At the core, down deep, is a willingness to act on instinct when the situation leaves no time for chewing things over or searching the memory for a textbook solution.
I trust my instincts. They are the sum total of all I know, all I have read, all I have experienced, all I have learned.
joe-gallowayInstinct has served me well all my life. It has permitted me to jump when others might not, and survive to tell the stories.
I wouldn’t encourage you to remain at frustration level for very long but pushing your students past their cognitive comfort zone is our job. Getting there may feel like pulling teeth but the good teachers keep pulling and less effective teachers just give up.
No matter what incentives or punishments I throw at my students, nothing works better than a healthy class relationship.
Here’s what I want: I want the students to derive the equations of motion [a(t), v(t), and x(t)] from first principles. I want them to think about how the wind pushes a sailboat, and I want them to use their basic understanding of physics (F=ma) to go from there. I can’t say that aloud, though, or it has become my investigation they then have to do. I have to let it grow, otherwise all I’ll get is a picture of how well they follow my directions, not how well their mathematical intuition is developing.1So, I need to introduce a good question, one that is clear about what we’re doing, but not so clear that it maps the whole process out artificially. This process is the math. By using only the asinine problems from the book you are relegating math to a status of recipe following. Do you really want your kids to be the kind of people that won’t attempt to make a pizza from scratch for lack of the 1 tsp of anise seed that has little to do with the overall success of the dish? That’s the kind of math that is predominantly taught. Barf.
My Fleep list:
fleep– the universal language of silliness
plugatroid– a person who cannot resist plugging and unplugging things into other things
dofo– said (with a mix of relief and frustration) when you finally figure out what you were supposed to do instead of doing what you actually did
octify–to make 8 of anything
yerst– in Fleep, this is a preposition indicating causality. Due to the complexities of modern Fleep combined with its etymological nuances, a direct translation is not possible.
4.2 extra credit– phud is the sound your body makes when you collapse on the floor in a Fleepish excursion into laughter
I've been disgusted by that until a minute ago. Now I wonder if I & my colleagues can find a great opportunity in this cheapness.
Maybe we can break from the bondage to the contents of our printed, same every year, text
And
Find new material on the net.
I webbed into some celtic music by Aine Minogue.This is the state known as liminality, from the Latin, limen: a threshold – the state of being “in between” places and times. In Celtic tradition this is a sacred time when the doors between the worlds are open and magical events can occur.
http://www.chalicecentre.net/imbolc.htm
which led me to work on this photo I took in Paris of doors. I have a couple photos of this beautiful set of doors and was thrilled when someone entered, allowing me to get a picture of one of the doors open. I waited to take the photo until the person was out of sight.
