On Noticing

I have written about noticing before, but it is something that occurs and reoccurs in thinking and reflecting on my practice. What is noticing? What do you notice? What form does your noticing take? How do you attend to that which you notice?

And here is the rest of it. Have you ever been surprised by the multiple occurrences of something which you have only just spoken about? Does this happen very often? Is this just a co-incidence do you think? Perhaps there's something else? There is certainly something about this feeling: the fact that it happens to people so often (well to me anyway). I feel that it has something to do with what it is we "set ourselves to notice".

I noticed recently that a lot passes me by and that I notice very little, in the order of things anyway. It is so easy for someone observing to have seen something that we 'in the fray' didn't see at all. This is where reflection is very important: by setting ourselves to notice specific things, be they ways in which we react, patterns of behaviour in students, the intonation of our voice; we are much more likely to be able to attend to those things we want to change or at least notice.

The idea of being more in control of my own classroom behaviour seem to me to be empowering.

Mathematics and Art (part 1)

I started drawing recently (yesterday in fact) with Justin. It is a skill I have never had much confidence in doing, there is very little in the way of drawing that I can say that I have been pleased with. This is going to stop though. I think I need to be more patient and understand that it can take time. I have come to the conclusion that my impatience is in part to blame.

You may be asking what place this has on a blog about maths, and you'd be right to ask. The reason that I am posting about this is that whilst drawing I found myself thinking about mathematics and how it could be used to describe the processes and the image.

We started by discussing the nature of parallel and perpendicular and the effect that they have upon form. Gradient and juxtaposition. Two concepts which also came out in thinking about shadow and light.

It seems to me that I perceive that which is different, but I also perceive in context. I see a parallelogram when the black lines are juxtaposed with the white paper, in an isometric context however I may perceive a rectangle.

As I sketched the container I attended to the curvature particularly. The way in which I thought of the top of the base intersected closely with graphs. "It stops at this point" I thought, "this is a stationary point". I noted this as it was a moment of unforced mathematical behaviour. I was not trying to think about how mathematics related to what I was doing, it happened because it was related.

When we began considering the container Justin began by asking me to sketch it 10 times for a minute each time. After this I sketched it twice, each time for 10 minutes. I finally sketched it for 30 minutes. At each stage I noticed more detail, more shadow, more light. I am currently reading Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing by John Mason and the drawing seemed to serve as a fitting analogy to thinking about teaching. We attend to that which we set ourselves to notice, and it is through reflection and consideration that the finer details reveal themselves.