​​​TashaDavis​

In my Algebra 1 class, we were working on using Algebraic Models and equations to map out exactly what would happen if a disease called “Brain Pox,” that turned people into zombies, suddenly came out and how it would affect the United States. Working with a partner, we were supposed to end up writing a Business Letter to Governor Kasich addressing the problems and tell him in how long the state of Ohio, and then America, would take to become entirely infected.

 

The thing that I learned from this project is that when technology happens to fail in a group of two for an extended period of time, you need to give them an extra day or two. The problem was that this project was done almost entirely on the computer and my partner’s laptop stopped working the second day of the project.  This was a problem because, while we did a lot of the project in the classroom, there was also a lot that had to be done at home. So while I took time trying explain what we were doing /had to be doing (to make sure that she had something to reflect on after the project), I was just adding to the things that I had to do for homework.  She still didn’t quite understand what we were doing anyways.  In effect, a two-person project became a one-person project and because of the deadline and all the other projects that I have been working on in other classes.

 

In this project we first were given a downloadable document to tell us all the scientists knew about the disease at the time of their writing. It gave us the growth rate (0.75%), the number of people in the state of Ohio, and the whole of America.  We had to guess at the starting number of zombies (8) and explain why that was a probable starting value (It happened in a hospital). After that, we were given a paper so that we could organize the things we knew (the facts), the things we had to guess at (assumptions), and the different ways/things we could use to model the data that we were going to collect.  Next we had to create an equation that could graph the data. We also had to put together a table showing the first seven days after the outbreak using the facts and assumptions that we had.  Over the next couple of days we expanded our table using the equation that we had made. We also made a graph of this data. The next day, my teacher announced that a cure had been discovered.  For most of our class this was after there should be anyone left in the U.S. We learned about the cure and then made a table, equations, and graph for it.  This was easier than the first time because this time because we had a starting value (the U.S. population before the outbreak).

 

During all of this, I think the hardest part for me was when we had to write the Business Letter to Governor Kasich at the end.  My partner didn’t have a functional laptop and therefore wasn’t able to look at the models we had made for the problem.  That meant that her three paragraphs never got finished because she could only work on them in the computer lab and I and to stay in the classroom.  That was not a good combination. Being at a technology oriented school has taught me through this experience that as we begin to rely more and more on technology, we need to become more and more understanding of the difficulties a person who is trying to function temporarily without that technology has to go through to still function without it.

 

Another place you can see this is in our Slide Show Presentation. While we weren’t presenting to the class, we were presenting to others. We had been asked a question and were to create a PowerPoint showing what the information that we had been graphing would say. The question my group had to answer was, "At what point is Ohio completely infected by Brain Pox?" My partner and I were supposed to make the slide show the night before, but I had only gotten to part of it the night before, and she hadn't been able to work on it due to the prolonged technical difficulties. Anyway, we ended up throwing it together at the beginning of class and was lacking of the quality that this type of project was supposed to bring us.  My partner had her hands tied simply because of the lack of a functional laptop with Wi-Fi.  She still did not know enough about the project to help me with the making of this presentation.

 

I’m simply trying to stress the fact that when technology fails in this day and age, people shouldn’t be punished any more than they already are for something they can’t fix.  The stress of not being able to function is painful enough. Don’t fail a person because of circumstances that they can’t change. I want to make it abundantly clear that my partner did try really hard to put in her fair share of work.  Just for that I would give her 100% in the area of putting in her fair share of effort simply because would have taken far more effort than either of us could muster to finish the project just as seamlessly as the rest of the class.