How Much Tea?

Today was our first Cultural Day, a day where we give our students a break from normal lessons and dedicate our time to learning about Chinese culture. Today, we focused on tea, and presented a short PowerPoint about Chinese history and the role of tea in Chinese culture.

Prior to the start of our project, Mrs. Wilkerson encouraged us to try to intertwine our Chinese lessons with other subject fields such as history, math, etc. So Daijah and I planned a math problem that required the students to plan a tea tasting event in downtown Cleveland for 100 guests. We provided them with a recipe for one person, then they would do the math to determine how much tea, sugar, etc., would be needed for 100 people. But that was only step 1. Step 2 required them to figure out how much they would need to spend on all of the ingredients (Daijah and I set up a "store" with all of the items), while staying under their budget of 500 kuai (Chinese dollars) per team.

Things went interestingly...

Well the problem may have been a little harder than we thought. It took the teams most of our teaching period for them to solve the problem, but that may have been mostly due to the arguing. The kids have difficulty working with each other. One team finished pretty early, but the other teams spent 80% of their time arguing instead of working together to solve the problem. One student got so frustrated that he started crying :(

However, I am proud to say that each team did eventually solve the problem. With some help from Daijah, Mrs. Wilkerson, and I, the students were able to put aside their differences and actually work as teams. While the students were working, Daijah actually made tea (from China) for everyone to enjoy at the end of class. The students really loved that.