Gartden Exercise

    My art is actually not very pretty, but I do quite enjoy drawing. I think I might actually be an artsy-fartsy kind of person, but I just haven't devoted any time to that sort of thing (dang STEM always getting in the way of what's important). So as the "student bird," I certainly enjoyed this activity. I found that when I was drawing man-made objects, I was much more concerned with getting the lines and angles exactly as I saw them. On the other hand, any natural objects seemed much too complex to reproduce faithfully. So instead, I simply tried my best to capture some vague sense of vegetation. To me, this exercise clearly contrasts the ordered world of the man-made with the complex, impossible-to-replicate chaos of the natural.

    Now as a "teacher bird," I do think this exercise imparts some kind of lesson along those lines. But at the same time, there are a lot of open-ended variables, and one student's takeaway isn't necessarily going to be the same as another's. That was clear from the class discussion, which, I'm starting to realize, is like some kind of teacher cheat code. I'm also wondering, if the effectiveness of having students learn from each other might be context-dependent. For instance, wouldn't a class discussion be extra effective with, say, a group of thoughtful and articulate teacher candidates?

    In the context of a primary or secondary math class, I do like this exercise anyway. And I think the class discussion portion probably works pretty well here regardless of the grade level. What really interests me though, is that I think this drawing exercise promotes certain ideas almost subliminally. For example, a student might be forced to wrestle with their perfectionism. On the other hand, maybe they're getting to practice their attention-to-detail. Or maybe it's an exercise in creating abstract representations of real world objects. Or maybe it's a lesson in the loss of fidelity inherent in such abstractions. Or maybe it highlights the clear geometry of human constructions and piques an interest to apply such geometrical ideas to the complex shapes of the natural world! It's actually all of these and more, and different students are going tune-in to different things. So to me, this kind of exercise is more like an experience which washes over the students, and directs their awareness to many interesting ideas, even if they don't vocalize them like a group of teacher candidates might.

 

Shoutout to Caris, pictured below: