Assignment 3 - Final Unit Plan

It is complete* -- the unit plan and 3 lesson plans!!!

• Unit Plan - Introduction to Polynomials, Mathematics 9
• Lesson #6 Plan - Math lab for Multiplying/Dividing Polynomials by Monomials
• Lesson #9 Plan - Presentation day for project: Funky Measurements Inquiry Project
• Lesson #10 Plan - Review lesson + whiteboard review activity

*If anyone has feedback, feel free to comment on the Google Docs linked above and I will address it accordingly. Otherwise, I am very happy with the lesson plans that I have written up... though they certainly took a lot of time! Of course, I feel that they took a long time because I felt that I cared a lot about them while doing them.

In any case, there are some pretty neat ideas in my opinion. Each lesson has something different:

• Lesson #6: A lab-style "lesson" where students are given reminders of definitions, and they have to extend off their prior knowledge into the skills and content being introduced
• Lesson #9: Presentation day for a small inquiry project where students use self-made units to estimate quantities, and make an artistic piece to represent their measurement polynomials
• Lesson #10: A review day before the unit test with a whiteboard activity where students teach each other, and a practice unit test homework handout

My current stance regarding my own materials is that I will not gatekeep anything; if you look at whatever materials I have and deem them suitable, feel free to use them. (Though if your SA asks, please do not credit yourself!)

Special thanks to:

• Sahl and Josh for giving initial feedback during the unit plan peer review class
• Jacob for providing feedback on making the project handout clearer
• Saiya for providing feedback on various aspects of Lesson #10 Plan

Assignment 3 - Unit Planning and Three Lesson Plans Draft

(As of this post being published, I have definitely not finished the assignment. However, I am putting this up here as the Google Docs are live documents, and I will eventually be done :) )

Link to unit plan document (document contains links to three lesson plans):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LMVGiBBkz0i1h072a9DPaTfg1haOnmSWh_NWfM8C2tQ/edit?usp=sharing

EDIT: The draft is complete!

Response to "Math textbooks and the way they may position their readers"

The reading this time describes how math textbooks position students based on the will of the author(s), and I would even add the curriculum. Prior to this teacher education program, I did not consider any of the aforementioned aspects of a textbook. All that mattered to me was whether or not the textbook that I was most certainly renting from the school (textbooks are expensive, people) was mostly intact and not scrawled on to death by my predecessors. If a textbook was in pristine condition and modern like every other textbook I grew accustomed to, it was all good. However, now that I've been pushed to think a little deeper about the textbooks in our students' hands, there are certainly new perspectives on how they are carefully designed to subtly sway the students to think about mathematics in a certain way, but also to sway how teachers do things. Although I have no proof, I suspect that despite teachers being paragons of critical thought and inspection, they are typically so busy that they would be susceptible to the conniving ways of the textbook authors. Yes, you "will" do mathematics this way. It is "certain" that the mathematics in the textbook you are looking at are in line with what the curriculum you to teach, so get to it! These are silly attempts at emulating the examples of high modality that were provided by the reading, but honestly the reading has a point -- there's a weird gaslighting effect at play here that I never considered deeply until now. Of course I wouldn't have as a student, because I was just so preoccupied with surviving and thriving that I placed my faith in the textbook in front of me, as well as the teacher who assigned and interpreted the textbook their own way. There are other examples along the same vein of gaslightery, whether it's through the imperatives used to guide a student's actions, the question figures that intend to inspire self-insertion, or explicitly telling students to think, discuss, and write about answers. Again, me as a former student did not consider this, so I'd consider the all-star line up of Math Makes Sense, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill Ryerson as very effective at embedding the gaslights.

As an aspiring teacher, I feel that the level of design focused on the authors' central goal of positioning students to do mathematics their way is at a similar level of intricacy as a casino. To digress a little bit, did you know that every aspect of a casino is designed with the goal of keeping their gamblers inside for as long as possible? There are no windows or clocks because they want to warp people's perception of time (seeing the sunlight peeking out is not ideal for business). The air circulation works optimally to ensure a good smell, and other design strategies are employed. Reading this article gave off that vibe of hyperintentionality.

