Birch Bark Biting

 "It has been argued that disengagement from mathematics emerges

as a result of the conflict between Aboriginal culture and the cultural

values embedded in school-based mathematics programs"

- Lisa Lunney Borden

Before diving into the specific question prompts for this entry, I wanted to flag a few 'stops' that I had along the way. The first (beyond the quote that I highlight above) was when Dr. Lunney Borden addressed describing math with language. I can distinctly remember myself first learning what a factorial was because I found myself doing extremely repetitive procedures and thinking "surely there must be some better way of doing this." The fact that mathematics had a word for just that process was very empowering. It made me better understand the operation and also situated me as creative in my own math learning. 

I also really resonated with the description of spatial reasoning being useful for survival whereas numeracy is useful for play. I think that too often we ascribe numeracy the paramount importance because of finance and disregard its strong connection to playfulness and joy.

With regards to the prompt, I think that I was fortunate to learn from Susan Robinson, a high school teacher who focused very heavily on embodied mathematics and creativity. At the time, I would engage with the material but thought that the idea of "dancing the tangent" was a bit silly. We do have to be careful not to force connections upon students, I think. 

It was my experience at the 2018 CMESG conference that changed my mind on this sort of embodied learning. Specifically, the warm-up of moving one's hands in patterns with different length cycles to drive home the idea of lowest common multiples. The challenge with creating meaningful integrations of math and art, as it is with math and games (a subject with which I have more familiarity), is that both the math and the art must stand alone meaningfully in their field or else one will always feel foisted upon the other. 

This is a great challenge for educators, but those examples that I have seen of educators rising to that challenge have been intensely motivational for me as a teacher and learner.