I believe bodily experience is helpful in learning aspects of mathematics and physics, especially when helping students building interest and cognition at early stages.
Maybe all of us had learning counting numbers and addition using our own fingers when we first time in contact with the concept of basic mathematics. We can feel gravity, inertia and friction force every day. In elemental school and secondary school, teacher are using colorful and distinguishable shaped objects like beads, wooden bricks, and marbles to teach basic mathematic. It may be hard to explain physic law of gravity and air friction force. While when a student dropping an iron ball and a feather from each hand to ground, he can understand these concepts easily.
Dr. Borden’s article on birch bark biting lesson shows us that besides the cognitive advantage and inspiring of interest that bodily experience can provide, combining it with indigenous traditional art crafting can also serve the purpose of culture affirmation and social justice. This help counter “the marginalization of Mi’kmaw youth from mathematics” (Borden, P757). By “pull mathematics into indigenous culture” using bodily experience, student can learn and gain value more than just the knowledge alone, which is marvelous.
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August 18, 2021
References:
Some quotes from the first article:
1. Mathematics is actually an aesthetic subject almost entirely.
2. Mathematics is a natural and deep part of human experience and experiences of meaning in mathematics should be accessible to everyone.
3. why and how are these meanings related? This is a why-question...
After reading this article, I feel that there are still many aspects of mathematics to explore. I like drawing since I was 5 years old. Maybe it is why I loved geometry courses when I was in high school. I enjoyed drawing those circles and lines neatly and accurately when doing assignments. I somehow felt a little sense of aesthetic in it.
I do believe there is a close relationship between mathematics and arts. It would be very interesting to integrate arts into math teaching in the classroom.
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Professor Gerofsky teaches us Rope Making in a video(she also taught us about this in one class in the 2020 fall term). When she is twisting the grass and say that there is a lot of stored energy in the grass, I am kind of attracted. I remember when I was young my mom taught me about something similar to Rope Making. I believe I can do this type of job all day long since this ancient activity brings me some sense of peace and deja vu.
There is another very interesting video that is about dancing combinatorics. For example, the left arm does a sequence of 11, and the right arm does a sequence of 13, then a whole cycle includes 143 (11x13) different movements. A simple example is the left arm does a sequence of 3 (up, middle, down), the right arm does a sequence of 2 (up, down), then there are 6 combinations (up-up, middle-down, down-up, up-down, middle-up, down-down).
An interesting problem here is that it is better to choose numbers that are relatively prime numbers so that your movements will not repeat somewhere in the middle. Relatively prime means these numbers don't have common factors except 1. For example, 4 and 5 are relatively prime numbers, but 4 and 6 are not because 4 and 6 have 2 as the common factor.
If we choose, for example, 6 and 4, then the sequence will start to repeat at 13, because 4 is the factor of 12 which is the multiple of 6. The whole cycle ideally is supposed to include 24 different movements, but now you suddenly realize that it starts to repeat after the 12th movement.
So we may know that for two or any number of non-relatively prime numbers the sequence will start to repeat at their least common multiple. For example, for 8 and 6, the sequence will start to repeat after the 24th movement.
There are many valuable and inspiring videos on this website.
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