Tuesday, March 29, 2011

"Consumable Manipulatives"

Today in statistics class we did a short lab--given a distribution (supposedly from M&M Mars, but I couldn't find it anywhere on their web site) of the colors of M&M's in an ordinary (brown) bag of milk chocolate M&M's, we performed a chi-squared test to determine if that distribution was correct. (Turns out it wasn't, so emailed M&M Mars and asked what the distribution is supposed to be.) For a week I'd reminded students to bring in a small bag of M&M's today, and almost all of them did. In each class we recorded and totaled the number of each color that each student had, and did our calculations based on the class total.

I got to thinking--I know that I couldn't get the school to reimburse me if I had bought them, as there's no way they'd pay for snackies even if I "needed" them for math class. Oh, I could probably get reimbursed for marbles and for the paint to paint them in six different colors, and use those for the lab next year, but that would be about as exciting as watching grass grow. What I need is a way to "sell" our comptroller on the idea of reimbursing me. I need better PR than just "M&M's".

And then it hit me. Consumable manipulatives.

I'm a genius.

9 comments:

socalmike said...

Two words: tax deductible.

Keep the receipts, Darren.

Anonymous said...

Not consumable.

Recycleable (sp?).

-Mark Roulo

KauaiMark said...

...and don't forget to keep the end of year inventory reports about who/when of where the consumables went.

Happy Elf Mom (Christine) said...

No, no! Start a new company and SELL "consumable manipulatives" to school districts. You could write an entire catalogue filled with educationalese mumbo-jumbo and make boodles of money. :)

Joshua Sasmor said...

Find out how the chem lab labels their reagents. These are consumed in the lab experiments, just as your data point items were :)

Rose said...

How did you get past the food police?

Anonymous said...

HappyElfMom is onto something! Use this education buzzword generator to get words for the proposal.

http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html

"Using our consumable manipulatives will implement collaborative enrichment, extend assessment-driven functionalities and synthesize intuitive life-long learning. Therefore we suggest an initial acquisition of 10000 units. Call today to order!"

Darren said...

Rose, I didn't ask. I just ensured everyone knew not to bring peanut M&M's because I have a student with a severe peanut allergy.

Steve USMA '85 said...

Happy Elf Mom, you don't know how appropriate it was to say "boodles" of money off of selling M&M's to Darren. His Alma Mater has some strange slang.