Exit Slip - Nov 14th

 Generally, I haven’t been exposed to many academics that focus their efforts in highly creative spaces. As such, it was fascinating to hear Kathryn speak about how they have continued to innovate in creative spaces throughout their life. I was particularly interested I how Kathryn spoke about energy and being a ‘conduit’. Often, I hear creative people speak about ‘giving or sharing their energy’ – this was not the language Kathryn used. Rather, they spoke of drawing inspiration from objects, stories, and archetypes. For Kathryn, I understood their creative process as a channeling of energy, rather than a giving or sharing of energy. This is an important distinction! It speaks to the unpredictability that characterizes Kathryn’s work. It also gives me comfort, as a creative person, that I need not feel responsible for ‘deciding’ what to create. Rather, the creative process is one in which you allow your body and skills to act in accordance with something else (a story, an archetype, a letter, etc.).

 I was deeply impressed by the ingenuity my peers demonstrated in tying Kathryn’s highly suggestive objects to math, however there are two I want to highlight. The first was how Teij (and others - I forgot who was also in this group) suggested using story to teach equations of lines. I realized that when we are teaching students about relationships, lines and equations are simply tools to abstract and distil much more potent ideas. By associating subjective qualities (such as happiness and fantasy) with each axis, we can more intuitively what we try to represent with lines. For example, I feel stories have the potential to clearly show students the meaning of vertical or horizontal lines – namely, it is the change in 1 quality while keeping another constant.

The second idea I want to highlight was presented by Madison. She suggests that as an exit slip, we use colored popsicle sticks to quickly and intuitively assess the student’s engagement and overall satisfaction. There are many ways to execute this, but generally I am drawn to this idea of leveraging the relative ambiguity of color to get a sense of the student experience. A few prospective prompts may be: “How was your experience today?”, “Are you excited to continue learning about this topic?”, and “Do you feel you ‘got’ what was being taught?”. I’m sure there will be many unpredictable nuances to consider if / when I try this in a classroom, but regardless I am excited to apply color in my approach to exit slips.