We need teachers to lead classrooms and educate students, of course, but some of the most profound moments of learning and discovery can happen when a teacher takes a step back and allows students to learn from each other. An exciting large-scale example of this is the annual Math And Science Day at Wagner Middle School (MS 167), which took place in early June this year.
The gist of the experience is that Wagner, which runs from 6th to 8th grade and is the largest public middle school in the city, invites 4th graders from neighboring grade schools on the Upper East Side to visit the school and participate in fun hands-on activities in math and science. The catch is that the teachers for the day are themselves students—8th graders at Wagner—and the experiments, games, and other activities they share with the younger students come from lessons that they themselves learned this year in their classes.
“Our 8th graders become the teachers, and it’s interesting to hear them say how difficult it is sometimes to teach the 4th graders. They end up having a different perspective of what we as teachers go through when we’re teaching them!” says Mark Aschenbrand, Wagner’s Lead Science Teacher, who supervises the event with Ethan Cherkasky, who teaches honors math at the school.
Adds Aschenbrand: “For the students, the experience is multi-faceted in the sense that it helps our kids synthesize what they learn this year, and they also have the rewarding experience of teaching it to an eager 4th grader who may or may not understand the concept.”
Initiated three years ago, Math And Science Day at Wagner is relatively new, but very popular comet: this year’s event, on June 3, involved about 60 student volunteers from Wagner, who worked with over 240 4th graders who visited the school over the course of four hours. The math and science activities are presented in a fun, carnival-like atmosphere that includes ice cones, popcorn, and door prizes (Wagner gear). But as Aschenbrand and Cherkasky describe it, what’s really wonderful about the event is that the students take the lead on planning and running it.
“We kind of facilitate it with a few meetings, but it’s really student-led.They put together the boards, the work sheets, the activities set up, and then they teach the kids. It takes about a month to put together,” says Aschenbrand, who also credits the school’s Parent Coordinator, Sheila Gonzales, for her essential role in providing logistical support, and the parent volunteers, who helped at the event.
This year, the Wagner students worked through five math and five science activities. One of the math activities, described by Cherkasky, explored the “sums of linear equations” but used candy to make it more accessible to the 4th graders.
“It’s something like, if you go to the store and you buy 3 bars of Hershey’s and then 2 Starburst and that costs $11; and then you went to the store again and you buy Hershey bars and one Starburst and that cost $9; then you could use what we call elimination to solve for x and y,” he says. “This may not sound that fun, but when we introduce the candy, the 4th graders can understand it a little bit better and they actually have a little bit more motivation to understand it as well.”
One of the popular science activities used Punnett Squares to calculate the chance of inheriting a certain gene based on what your parents’ genes are. Another activity involved making a model of DNA from Twizzlers and gum drops.
As in their classrooms, the teachers could sense the event was a success by evident quality of student participation. “One 4th grader said to me, ‘This school is boss,’” Aschenbrand says. “And I feel like our 8th graders felt the same way. You can see it from the pictures. They sat on floor with the kids, one-on-one, and were really into it! We should be as lucky as teachers to have that kind of student-teacher ratio.”
