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U.S. Campus Life

Counting coins

By Masako Yamada


硬貨を使って…何をする?!

黙々と硬貨を数えるのも、すべては高校の科学教育発展のためなのだ。

I find myself in front of a cardboard box full of coins, scooping out pennies, nickels and dimes with paper cups and noting how many there are of each.

No, I haven't been panhandling, I haven't volunteered to be money counter for a collection box, and I'm not training to be a bank teller. My counting coins is all in the name of science — science for high-school students.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I had agreed to participate in a project to develop a new high-school science curriculum. I joined this group partly because it sounded interesting, partly because I needed the funding and partly because the group members needed somebody to help.

At first, I didn't have any idea of what was expected of me. I thought it would be something like being a teaching fellow, only easier. My adviser told me it would be a piece of cake, an easy way to earn money for the summer. It's just high-school stuff, right?

In the past week or two, as I've become immersed in the day-to-day details of developing the materials, I have come to realize the difficulty of the job. Even though I'm merely an assistant to the professors, scientists and veteran high-school teachers who have developed the curriculum over the past several years, the workload has been surprisingly heavy.

I've spent days editing a few pages of text to make it easy to understand as well as scientifically sound. I've had to return to basic statistics textbooks to refresh my own memory. The amazing thing is that most of the chapter was already in place before I started; it took me this long just to edit existing material. One of the members has re-written one chapter at least five times. I admit I used to find her complaints annoying, but she wrote the chapter from scratch: She deserves to complain!

I'm part of a team that will be teaching high-school teachers, so I have to have a firm grasp of the material. I've been reviewing all of the hands-on demonstrations and computer-simulation demonstrations so I can step in when necessary.

This is where the large bin of coins comes in. We're using the coins to try and prove a statistics law, called the "Law of Large Numbers," using the coins. We have to use a large number of them in order to do this.

To explain: Let's say there is a jar with one million coins, and you want to know the different proportions of pennies, nickels and dimes, preferably without having to count them all. Choosing a certain number of coins at random and counting the proportions in those coins will give you an idea of the proportions for the whole jar. The Law of Large Numbers says the larger the number of coins you pick, the closer your proportions will be to the actual proportions in the jar.

When I signed up, I didn't imagine myself sifting through coins and arguing whether it would be better to have the high school students count beans or buttons because they might slip some of the money into their pockets. I didn't imagine myself thinking of ways to use plastic soda bottles and straws to make thermometers and water pistols. I didn't imagine editing lab manuals word by word; after all, it isn't rocket science, and it certainly isn't Shakespeare.

And I didn't imagine that I would find the work so engaging. I've had entire days pass by without touching my thesis work. I can't say this is good, since this project has nothing to do with my academic research on water. My challenge over the next few weeks is to manage my time better so that writing about coins fits into the gaps and spaces that appear in the day as I work on my thesis. My real job this summer is to complete my Ph.D.

I see that the other members of the high-school education project have fit this curriculum development work into their full-time job schedules. Most of them have children, so they can't stay long hours, but they somehow manage to get everything done on time.

I look at them and I see in them the difference between being a student and being a real adult. They don't spend so much time eating lunch, chatting over coffee and surfing the Web. Although counting coins is not related to my dissertation research, nor to my new job in the fall, I feel that I'm learning new and useful things.


Shukan ST: June 7, 2002

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