Now that our mini-classes are over, we started the second semester today. One good thing of my day was that we had our second meeting of the math book club where we’re reading Sarah Hart’s Once Upon A Prime. We have about 35 minutes over lunch to talk about it, and it was just a fun conversation. I really loved the section we read for today, and I was glad that kids seemed to find a lot of interesting things to say about it.

Today we finished out the math-art class I’ve been leading. I’m too exhausted to type much. But the main activities from today included our kids meeting up with the kids in the “math and music” class. Each class shared what they did/learned with the other class. The last activity, and the one I was msot looking forward to, is our kids working with a kindergarten class. Our kids set up all their artwork in the art studio, so it looked a bit like a gallery. We put the kids in pairs. And each each pair came up with a lesson plan with things to do with the kindergartner’s they were assigned. (Each pair got 3 kindergartners.) About 20 minutes was spent looking around the gallery and talking with the little kids about shapes, numbers, what they noticed, playing with things, drawing things they saw… and about 20 minutes was doing an art activity. My heart burst seeing all the curiosity and energy of the little kids, and our big kids matching that energy and being so kind and engaging and centering the little kids. It was magical.

After cleaning up, we said goodbye to the kids now that our class is over. Three kids had separated during some free time to write a rap. I said they could, as long as it involved math and art. After all the other kids left, these kids “performed” their rap for us, and it was about our symposium. It was just so sweet. To end our time together with little kids, and then a few of our kids sharing a random for-fun rap they made? That made me joyful. (And also today about 3 more kids wanted extra linen and embroidery floss and embroidery hoops so they could do some string-art cardiod making, or embroidery-ing this weekend… just for fun.)

Even with all of this said, I don’t truly know if kids *really* enjoyed our class or if they thought it was *fine* overall. It’s hard to read the inner minds of kids, and I could be convinced either way. But for me, the one good thing was that I left our time together seeing the kiddos be joyful with little kiddos, and that was just magical.

It’s 9pm so I don’t have much time to write — so tired and I still have some planning to do for tomorrow! But today the kiddos finished their stained glass pieces. And they turned out so very fabulous! And then kids were continuing their embroidery work for the hitomezashi designs. And for a good thing, a few of them saw the string art for the cardiod that I brought in that I made this summer, and two of them took the materials to make their own at home, just because they thought it was cool!

We had a snowday yesterday, but today we started what should have been Day 4 (of 7) of the math-art class. I’m too tired to write a lot now, but in the morning, we did some debriefing at the start of the day. And then we started working on our stained glass pieces. They learned to cut glass, and then grind glass.

In the afternoon, kids continued grinding their glass, and started working on stitching their Hitomezashi patterns in linen.

I did an intentional act of kindness. When walking home in the snow today, a man fell. And so me and someone else helped him up, and made sure he was okay walking (I was worried that he had twisted his foot/ankle, but he hadn’t).

For our third day of our math-art class, we gathered the students in our classroom for a half an hour before heading off to the Museum of Math. In this half hour, I gave them buttons with this image on it, and told them it was very special and they would have the weekend to figure out why it was such a beautiful image. It feels random, but I told them in any one of the colors changed in a single circle to another color, the image would not be beautiful to me anymore.

Then we had kids do scratch offs (with numbers from 1 to 14 underneath). The number they got told them the order in which they got to pick which stained glass template they’d get to try to create. And so they all went up to look at the 17 template options and then we called them up dramatically one-by-one to claim the image they’d be making next week.

Finally we left for the Museum of Math. They had someone lead an hourlong workshop which tied in perfectly to something we very breifly did yesterday. We had kids cut mobius strips, we watched a 4 minute video of it, and then kids cut a mobius strip into a bagel. Well, the workshop was about playing tic-tac-toe… and analyzing it… comparing it on a regular board, a cylindrical board, and on a mobius strip board. It was really fun. And then kids had a little under two hours to explore the museum. They engaged, did lots of puzzles, geeked out about learning about the fourth dimension with a couple docents/instructors, etc. I was nervous because the museum isn’t big and initially I saw kids get a little bored after running around and quickly looking at things for 30 minutes. But then they settled in and spent more time with the exhibits and chatting with each other and talking with the docents. I was honestly pretty nervous about this day, but (not to a kid, but for most kids) kids seemed to enjoy simultaneously learning and chilling.

