Response to "Flow"

Getting into this blog post, I feel like I have quite a few things I can cover in terms of flow. Thus, I hope that as I write this post, I have the skills needed to meet the challenge ahead of me of getting a nice, well thought out blog post. In other words, I would like to achieve a flow state while writing this.

To continue off of that, yes! I have experience a flow state through many different experiences. One of the experiences that I've been able to get into a flow state in recently was actually just the act of writing blog posts. As many know me for at this point, I am what the children would call a "yapper". At this point I cannot deny it with my multiple paragraphs of """yapping""", but at the same time it's a very subconscious process. To look at myself typing this paragraph out is also interesting -- there's a bird's eye view happening here that is fairly counterintuitive to the process of flow, but there is a solid pipeline akin to a line of people porting buckets of water to put out a fire in an efficient manner. In my case, however, it's more like the cogs in my brain being able to pass on information to my hands, which in turn type and my eyes process what I've just typed, which gets fed back to the brain to decide whether I should press backspace or not. It also helps that I'm able to type without looking down at my keyboard, so that potential load on my brain doesn't really exist which frees up the capacity to just get into the literal flow of thoughts coming from my mind.

Another situation that I remember bringing up the topic of flow state was during a short practicum seminar session, during a discussion question exercise. Although the flow state didn't exactly happen at this time, the conversation eventually brought it up. I was sitting in the front-right side of the infamous ESB lecture hall with Madison, Leon, and Raymond. We were asked, "What is something you are good at doing? When did you become good at it?" The exercise was intended to ground ourselves especially if we started to adopt a doom-and-gloom, low self-esteem mindset. There are some implications with flow and "being good at something" here, which I won't get too deep into now. For my answer, I told the people around me that I was really good at making rice. Got a few chuckles, nice. Then I was asked something along the lines of how one would be better at making rice, to which I answered, "You have to wash it like crazy. The more you wash it, the better it tastes." This is a statement I stand behind firmly. My mother and uncle only do one wash, and it ends up tasting a little off. On the other hand, my father and I wash a lot, but especially me. Instead of 3-5 washes, I actually end up doing about 15-20. Shocker, right? Everyone around me was shocked, but I explained further that it was usually not a matter of me wanting to wash it more, but more so two reasons: 1) I wanted the water to be crystal clear before putting it in the rice cooker, and 2) I entered a flow state. The repetitive, easy motions allowed for me to really immerse myself into the state of washing rice, and washing it 20 times ends up not feeling very long. The result? The best rice in my household, in my personal opinion and experience. In this case the challenge aspect wasn't really there so it may have actually been a state of relaxation, but to me it felt like a flow state.

So that raises an interesting point: is it actually a flow state, or is it relaxation? So the interesting thing that just happened as I typed this sentence was that my blog post writing flow was broken a little bit because I had to start thinking! This is particularly notable, because it applies to so many of my experiences with the flow state and the absence of. In terms of what prompts the flow state for me, I feel like it is a lot more synonymous with a high "ability" more so a high ability and challenge of task. The main challenge stems from the need to think and process consciously. This is probably the biggest killer of the flow state for me, because it requires me to confront doubt and truly take a critical stance on whatever I am doing. On the other hand, however, even the critical thinking process could tap into the flow state, which happened to me earlier today when I was leading a guided discussion on neoliberal policies in education in my EDST 401 class. The trigger for this was a weird sense of panic when people weren't responding in a quick manner to my discussion questions, which made me attempt to start the discussion by putting my own critical thought into the matter. However, this was mainly possible because I already invested so much time to understand the material, so the challenge was lesser for me than the people I was leading. That being said, during something like math homework or even this blog post, having to stop and think can really dampen the flow state as it had just now.

To discuss a little more on my personal experiences with flow in other contexts, I'd like to recall the magic card exercise that we did in class today where we tried figuring out the pattern behind it. Jasmine was able to get it really quickly, but for the first while when I was in a state of 0-ness, she tried teaching and showing me how it worked but I just laid there in a state of anti-flow. Let's take a look at this situation. Was the challenge high or low? I feel like the actual challenge was not very high, but at the beginning it *seemed* high. I also feel like my abilities are generally on the higher end for these kinds of problems, but at the start (perhaps I was just tired) I felt dulled. Was I apathetic towards the problem? No, I still felt like I cared about it. I was more so content, so maybe boredom was the descriptor here? Not quite that either. Maybe worry or anxiety because I couldn't get the trick down in a quick manner despite guidance? That's possible, so the challenge was actually higher than I think. But the cool thing that happened was that I eventually took one different angle to look at the problem and figured it out instantaneously. Once I "got into the groove of things", I was able to enter a flow state and verify my angle of approach, and from there it was nice and easy.

So my thoughts on whether it's possible to achieve the state of flow in math classes is, short answer: yes. Of course it's possible, but it has to happen after the act of front-loading the abilities and knowledge has been done. In my cases, the complex learning processes and thinking was already done: I already learned how to wash rice after being taught how and countless cycles of practice; I already did my research and preparation so my critical thoughts could flow naturally during EDST 401, and in the case of the card magic trick, I couldn't get into the flow of things until I did all the front-loaded thinking. Thus, my belief is that in order for students to reach the flow state, it depends on how much front-loading is done such that students can enter an automatic process. To me, going from 0 to 1 is the hardest part that can almost never be expedited through a flow process, but from 1 to beyond it is a prime time for flow to happen. For us to create a situation where students can achieve a flow state, we as teachers need to provide them with the front-loading of tools, knowledge, and most importantly scaffolding such that they can fly on their own. 

I've seen it with myself when I was marking tests during my follow-up visit this past Tuesday; my SA predicted that it would take me a long time to mark just the first page of *multiple choice* questions, and he was sort of right. However, he was off about one thing: when was most of the wasted time happening when marking? Short answer: at the beginning, when I needed to front-load. In this case, I needed to front-load knowledge and understanding of various situations that may arise such that I don't flub my SA's established marking system. "The student showed no work and just guessed, but got it right. What do I give them?" Stuff like that. But once I had figured out all the situations that could arise (my STUCKs, if you will), I was able to enter a flow state of marking. I suspect that this is similar for students. As discussed in class on the SFU slide decks on flow, we as teachers need to scaffold our students such that they get past the thinking process while they actually have to do the thinking (versus being spoon-fed answers). Part of this is playing with the balance of challenge, which I feel is the most controllable part in the short-term. Such play would involve increasing the challenge (extensions, introducing doubt) or reducing it (altering group compositions, providing hints). It's stuff that I've done subconsciously during one-on-one interactions (my own teacher flow state?). Ability on the other hand is something that develops over time as students continue to experience success and mistakes in a mathematics class, including the flow states that they may enter. In general though, it seems that I agree mostly with the Csikszentmihalyi model of flow. Flow is productive as a learning tool because it helps combat plagues like learned helplessness (considering that flow is such a high agency state), but I do want to add that flow cannot come first. Flow needs to be built into, and that's where we as teachers come in. Flow is only a piece of the learning puzzle, and it cannot happen until zero becomes one.

(Add-on: I know that in English classes, something that teachers like to do is to get students to just write without pressing backspace or erasing anything or something like that. I feel like there's some kind of intended effect of getting kids into a flow state. Could something be similarly done in math where we instruct students to just "do math" without getting hung up on nitpicks and the like? Hmm.)