Exit Slip: Embodied Learning

 During the rope making, braiding, and poem-writing, I feel like it finally clicked for me what embodied learning actually means. Before, I was like "yeah cool, you use your body to learn." However, it actually took the contrast of what disembodied learning is for it to really hit home what we're trying to do here. Indeed, embodied learning is using your body to learn. But when you use your body to learn, you are also building these neurological pathways (presumably those that have to do with motor function) and associate it with the concepts or ideas.

This whole idea made me think of my own experience with playing music. I starting learning to play the piano when I was about 4 years old and guitar since I was about 7. I've taken periods away from practicing both of them, and sometimes have multi-year gaps between practice sessions. Interestingly, though, the "muscle memory" still remains and while my playing is not as polished as it once was, I can usually still remember how to play certain pieces with remarkable fluency. It's as though my fingers remember, but my brain doesn't! Now, I'm sure there's a psychological explanation to why my fingers appear to move on their own, but what's more interesting is how I can actually recall elements of music theory that I've long forgotten, simply by moving through the scales or chords with my hands. I can just let my hands play, then figure out what they did and work backwards from there. 

During class, Susan has elluded to embodying the shapes of graphs/functions by moving our hands through space in their shape. I'm really digging this idea: the students may forget what a cubic function looks like if they just draw it or view it, but what if they actually move their bodies? What if, later in life, they think "cubic" and then their body automatically traces the shape? Then suddenly everything is flooding back to them. 

I'm sure that triggering memories is just one tiny aspect of embodied learning. I'm beginning to see a lot of other benefits and am starting to make similar connections (though they aren't quite clear enough to express here yet). 

Entrance Slip: Building Change from the Ground Up

This first "stop" for me in reading this chapter was right in the very first paragraph. Kallis says,

"Participants can acknowledge where their skills are best suited to aid the community and where their own internal needs for creative fulfillment can be satisfied."

It's been a long-standing personal belief of mine that I'm "just not a creative person" or "I don't need a creative outlet". I have therefore focused on a lot more of my efforts on the former part of that quote (aid the community) than the latter (creative fulfillment). However, I've come to realize that many of my endeavours that I've previously just identified as problem solving are actually my version of a creative outlet. For example, my partner and I recently designed a carriage house (which is now under construction on our property) for us to live in. I considered this to be a strictly administrative and problem-solving task: where would the windows need to go to get the best winter sun? How does one move about the space, and can we organize it more efficiently? What are the geotechnical constraints and how do we work with them? It turns out, though, this act of design was actually a creative process veiled as problem-solving. Crafting could, similarly, be seen as simply a necessary and practical way to obtain the goods we need. And indeed it is! But it's also a way to express ourselves and explore our world creatively. 

I also enjoyed Kallis's discussion of backsourcing as a way to "re-[claim] what we outsourced when factories took over" for political/ideaological reasons, practical reasons, and individual reasons. 

And finally, I tried out the 7-strand braid by cutting up an old piece of climbing rope and rigging it up onto a coathanger. I found the process to be very meditative (once I got the hand of the method) and was actually a little disappointed when I got to the end of the rope because I wanted to keep going. The result is a beautiful (and huge!) flat braid.

Exit Slip: Human Sundials and Angles in Nature

 I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed today's class. I definitely have a bias since I am already well acquainted with the outdoors and have devoted the last 7-8 years of my career in outdoor education. However, I have never really thought of the outdoors as not only a venue but a resource to teaching anything other than "outdoors skills". Indeed, in mathematics and sciences (among other subjects), we are learning the language that describes the natural world, and what better place to learn than surrounded by it. These types of hands-on lessons like measuring the angle of the sun with our bodies is also much more memorable than studying a diagram of the sun's trajectory in a textbook. It probably also would help a lot of youth stay engaged since they don't have to 'resist the urge to fidget', but rather participate in the lesson with their whole bodies. 

Exit Slip: Frank McCourt

Prompting questions: after watching these, what do you think 'teacher inquiry' meant to McCourt? What could you take from his sense of teacher inquiry for your own inquiry process?

After watching the videos and hearing some additional anecdotes about how he adapted his teaching based on his students, I think Frank saw his students as teachers for his own practice. He listened to them and got to know them, and his own teaching was inspired by their needs and interests. Had he come into the field thinking he knew everything, he may not have been able to be as flexible and adaptable as he was, and wouldn't have built the connections with the students in the same way. 

In my own inquiry process, I hope I never lose my voracious curiousity. I don't know what Frank's internal motivations were, but I hope we share the same path of always striving to be better than before. I hope that I'm always willing to be wrong, and to learn something along the way. 

Entrance Slip - On Becoming a Reflective Teacher

 "Becoming a reflective teacher is a continual process of growth."

This quote here is the one that stood out for me the most, probably because it connects with another similar concept that I already practice deeply: the Growth Mindset. I could go on and on about how adopting a Growth Mindset has absolutely changed my life, and how I've integrated it into all areas of my teaching life, but I'll spare you all the preaching. This discussion of being reflective, however, had a piece that I hadn't really thought too much about: wholeheartedness. In my own life, I try to focus my attention on the things I truly want to do wholeheartedly (by the colloquial meaning of the word). Doing things half-a$$ed or without intention can make them feel like empty and pointless pursuits. I like that the idea of being a reflective teacher brings in this idea. 

"There is no such thing as a neutral educational activity."

This quote definitely got me thinking about bias in math and math education. I mean, math is purely factual, right? Objective, even? We are teaching neutral content here, right? RIGHT?! Well, yes and no. We decide to focus on or omit certain topics in what this reading calls "value governed selections", even under a standardized curriculum. I wonder how we can teach our students to question what we teach in math education the same way we teach them to question teachings of, say, history. 

Hello World!

 This is my first blog post for 450B.

Here's a picture of a sunset swim in Squamish from a month or so ago. I've chosen this image becuase it was the first one that came up on my computer. LOL