Dancing Euclidean Proofs

The first thing that stopped me when reading this article was how I could find a way to physically implement mathematics into something I'm passionate about: hockey. It didn't have to be about Euclidean proofs necessarily, but more geared to embodied learning as a whole. I think that sports is a great way to show embodied learning and can have really great physical representations, especially with something like skating that allows gliding and movement of the puck, or even the use of the stick. If I were to translate ice to the dancing Euclidean proofs, perhaps the use of figure skating could be used. With hockey however I could create drills or skating patterns that would represent mathematical proofs, or even mimic the first Euclidean proof dance as a drill that could work on edgework and skating. While reading the article all I could think of was how I could implement these ideas into something I love.

A quote that made me stop was "If you sit down to study the Elements from a book, you are in a sense completely detached from its representation on the page" . What I found so interesting about this was of course that I have experienced this detachment in other subjects or even with math. I feel this is a reason why math can be seen as 'boring' for some students, as rigorous proofs through text may just be words on a page that they don't care for. Over the short practicum what I've learnt is kids do not learn well when all they do is sit in their seats and take notes or read -- the more they move and become part of the work, the more they become engaged and focused. I think that math is notorious for having proofs that are boring and hard to understand for most people, so having embodied learning really gives the student a better sense of how proofs may work.

A second quote that stems from the first is "You become the active agents responsible for the making and understanding the representation" , and although this has to do with dancing in the text, in reality this is what we want all of our students to be able to do. We want to give them the necessary tools and knowledge to understand the material, but we want them to actively engage with it and form relational understandings through whatever form they're most comfortable with. We should encourage students to learn through analogies or physical representations, as it can give the context a sense of realism and practicality. I remember in physics we used the right hand rule, this physical representation really made sense of how forces may work on an object and therefore made the content easier.