Dancing Euclidean Proofs Reflection

     I enjoyed watching the Euclidean dance video and the article was an interesting read. One thing that made me stop and think is that the dance choreography must have taken an ample amount of time to do. As the article already stated, the proof of Euclidean is given on paper with all the details for a person to absorb. Does that really help people to understand by giving all the details at once? Through dancing, I've realized that it is a sequence of steps taken to show the end goal and one must understand every intermediate step to make the dance a beauty. This helps solidify the understanding of the proofs. Another thing that made me stop and think was dance being a expressive piece of art. I had the luxury to take a dance course at SFU (EDUC330) and I learned about different movement techniques.  We think math as being abstract and I feel most people don't realize is that the theorems that were derived today is a result of someone's hard work. It is a journey of mathematical thinking, practices and applications. Through movements, we can better understand the journey that mathematicians such as Euclid went through.

    It was interesting to see how my fellow classmates tried to replicate their own dance. Most people never saw the proof before, so most were trying to decipher and understand the proof. Then, they took the proof apart and went step by step to make their dance choreography. I wanted to take a different approach so I thought how about music? Although I went with rapping, it goes to show that Math can be expressed in many different ways!

    I think these types of activities are important because movement allows for thinking. Also, the biggest factor is collaboration because there are students who work better with other people. In order to understand thinking of some mathematicians, students need to ask why? These types of activities requires students to analyze carefully each individual step and by doing that, they will hopefully be able to find the answers. Also, it requires students to look from a different perspective on how some of these mathematical concepts came to be.

    Some constraints I think implementing this in the classroom is time management. I had the fortunate opportunity to teach, but as a novice teacher, I found myself not being able to keep track of time. I ended up going faster than usual. Also, engagement is also another factor that I need to consider. How can I make activities such as they are not bland, informational, and fun? How can I ensure my students are understanding? I believe experience will come with time, but I can't help but think of some of these questions. People have different learning strategies and as a teacher, I think one of the hardest thing is how to accommodate for everyone.