One-by-one individual reflection (math/art project)

 In all honesty, before starting this project I was a bit skeptical about how it would all go. While I like the idea of math projects in high school classrooms, I had the presupposition that in this project we would pick an art piece, and kind of inauthentically make up a way to connect this to high school students to satisfy this projects’ rubric and not actually get that much learning out of it. However, I am very happy to say that this was very far from what happened. I got so much enjoyment out of the project. Getting the opportunity to think about the patterns we see in math gave me such an appreciation for the beauty of the things we consider “simple”. I also really enjoyed hearing about how all my partners in the project thought about the concepts as well, and all the different approaches we took to understanding the piece. This alone feels very applicable to teaching math. Every student truly will have their own unique way of learning and will bring their own experiences into the class to inform their thinking. I think being able to appreciate this makes me a stronger teacher.

Beyond this, I’m already thinking about how I could modify this sort of assignment as a final project in a class, as I realize even more now how meaningful a project like this could be for students. I could see huge benefits from giving them a chance to independently explore a math piece they find interesting, and trying to connect or extend that project to a related unit from math class that year. I think the main limitation that comes along with this project is the potential costs associated. As we saw during presentations, there are definitely ways to save money in making these projects, but I think its also important to recognize that not every student will be able to buy all the materials they would like to, and to be fully inclusive and equitable for all students, there should be materials available at school for their use in this project. 

Within our project specifically, I found a lot of enjoyment working with our team. I think we all resonated with the piece we chose, and because of this I found we were all really excited, motivated, and all wanted to contribute to the work at hand. This makes me glad that we had so much liberty in choosing the artwork and the project associated. Getting to be creative in that way was refreshing. The only real difficulty I found in this project was finding time for all of us to get together to work on it as a group. While everything still worked out and we did have time, balancing everyone’s busy schedules was at times a bit challenging. If I were to do the project again, I think I would have also liked to do an activity that was a bit more hand-on. For example, giving each group a row number of the one-by-one piece to complete with sticky notes or colored tiles, then giving one group the non-existent 10th row, and use that to generate discussion about why it doesn’t work.



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