On Spreadsheets

I've been asked to evaluate a classroom project that involved the use of spreadsheets.  Before I get into the project, however, I need to explain that the Geile side of my family is genetically predisposed to view any project, large or small, as an opportunity to create a spreadsheet.  We have been creating spreadsheets since before coming to the US from Germany in the late 19th century.  If you did some reasearch, you could probably locate a handmade collection of rows and columns detailing the rate, severity, and date of occurance of scurvy incidents during the trans-atlantic journey.  And in the corner, it would read "Property of F. Geile."  Spreadsheets are in my blood.

But then, so is poetry.  Shall ever the twain meet?  More on that in a bit.

The project I looked at was aimed at 4th graders learning about volcanos.  Their teacher, Mrs. Pishl, crowdsourced a set of data that the students thought they could learn about volcanos, narrowed that list down to a list of four, and then had her students work in groups to gather the actual data.  Students then input the data into a spreadsheet, and watched as their data was translated into a graph via MS Excel.

Based on what I could glean from the videos and notes, the project was succeful in a few ways.  It gave the students the opportunity to learn the process by which data is collected for graphs, and also let them be a part of the process, by allowing them to enter the data they had collected themselves.

In my experience with short stories and poetry, identifying what makes a piece good or bad is at best tricky, and often can lead a peer-review quickly from elevated discorse to a seven-way screaming match.  And nothing takes the passion out of a problem like that infinite field of empty boxes.

I would ask students to bring me a set of objective criteria by which we could judge the "goodness" of a piece (ie.  clever use of rhyme, setting, etc.) and create a survey that the writing students could give their peers to determine what "weight" any criterium has in relation to any other (ie. realistic endings carry twice as much weight as clever titles.)

We could build a set of formulas in a spreadsheet, and then simply apply the logarithms to a piece of writing to determine an objective level of goodness, that can be represented by a graph. 

Of course, this would then lead into a discussion of whether or not our classroom "goodness" logarithm has any relation to, say a "qualitative" logarithm, or a "likeability" logarithm, and we'd need to build more spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets also give a great opportunity for practicing concrete poetry.  In a college poetry writing course, a professor led a discussion on whether a simple data set could be emotionally moving.  I pointed to this (warning: N always SFW) as my response.

Pax and Petra,
Ben