest of today's blog post!

How much does Jeff Bezos make? What is he worth? What does he make from being the CEO of Amazon? He makes around $2,219 USD a second, however he only makes $81,000 from the CEO position. He is worth $175.3 billion USD as of 2020. That could pay off about 10% of Canada's debt.

What could he do with all that money? He could buy 1,300 Lamborghinis and still have $15 million left over from the $321 million he makes every day. If his net worth was his bank account, he could buy Disney and still have about $45 billion left over. Also, it cost $0.50 a day to feed one person a day. There are 815 million people that are starving (as of a 2016 study) so that would mean it costs $407.5 million dollars a day to feed everyone. In the next couple of years he could probably solve world hunger.

But wait! Was he always this rich? No. But he wasn't poor. He was born into a working class family like most billionaires and made an idea into a company that makes $638.1 billion dollars a year (as of Sept 2019).

"We are not blessed" by Nikolay Mayorov

We are continuing to practice summarizing what we read and determining the main idea. Today we read a short poem by Nikolay Mayorov called "We are not blessed" (see image below). Using our understanding of words and phrases in the poem, and thinking about what message the author wanted us to understand helped us determine the main idea of the poem.

Over the next few weeks before November 11, we will be reading poems about the First and Second World Wars from a variety of perspectives.

Leadership

Sir Arthur Currie was a commander of the Canadian Corps in the First World War. He was an exceptional leader who never lost a battle. After researching a bit about his career, we discussed the characteristics that make a good leader.

We also reflected on the impact it would have on our experiences at school if everyone was a leader for "good". Finally, we discussed what barriers we think keep us from becoming leaders (see image to the right). We realized that WE put up most of the barriers!

We are all challenging ourselves to take small steps every day to become better leaders in our classroom, our school, our homes and our community.

Experiment Design

We want to be able to design our own experiments to investigate our own questions this year. To practise setting up a scientific report, we are doing experiments to investigate what factors influence our reaction time. Some of the independent variables we thought would be interesting to investigate are:

whether you are standing or sitting
how much noise is in the room
whether you're tired
whether you hold your breath

We are using the criteria we developed and practised for the food separator procedural instructions to write our experiment procedure. The requirements of a scientific report are in the image to the right. In the next few days, we will be doing our experiments and sharing our results. Stay tuned!

Proportional Reasoning Problems

Many of us have experienced a situation where we needed to figure out what the "best deal" was for something.

There are so many different strategies for solving these kinds of problems! We are practising using ratios and proportions to solve these problems.

The full notes and solutions from today are posted in our Google classroom.

Maximizing our Potential

Quitting is the number one thing that most of us regret. Whether it's giving up when something gets tough or when we fail, most of us wish we had stuck with things rather than quitting.

In an interview with Stephen Colbert, rapper, producer and actor LL Cool J shared his reflections on quitting and what it means to maximize our potential. We listened to the interview and wrote our own reflections on what might be keeping us from maximizing our potential. We also identified 2 goals we would really like to achieve.

Another quote that we discussed was, "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse". You can listen to the interview here. (Note: the section of the interview that we listened to starts at 6 minutes and 20 seconds into the interview)

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