Since Labor Day the month of September has been jammed with activity as the new school year gets underway. Until last Wednesday, none of that activity involved the model railroad.
The four sections of benchwork and cookie cutter roadbed that students carried up into the attic of the school building at the end of last year finally got carried back down, this time by an almost entirely new group. I’m kicking myself because despite my determination to “take more pictures” that I declared when I started this blog, I completely failed to pull out my camera for this inaugural process. Argh, sorry about that. Dealing with large groups of kids can addle the mind.
This element of a “new group of students” is one of the most intriguing dimensions of the project for me. My school is “K-8,” but the seventh and eighth grades that I teach have a distinct schedule and location so each year half of my students graduate and go off to various high schools and another new group arrives from the sixth grade on the other side of our campus. These new arrivals had heard rumblings of something going on in the middle school math room, so they are primed.
I started this blog as a vehicle for my own contemplation and reflection on the undertaking of a model railroad in a middle school environment, but up to now I have mostly been describing things that had already occurred, making frequent posts over the summer until I eventually got “up to date.” Now I’m shifting into a mode where I hope to do a bit more in the way of organizing my thoughts and explicitly working through various options for both long term and short term tasks and goals.
One constraint that I’m feeling rather pinched by is the limited amount of available time that the kids have to work on the project at this time of the year. Most of the kids are feeling overwhelmed by the transition from a single classroom and teacher for their entire day to a different room and teacher for each subject, with all of the variations in personality, homework expectations, and classroom routines that go along with that. I’ve also adopted a new math curriculum this year for seventh grade, so I’m not very sure-footed yet when it comes to making effective use of the materials and class time. Fortunately, my eighth grade curriculum is a very traditional, familiar Algebra sequence that I can be more flexible with. A nice match with the fact that my eighth graders are already invested in the project and can dig in readily.
I’m also teaching a one-hour-per-week elective called “Applied Math” for a nice mix of seventh and eighth graders – clearly this will be where things get started while I wait for opportunities to arise in the regular classes. It’s the group that carried the sections down from the attic.
My immediate goal is to get trains running quickly, but remain alert to provide interesting projects for students who might need some creative activities (like landforms, structures, trees, etc.) to engage their interest.
The immediate tasks then are, in approximate sequence:
- Install the benchwork sections. They bolt together and clip to small wall blocks to form a rigid structure, but getting the L-girders approximately level by adjusting the t-nut feet before final fastening is a bit of fussy work.
- Install risers and fasten cookie cutter roadbed with close-to-perfect grades and vertical curves. The plywood and homosote sandwiches are all cut with approximate track centerlines marked, but vertical locations will be more fussy work. Superelevation, if any, can be shimmed.
- Install critical control point turnouts. I’ve got some 25-year-old Walthers/Shinohara code 83 turnouts that I salvaged from an earlier layout. They’re not DCC friendly and some of them were modified quite a bit, so there is some work here. I’m not settled on how much of what’s going on here will be appropriate for involving the students in. Certainly some of it. I scratch-built my first turnout at about their age and will never forget how empowering that was, so I’ll be looking for any student who shows the slightest inclination to take one on. Many options here.
- Lay track. I’m interested to see how sensitive students can be to smoothly flowing lines. I need to get some mirrors for sighting at track level.
- Install feeders. This will probably be many students’ first experience with soldering. I also find the shaping of the feeder tip to be very satisfying – a tiny length of solid conductor, a 90 degree bend, then a 45 degree bend in the orthogonal plane allows the “tiny length” to nestle into the web of the rail (on the side away from the viewer). Very high craft/tech/function/satisfaction value in this task.
- Test and tune trackwork. Good use of students’ outstanding visual acuity, I hope.
- Anchor ends and cut section joints in rail. I really dislike sheet metal rail joiners. Am I fantasizing that I can get by without them?
- Sculpt roadbed & ballast shoulders and ditches in the homosote. I’m eager to get to this step. Most kids have never really noticed the amount of design work that goes into the interface between a foot or a vehicle and the Earth. Once it has been pointed out, they discover a mathematical beauty in something they’d either never noticed or had taken for granted. Appreciating the mundane has a wonderfully low-stress richness.
What am I forgetting?
Jeff Allen
Jeff Allen
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