November 14, 2024 Exit Slip

First, I'd like to thank Kathryn for coming to present her unique expertise to us, and thank you Susan for arranging everything for today. While it was a very different Inquiry I class (I still remember at the end Andy saying something along the lines of, "To be fair, most of the time we aren't doing much math or science-y things to begin with"; this class was even more different than the classes before), there was still value to it. Although I did not seek out the ideas to begin with, it was nice to sit, listen, and engage in something so unknown in a casual environment. A shout out to the music cohort (I assume) for providing a nice ambient backdrop of sound as well. I've wanted to bring that up for a while now, so maybe next week I will if they decide to play again.

Anyways, the initial presentation was of some interest to me. I have to admit that lately, I have not been getting the most optimal amount of sleep, and it has been affecting my attention span a little bit. For that, I apologize to Kathryn since I found myself getting distracted by my own body, which is ironically thematic with all the embodied activities we've been covering in this course and others so far. While the presentation was happening, I was actually doing something along the lines of embodied activity. I'm normally a fidgety person, but instead of playing with fidget toys, I usually play with my hands. Sometimes I would inspect my hands (especially these days now that it's particularly dry and it's starting to crack the skin a little), but today I thought it would be fun to play with my hand nerves a little bit. If you want to try it yourself, here are the steps:

1. Put your hand palm-side-down. Keep it this way throughout.
2. Start by raising each finger by themselves sequentially. I did it from thumb to pinky.
3. Now, try raising each combination of 2 fingers. It's easy until you reach that darn ring finger!
4. Now, try raising each combination of 3 fingers. To keep track of it, use the same sequence of 2 fingers from step 3, except instead these fingers would be down while the other three are raised at a time. This is when it gets tough.
5. Now, try raising each combination of 4 fingers. It's a complement of the 1-finger step.
6. Finish it off by raising all 5 fingers.

Basically, there's some brain and nerve trickery that's happening here. The ring finger actually has two separate nerves that control each lateral half of it: the radial and ulnar nerves. The radial nerve is responsible for the thumb, pointer, middle, and half of the ring, while the ulnar nerve is responsible for just the other half of the ring and the pinky finger. If you want to feel the nerve mapping, you can dig into where your funnybone is (i.e. the ulnar nerve) and give it a light strum! Anyways, I suspect that because of this nerve entanglement, going through that sequence is particularly challenging. There's also another cool extension that I played around with that started with me trying the sequence with my left hand. Absolute disaster, mainly because I've never tried it with that hand. However, I noticed that every time I tried to intricately play with my left fingers, my right fingers would unconsciously raise the same ones! So I decided to try an experiment: if I have both hands out at the same time and do the sequence above, but only focusing on the right hand where I could do it, could my left hand naturally follow? The short answer: yes! If you're feeling an experimental mood, I definitely recommend trying out the sequence above with one and both hands. The way that the brain works with these coordination quirks is utterly fascinating, and I found that it distracted me from the presentation a little bit.

That being said, I did pick up some pieces of the first half of Kathryn's presentation. I thought that the "three-pronged assignment" idea was relatively familiar and connected with the concepts of equitable access points and universal design for learning, on the basis of having multiple options for students to demonstrate some understanding or learning. In one case, there were three options, two of which I remember (interview or photographs). In my B.Ed program, EDST 401: the second assignment on cultural analysis was also a "choose your favourite" between a group podcast, essay, interview with a community member, or teach the class a topic of your passion. While the interview would have been okay with me, I did not like the other options besides the podcast. As such, I could see myself benefitting from such options. I remember in EPSE 308's pre-readings, there was a video that explained UDL by comparing it to a buffet. To put my thoughts out here, I found that to be the perfect analogy. Yes, people can choose their meal elements and make their own perfect dinner! HOWEVER! The analogy is perfect because it also captures the disadvantages of a buffet. Mainly, the amount of food and prediction that has to be done. Maybe you will prepare certain things, but no one ends up eating it. But the fact stands that you had to spend a lot of time designing those buffet items regardless. But I digress. I also thought that it was funny that Kathryn moved to online lessons for her classes because it was easier for her students to come out of their shell if the shield of the computer monitor was there for them. More power to her, honestly.

There were also two cool activities that we did after the break. The first one was one where we each grabbed a Dixit card and used it as a visual to describe our interpretation of a math student, if that makes sense. For me, I picked up this card that looks an awful lot like No-Face (Kaonashi) from Spirited Away. As a minor tangent, I just wanted to say that despite watching over 200 anime series in my life, I have only watched that one Ghibli movie. The main differences were that the Dixit card had a blush instead of the vertical eye markings, and the mouth was more feminine.

Taken from https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/No-Face_(Spirited_Away)

My math student depiction was one that I resonated a lot with. As someone who typically scored high in math classes throughout my life, as well as relishing in praise and reactions from others, I always liked to show off my scores. However, I am also conscious of how others may feel if they see these marks. Will they think lesser of me because I've decided to show off my grades while their grades were lower? Is it worth showing off my power level? So I ended up relating to this massive black cloak with a mask design on the Dixit card, because everything is under wraps for both of us. Personally, I wish that we could show off whatever we got, though some may argue that it breeds unhealthy competition in a class setting. But a little casual recognition would still be nice. At least for me.

Finally, we did another activity where Kathryn handed each group of 2-3 (There were 4 groups. For whatever reason, there were not a lot of people present today.) a set of things, and we were to develop some kind of curricular thing around the things in order to win an imaginary portion of the $750 grant. $750i, if you will. (chuckle.) In any case, I paired up with Jacob and we got a bunch of assorted buttons of different sizes and colours. That's exactly what we did: mapping of the buttons based on attributes! My inspirations for this idea actually came from a machine learning workshop for a grade 9 class that I observed this past Tuesday; they were discussing unsupervised learning (give the model data, it will make its own labels). In our case, the students would be the models being given data (buttons) and sorting them into labels somehow. There's also a visual aspect that lends itself to unintentional (or intentional) art -- who says we have to rearrange the buttons in a coordinate grid way? Why not a circular way, which captures the variation in hues better especially if we consider that some image editing programs use circular hue selectors? Also because we'd be allowing students to decide their own ways to sort, there's probably a unique art gallery that comes up. As an added challenge, students could try to guess what the sorting heuristics were for other groups. 

That's all I really have for my recap of today, but honestly it's still a lot. If you see this blog post and try to play with your fingers, it'd be cool to hear your experiences and brain tangling! We've had tongue twisters, now we have finger twisters. You could also try to alternate raising your pointer/ring digits, then thumb/middle/pinky digits. Speed up once you get the hang of it (you won't anytime soon), and watch as your brain crumbles. Maybe even throw in your left hand and watch the magic of your brain causing the left hand to be an expert simply because the right hand is too!

P.S. I have narrowed down my inquiry topic of one-on-one interactions to just the Beginning (how do I know who needs help, besides hand raising) and the End (how do I know when to leave a student). I have a few ideas for Google Scholar search prompts, but I haven't started yet. I could see formative assessment being a part of it though.