This snippet of student-driven discussion is a glimpse of the style and approach that have earned Gaffey national and international recognition. He placed second in Microsoft's U.S. Innovative Education Forum in August, then represented the United States at the Worldwide Innovative Education Forum in South Africa and was named a semifinalist.
Les Foltos, one of the judges who reviewed Gaffey's work, was impressed by his emphasis on "actively engaging students in solving real-world problems."
In his classroom on a recent Tuesday, Gaffey's challenge to his "learners" - as students in the Parkside public school are called - was to estimate Earth's land area.
To solve the problem, the class first covered basic concepts about area and polygons - shapes with three or more straight sides.
Gaffey then asked, "If a shape has four sides, is it always a polygon?"
Learners who answered yes (the wrong answer) were asked to redefine what a polygon is, while those who answered no were asked to draw a four-sided shape that was not a polygon on the class "smart board."
Gaffey drew a shape with three straight sides and one curved side.
"Is this a polygon?" he asked.
"No," the class responded.
"I'm not teaching polygons," Gaffey later explained. "I'm teaching a process."
So, how to attack the land area of Earth?
The class drew lines through each of the continents, chopping them up into complex polygons, then simple polygons.
The final phase was to derive formulas for the areas of the simple polygons, and add up the areas.
Geometry, algebra, and estimation are the three fixtures of Gaffey's Project 100 course, created two years ago as an elective that supplements the core Algebra 1 class for ninth graders.
