In many classes, teachers decorate their rooms before the start of the school year. The same is true for AP Statistics teacher Rhea Mandalia’s class, which is decorated with a combination of strawberry themed items and math posters; however, lately her 3A AP Statistics students have been adding their own decorations: colorful, mini paper airplanes stuck in the ceiling. What started as a fun little pastime for a few students is turning into a beautiful project.
This effort, led by juniors Samuel Garrett and Andrew Johnson has been in the making since a month after school began. Within this time, students have gotten one large area and two small clusters of the ceiling marked with their paper airplanes. Their goal, however, is to fill up the entire ceiling, so they still have a long way to go.
“Once we start getting to the end of the year and have a lot more free time, I think it’s going to fill up a lot quicker, but right now it’ll probably take me a long time,” Garrett said.
To accomplish this goal will take a lot of work, as well as support. While Mandalia is fine with her students doing this during her class, she has set rules regarding when it is allowed to ensure that learning is not disrupted.
“At first they were a little annoying, but it kind of grew on me,” Mandalia said. “They’re all multi-colored, and it feels pretty now.”
After weeks of work, Mandalia’s other classes have started to take notice of the airplanes. More and more students are trying to add paper airplanes of their own, but at the moment, only the 3A class has been successful at getting them to stick.
“It’s just pretty hard to be accurate with them because … you have to fold them perfectly,” Garrett said. “We talked about making a scatterplot … so that it’s math, it would just be really hard to do.”
Garrett and Johnson attempted a similar airplane project back in middle school, but they didn’t get very far. As a thank you to their teacher for her support, they told her that they would buy some strawberry sticky notes so that she could add her own flare to the artwork.
“Honestly, it really makes me look forward to her class,” Garrett said. “It’s just a little thing, it doesn’t affect much, but she’s still okay with it.”
