Beauty in Nature

 Good morning,

I hope you all had a lovely weekend.  I noticed math in a few different places, per usual . . . but I'm wondering how to bring them into my classroom.  The wind blew around my kayak a bit, so the math of that (hydrodynamics vs aerodynamics) could be interesting.  However, I'm not sure (yet - growth mindset) how to make that accessible to 7th graders, since it is calculus based physics.  I also saw several ripples (well, every time I cast my lure).  I'm still wondering how to present it, but I love that I can see it.  Maybe I can show my students first that it is there, and ask them to find it themselves and describe it.  

Anyhow, I like fractals and curves - and in the context of nature they are better.  Math is too often seen in the absence of context, and what it actually is is the language of the sciences.  The language of what happens in the real world.  If my students could see this, at 7th grade or in college, they might love what I teach instead of (mostly) despising it.  They might see how a tennis forehand could be better with topspin, how a cast could be optimized when you are fishing, how a mountain range could be modeled with fractal geometry.  They might see the endless self similarity in a rhubarb leaf, or the patterns made by a snowflake or a frost pattern in a windshield.  Instead, they see a set of steps to solve a problem, presented void of context, and if they are lucky they have a math teacher who attempts to re-contextualize the problem.  

Instead, I think math ought to, from the outset, be contextualized.  The why should always come before the how.  The interesting problem should precede the set of steps that allows a student to approach it.  The students themselves should be able to come up with different ways to solve it, instead of having a set in stone approach handed down didactically from a teacher who may or may not have considered the real world implications of the problem.  

To that end, my approach to teaching this year (especially during the pandemic) will attempt to pre-contextualize the concepts I teach.  I want them to have life and vibrant color, and I want my students to excitedly pontificate about how they might solve them before I help them learn a strategy.  Oft I shall fail at this lofty goal, but I refuse to stop trying.  My students deserve nothing less.

Happy Tuesday everybody,


~Mark

 

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