May 2020
“I’M STILL LEARNING.” ~MICHELANGELO
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Learning from Challenges
April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth.
Astronauts Lovell, Swigert, and Haise were engaged in routine flight activities when they suddenly encountered a problem that brought standard operating procedures to an immediate halt.
Faulty wire insulation in an oxygen tank had ignited, triggering an explosion that spilled precious oxygen into space. Life support systems in the command module were shut down to conserve resources. Without oxygen in the command module, the crew was forced to harbor in the tiny lunar module during four anxiety-filled days. NASA engineers on the ground quickly invented a way of using available materials to remove carbon dioxide from the lunar module, allowing the astronauts to survive.
Thanks to an immediate stance of collaborative problem solving and a swiftly coordinated response from Mission Control, the space craft was able to set a new course and return safely to Earth. According to NASA, the Apollo 13 mission “was classified as a successful failure because of the experience gained in rescuing the crew.” https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo13.html
https://pixabay.com/photos/apollo-13-landing-module-60613/
Like teachers everywhere, I suddenly had to move my Math Methods course for pre-service teachers online this semester. The experience has been challenging but also an unexpectedly rich source of professional learning. Here are some key ideas about teaching that have been reinforced by the need to find creative ways of meeting my students’ learning needs:
- The value of investing time in building relationships with students and establishing a safe learning environment
- The critical importance of classroom discourse and hands-on experiences with concrete manipulatives
- The benefits of having students reflect on their learning and their growth as learners
Moving my course online has also given me the opportunity to consider which aspects of my curriculum are truly essential. In other words, what understandings must my students to take away from our time together to ensure that they teach students to make sense of mathematical ideas and resist defaulting to ineffective and sometimes harmful traditional teaching practices? Here’s my revised curriculum, the essential understandings I want my students to carry with them into their first math classrooms:
- Your math learning identity is a result of how you were taught, not your capacity for understanding and using math. You can build a new, positive relationship with mathematics! Teaching math in a sense-making way will help you to do so.
- Always, always, always teach math for understanding.
- Provide learning experiences that help students internalize the big ideas of elementary mathematics – number sense, operation sense, place value, fraction sense.
- Give students lots of opportunities to talk about their mathematical thinking. Doing so builds understanding and provides a wealth of other important benefits for learners.
- Help students learn to represent their math thinking in multiple ways. The more ways students can represent mathematical ideas, the stronger and more lasting their learning.
- Help students learn to make connections between mathematical ideas and from math to real life. Teach students to be pattern seekers.
- Problem solving is the purpose for doing mathematics. Use problem solving experiences as a vehicle for teaching math concepts and procedures.
- Give students lots of opportunities to struggle with rigorous problems, and to learn how push through struggle. Struggle is a critical element in learning and an important part of life.
In reflecting on the Apollo 13 mission, math education leader Cathy Seeley observes “The astronauts on Apollo 13 ended up using a combination of high-tech and low-tech tools to solve their life-or-death problem. But mostly, they used the combined brain power of a team of people working together to determine how to use the tools they had in the most efficient and helpful way possible (p. 307).”
As a community of educators, we have much to feel proud about in our response to the sudden disruption of our established ways of schooling. We put our available technology tools into strategic use, and quickly searched out new tools to keep student learning going. As we transition into the next phase in our response to threats posed by COVID-19, it’s important to pause and consider what we’ve learned from our experience so far and how we might apply these lessons to evolving circumstances now and in the future. By doing so, we can be more strategic in our selection of structures and strategies that optimize students’ growth regardless of our learning context.
What are you learning from the challenges you’ve faced in the last month and a half? How will you put these insights to work in the future?
Reference:
Seeley, C. (2014). Smarter than we think: More messages about math, teaching, and learning in the 21st century. Sausalito, CA: Math Solutions.
Learning from Suzanne
A new grandmother’s reflections on learning
How Self-Isolating is like Sitting in a Cardboard Box
It’s always good to start the day with a smile and the knowledge that you won’t always be stuck in a little box.
Your world is smaller, but you can still have lots of fun.
You can monitor all the going-ons from your safe and cozy nook.
You can play peek-a-boo if you want. There are lots of opportunities for giggles.
You get endless attention from family members.
Sitting in the box invites playful interaction and offers photo ops which will surely translate into family stories enjoyed for years to come.
You gain a new vantage point on life. This ground-level perspective allows you to take a fresh look at what’s important.
It’s little confining, but all-in-all not too bad.
Big smiles help everyone, whatever your current circumstances.
Learning More
Resources worth checking out
Man’s Search for Meaning
By Viktor Frankl
An unexpected joy resulting from our new reality has been the rediscovery of gems on my bookshelf, books I bought a while back but never had time to read. Man’s Search for Meaning is one such treasure, a tiny book with a powerful message.
The author, Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and, most significantly, a holocaust survivor. He offers this memoire of living through his experience as a prisoner in a concentration camp to explore the question “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” (p. 3). Frankl also considers the broader meaning of this experience and shares insights to help others pilot challenging passages in life.
Frankl talks about three phases that concentration camp prisoners typically faced. The first phase is characterized by shock followed by curiosity.
The second phase is defined by apathy which Frankl describes as “a kind of emotional death” (p. 20). During this phase, prisoners ceased to be horrified by atrocities and settled into a self-protective mode of thinking and action. Frankl talks about a prisoner’s distorted sense of time during this period. He says “In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example filled with hourly tortures and fatigue, appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted longer than a week” (p. 70-71).
The third phase involves the prisoner’s readjustment to post-WWII life after release from the concentration camp. Frankl warned that this re-adjustment period was often surprisingly difficult.
While my experience self-isolating in minuscule compared to that of concentration camp prisoners, Frankl’s description of these phases and the emotions experienced during these periods is helping me to keep my own roller coaster of emotions in perspective.
Frankl’s mental processing of this horrific situation offers a compass for navigating our own current circumstances. I’ve posted this quote from Frankl above my desk as a reminder of my responsibility to choose my attitude and my response to challenges I encounter:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (p. 65-66)
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
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