Maya Unit issues to resolve

[flannery-denny]

• [ ] These lessons are framed as if all teachers who use them will teach all 7 of them. They could also be framed so that teachers could opt into some of them without teaching all of them. Not sure whether we want this. One option might be to move the Do Nows into the previous lesson as additional resources. Another option might be to make the Do Nows @opt-printable-exercises and make it clear that the opening section is review for people who have just completed the previous lesson.
• [ ] How do we want to provide sources for quotes (from Spanish missionaries for example)
• [ ] This unit teaches about the collapse of the Maya and the end of a civilization. Meanwhile there are still many Maya people and communities living on the planet. Somehow we need to figure out how to acknowledge this / explain the distinction.
• [ ] The dataset of skulls we're working with only has 20 skulls. There is not mention of whether this sample is representative of the larger population. Yet, we're encouraging kids to draw conclusions about an entire ancient civilization based on them. How can we bridge that gap?
• [ ] Let the KIPP team know that the intention is to use the word Maya rather than Mayan, but their materials are inconsistent about which they use.
• [ ] Add README tabs with sources for all datasets.

Lesson 1 My research says that the letter-named gods referred to in the KIPP materials are from the early 20th century, before the codices had been deciphered. I have changed the text from calling these the 5 most important Maya gods (archaeologists believe that God D is not actually even a god)... to declaring them the first 5 gods deciphered by Paul Schellhas. I have also added names, because it seems that many people now refer to Maya Gods by their names, when they are known. I am not able to see the full text of the book that Nancy drew these glyphs from. Ideally we would access the text to

• [ ] collect the page and figure number for the missing plates.
• [ ] doublecheck the God names for the last two images.

Lesson 2:

• [ ] Add Driver Navigator intro

Lesson 3:

• [x] Find a more generalizable example of data collectible in a classroom for this?

Lesson 4:

• [ ] This lesson has no activities related to histograms, but the KIPP lesson plan for this unit is titled "Unit 2 Lesson 4: Class Skull Histograms" and states "In today’s lesson, students will wrap up their work with skull data from the Maya human sacrifice victims from Lesson 2 and realize that it is problematic to display quantitative variables (e.g. skull circumference) in a pie chart. In order to draw additional conclusions from the skull evidence, students will learn to display quantitative variables using a histogram."

• [x] This lesson presumes the school is coed. How will we make this lesson work for single-sex classrooms? It also doesn't make any space for students who might identify as non-binary? Should we switch to encouraging them to measure their own heads in lesson two and providing the data for this lesson so that when they measure their own heads it's not connected to gender? Could potentially also be better for math learning to find the average of 5 data points ( and of 2 and 3 in the gender breakdown) than of 4 (2 and 2 or 1 and 3).

Lesson 5:

• [ ] Decide whether or not we intend to teach histograms and make the Do Now match the description.

Lesson 6:

• [ ] The KIPP lesson plans asks whether pie charts or histograms are useful for looking at the deforestation data... but they haven't actually taught students about histograms. Let them know.
• [ ] Add histograms back into this turn and talk if they end up being taught. TURN AND TALK: Earlier in this unit, we saw pie charts and averages. Does either of them seem useful for helping us see the effects of deforestation over time?

[flannery-denny]

Additional Resources we might want to link to:

• [x] https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/school-resources/maya-world/maya-calendar/
• [ ] Maya Creation Story - Smithsonian
• [x] Metropolitan museum of art Maya timeline

[flannery-denny]

@schanzer We decided that we were going to try to follow our lesson plan template as closely as possible. Something that is different about the SS materials from other lessons, however, is that they are not written as stand alone lessons, rather there is an expectation that they will be done in a very prescribed order and, as such, they have Do Nows and Homework assignments. I am proposing that the first and last section of each lesson not be bound to the Launch, Investigate, Synthesize structure. Curious what your thoughts are. Take a look at lesson Maya-1 on the maya branch for an example of what I'm suggesting.

[schanzer]

@flannery-denny why wouldn't the Do Now be in the Launch section, and the homework be part of an investigate (or perhaps even synthesize?). Maybe best to discuss in a call?