Today we had our second day of the math art course I’m leading. I had a lot of nice small moments that I would call “one good things.” But at the end of the day, one of the sophomores in the class said “I have been lucky to get the best two symposium classes!” (Symposium is the name for our mini-class time period.) And obviously they meant one of those was our class!

I think all our math-art activities counts as a “good things” so here they are!

A bagel we cut a mobius strip into that we ate for breakfast:

Some Sol Lewitt incomplete open cubes, made out of dots and toothpicks:

The creation of some Sol Lewitt wall drawings:

And some basic discussion of randomness before using randomness and design to come up with some basic Hitomezashi designs:

For the next six days (today makes seven in total), I’m teaching a math-art course to 15 students (mostly 9th graders with some 10th graders). We have them for 7 hours each day. Exhuasting! I have been very nervous about this course and how it would go. But today, we got to spend the whole day with the kids… our first day. And by the end of the day, I felt like the kids had a good time and actually did some real math and made some real art. This piece is a George Hart sculpture (we made two of them). And afterwards, we spent 40 minutes doing a small activity to get kids to learn about Euler’s Characteristic Formula.

We had one small mess up… the clock in our classroom (it’s not a classroom I normally teach in) was off by an hour. So when the clock read noon, we let the kids out until 1pm for lunch. But it was only 11am, not noon. So kids got a two hour lunch. I was stressed when I realized what happened, but after 15 minutes of me kicking myself, I felt A-OK about it. And then when we all gathered after lunch, we all had a good laugh about it. So I am going to put it as a good thing that I could let this crazy mess up not stress me out for the rest of the day… just fifteen minutes.

I just got an email from someone at school saying “STU was in my office this afternoon raving about how cool your symposium course is. [They] said they learned so much and had so much fun- they even showed me pictures of the projects they did.” So at least one student had fun. ❤

Some good things…

Today was the last day of the first semester, and I recently gave a bunch of tests, so I did a bunch of grading. Even though I wasn’t super crazy efficient with my time (I kept of running out of steam and needing a break), I still got a lot done.

In the lunch room, I saw a theater teacher who I never see. And so I invited them to have lunch with me, but they didn’t want to sit in the cafeteria, so I went to their office, and ate lunch there with her and a few of her colleagues, and we had really fun conversations!

The seniors are now, as of 3:20pm, second semester seniors. And they always do a countdown in the student center to 3:20pm. So I went at 3:15 to watch them, and it was fun to see such elation in their faces.

The dean of the grade I advise got all the advisors some fancy croissants from a fancy bakery. So that was scrumptious!

My intentional act of kindness is sitting with a student I don’t know who was having an emotionally hard time, and helping them regulate their breathing, emotions, anxiety and doing a lot of listening and empathizing. When we were ready, we went to the nurses office.

I was looking over a student reflection on a project they turned in. In it, they referenced the feedback they got from a previous activity we did (where students created their own collaborative study guide, and their task was to “teach” a student how to solve certain types of problems). And how they used that understanding (need to use more visuals and more informal language) as they created their project. This made me really happy. And another student wrote how they were happy to get to explore something they were interested in (since they got to choose their project topic), after year after year of learning a standard curriculum. So that made me happy.

This morning, I was having breakfast with the normal breakfast crew… a few teachers and one of their kids (who is in elementary school). We have coffee, do puzzles together, and just relax before the day starts. We always have fun talking to the kid… and today we kept secretly exchanging nametags and telling the kid our nametag name instead of our real names… and then again and again… and it was so dumb, but it was hilarious for us and the kid, and it brought me morning joy.

I’m still at school now, but I wanted to post this now so I could spend my time after school focusing on grading!

A bunch of faculty were at a candidate interview for a new high school principal. And the candidate, who has a humanities background, mentioned Po-Shen Loh. Okay, that was awesome. But what I loved as one of my good things is that all four math teachers who were in the audience ooohed. I love that I’m in a department which is so “plugged in” to math/math education that we all would know this name and geek out over him being mentioned. 🙂

Today, there was a bit of a hullaballoo around something. And I had so much fun chitchatting about it in my office, and then in a different office. It made me grateful (as I often feel) for my colleagues.

This morning, a student I taught last year who is now a senior, talked to me about the robot they’re building for the robotic’s competition (which is happening on Saturday). That made me happy. And they invited me to see the robot in action after school today. I had to go to the interview I noted above, and then I forgot to pop on by right after. And when I remembered, I rushed down, but the robotics team was gone. ARGH! (But I saw the robotics coach who showed me a video of the robot in action.)