The Lemon in the Bottle

While I am extremely grateful for the fact I have access to clean drinking water whenever I want and don't need to buy it in plastic bottles, I don't really like plain water, it is after all, plain. So I got a brilliant idea to put slices of lemon or lime into the bottle to flavor the tap water. Two days passed and I thought it was time to replenish the citrus.

What was I thinking?

How was I going to get it out? 

I shook. 

I stuck a chopstick in to try and coax it out. 

I used a butter knife when I realized the chopstick was too round. 

I used a steak knife when I realized the butter knife was too round. 

I hacked it into smaller pieces and eventually the bottles were lemon free.

As school starts in 1 week time, everything I read, hear, see or do becomes fodder for a lesson plan. 

You see, I have been teaching digital art, movie making, programming and robotics along side math and started to realize that the creativity that leads to breakthroughs in thinking in those subjects was not cultivated at all by me in math classes.

So last year I started encouraging creative math thinking. I'd throw out open ended problems such as 

'compute the result 3,456' and challenge the class to come up with the most creative answer.

Students worked individually then shared in small groups who picked a few examples to show to the entire class. We voted on the most creative answer. Note, I did not say the right answer. This encouraged students to take risks and try new things because improving the process was the goal, not the final answer.

My students reported at the end of the year that creative thinking helped them problem solve because they started to think of different ways to do things. Even more exciting, they learned how to be more creative from watching their peers' solutions.

This year I will continue these exercises but I will also give them other types of problems to solve to explicitly teach the power of creative thinking (like how to get a piece of lemon out of a bottle).

Back to the lemon in the bottle. I brainstormed a few other possibilities: letting the fruit dry out or trying to dissolve it.  Any other ideas?