When I was seventeen I was hit by a car. I was riding my bike to work early one summer morning, and the light changed to green just as I arrived at the intersection. It was probably not even one whole second later that I was halfway into the street and I turned to see that a car had run the light very, very late. It was the sort of moment where you knew things had gone wrong, but you didn't really have time to do anything about it, and all I managed at the time was a resigned "oh--" before I was mowed down by the nose of the Dodge Neon and left lying in the median, dazed, helmet split in two.
Today's learning activity sort of felt like that experience all over again. I had a clear direction in mind, but somewhere along the way things went amiss, and I didn't get scared or frustrated, but I didn't really persevere either. I just got dazed, and maybe a little flustered. And like the bike incident, where my helmet was split in two, my head came out of it all okay, and I learned something. On my bike it was always wear a helmet. Here, I'm not sure I can put it so elegantly into words quite yet. I feel like my presentation fell a little flat---like a botched solo in jazz band, with everyone there to see. Everyone turned their focus on me like "yeah, this is it" and I lifted my trombone like "yeah, this is it". And then I flubbed a few notes, and never quite found my place again, and with the rhythm section still chugging through the solo section, there was an awkward moment for everyone and we all just hoped it would end so we could pretend it never happened.
Perhaps that's a little over the top, but it's curious the sorts of feelings that whoosh back in situations such as these. I was always more of a marching band kind of kid. Structure, structure! Everything by the book! No artistic liberty here! And so I have a hard time with these moments and just want to scream "just tell me what to do!" But reflection is always key.
I had put a lot of time into thinking about my activity---what I wanted it to mean, what value I felt it had, and how I felt it should flow. None of those daydreams came to fruition. In 8F01 we would call this an opportunity for reflection, and I have many thoughts on how it could have gone differently. First, I think I may have overshot the target. Perhaps I should have stuck to a simple activity and not tackled the more complicated concept of directional vectors. Though all vectors have a direction, so that's a redundant statement. But maybe that's the point I'm getting to---I don't look at these problems in the same way others do. And I don't mean that in a positive or negative way for any party, I just get grandiose ideas of how people will respond to math, when reality is nothing like it. I could have boiled down the activity to deal only with the directions (or signs) of each value, and maybe that would have been more productive, but either way the problem didn't seem very engaging in the end. To be honest, I hadn't felt the preceding activity was particularly engaging at first. But then we totaled the ledger and had a negative value! The kid owes money to someone! That got the wheels turning. Who do they owe? How will they pay the debt? What will happen if they don't? It ended up having a very peculiar outcome that begged for an answer.
I heard some great discussion during my presentation, and even heard someone talking about how we might label east as positive and west as negative, and what would happen if we did it the other way around (nothing!). But Part B where students were supposed to share feedback on the questions was met with a lukewarm reception. It was discouraging as someone that really cares about sign conventions. Like, really cares. And then I did this thing where I walked back and forth like a fool to demonstrate directionality. How fun. In retrospect, it wasn't a terribly engaging activity. I had felt that there was so much potential in it, and I really wanted to share an instance where you might use multiplication and division of integers in daily life, but I really just made a Physics 101 worksheet and demanded that everyone do it. Rather traditional if you ask me.
I want to just shrug it off and say "oh well", but obviously there is something for me to learn from this experience. And it's not that students don't like math, aren't engaged, or any number of other things. It's that not every idea can be a winner. Not everything will always go as planned when teaching, and you have to be flexible and adapt, and maybe go home and listen to some funky music when you're down on yourself afterwards. There will always be moments like these in life, but I have a cup of coffee, some good tunes, and an online forum to vent just a little. At the end of the day you move on. It's over and done, on to new horizons, and hopefully you learned something along the way.
