Pi Day (March 14) had barely begun before the switchboards at Farm Gate headquarters lit up with incoming transmissions from Up North — Missaukee County — where Force of Nature Ellen Vanderwal’s classroom blitz was well underway.
“It’s been a great day so far! I'm in Loretta Slocum’s seventh-grade math class, celebrating Pi Day!” Vanderwal reported in, reveling in her long-awaited return to in-person classroom visits, spreading the good word about agriculture.
A Lake City seventh-grader, left, applies her new Pi Day knowledge in calculating the area/circumference of a circle. Lake City Middle School Teacher Loretta Slocum comingled a timely Pi Day math lesson with plenty of information about Michigan’s prodigious fruit sector.
“It feels so good to be back in the classroom — especially the middle school I retired from — it’s been a while.”
She’d stopped first at Rogers Grocery Store of Lake City, which generously donated 16 freshly baked pies stuffed with Michigan-grown apples, cherries and blueberries, adding a delicious layer of relevance to the lessons to come.
In the classroom, Slocum and Vanderwal cited the sweet circles from several angles, shared with students information about Michigan’s prodigious fruit sector in addition to the day’s titular reference to ratio between a circle’s circumference and diameter.
“The students were very interested with the fruit industry — and it was a very educational math lesson for them as well,” Vanderwal said. “Loretta has a way of teaching math with a little fun.”
Slocum is a familiar face, going back to Vanderwal’s own career at Lake City Middle School. Since then they two have continued their working relationship, collaborating on Ag in the Classroom and other farm-friendly projects for students’ benefit.
Additional pies were delivered to all four first-grade classrooms and the preschool, where they were accompanied by appropriately simplified math and fruit lessons.
What pies remained after that were judiciously delivered to the Lake City Schools’ administrative staff.