Regarding the reasons for and against using textbooks: my general stance is that textbooks, like every other mathematics education resource (e.g. Khan Academy, Paul's Math Notes, a random YouTube tutorial series made by a kind and dedicated person with a heavy accent, mathsisfun.com -- you name it), can be useful provided that the teacher curates the things in there. If we're given nice templates, lesson examples, and practice questions to just tell the students to do without making printouts or spending hours crafting the perfect questions, why wouldn't we work off the shoulders of these textbook authors? That being said, I still think there is a sad dynamic where textbook authors spend months padding the living daylights out of a textbook with learning strategies, contexts and connections to real life and history, worked examples, colour coding, answer keys, formula sheets, practice questions, possible labs and project ideas yet 99% of teachers will likely avoid certain parts of a textbook with a 10-metre pole. When's the last time any of us actually flipped to a "Project Idea" in a math textbook because the teacher wanted us to do it? Maybe someone out there did it recently, but I don't remember ever doing it in my life. So while the textbook could be manipulative to students, this is based on the assumption that they are not being guided along by their teacher who is likely picking and choosing what parts of the textbook to subject their students to. Also consider the sheer length of the average textbook; I've been informed that they are getting shorter over time (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm mainly going off memory from lecture today), but even then I don't think any teacher is going to get through the whole thing within the time they are given... unless they were sadists.

If I were to surmise some counterpoints against using textbooks, they're mostly within the realm of "be cautious" and not "don't use them". This is addressed above for the most part, but I'll also add that many of these textbooks are 1) old, and 2) are written by people from multiple provinces, both of which contribute to a dissonance of standardization with the actual curriculum being taught now. These textbooks typically have copyrights that go back to the era of traditional mathematics education, yet we have all these fancy new BC curricular things to worry about. So the note of caution here is that while we can use textbooks, our job as teachers is to be ever so vigilant about how to translate it into the curriculum at hand. Another deterrent to textbook usage is also cost; if the school's ability to procure books is at direct odds with other financial demands on the school, then there are school-specific tradeoffs to consider.

I also found it interesting that UBC's mathematics department, at least for calculus I to IV and I believe the proofs course, have started making their own online textbooks. This shows that the role of textbooks is becoming more prevalent as a vehicle to guide how teachers/departments want to teach material, but I suspect there is also a recognition that 1) the monopoly on textbooks has gone on too long, 2) syncing up the textbook with what is actually being taught is important, and 3) textbooks are still important and desirable in many schooling contexts as a resource and vehicle for learning. I completely agree with these sentiments, and if I have the time and energy to make a free, open-source mathematics textbook and resource hub for BC math teachers, I would definitely do so in an attempt to give the textbook industry a major wake-up call. Finally, while there is a trend of textbooks becoming increasingly depersonalized and decontextualized, that really just translates to more work for teachers... like myself. I can't say I enjoy that aspect of the recent textbook developments, but there is a nice benefit of teacher autonomy here where we can decide the personalization and contextualization for the students.

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.)

Response to "Giant Soup Can Puzzle"

Sources used to fill in missing information gaps:

• Campbell's Soup Can dimensions:
• https://www.walmart.com/ip/Campbell-s-Condensed-Tomato-Soup-10-75-oz-Can/10321636?classType=VARIANT&athbdg=L1600
• Fire needed to put out an average house fire
• https://medium.com/@kiserdigitalmarketing/how-much-water-is-used-to-put-out-a-fire-fa075607bfb6
• Google Maps Street View location of the water tank
• https://maps.app.goo.gl/FMbeH7TSFNy9AeTi7
• Upper bounds on housing square footage
• https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/mapping-the-million-how-much-home-can-1m-buy-in-major-real-estate-markets-across-canada-869168725.html#:~:text=The%20average%20home%20in%20Canada%20valued%20between%20%241%2C950%2C000%20and%20%242%2C050%2C000,inclusive%20of%20all%20property%20types.
• Google Lens was used as a starting point to decide the dimensions of an average woman's bicycle tire dimensions.

The scratch work:

Here, I was trying to figure out the wire mesh of the can in case there were any considerations to make regarding the true volume. A can may be cylindrical, but the dents could've warped the volume of the tank. I used Street View to make sure that the dents were not too big, and there were no backside perspectives of the can, so I chose to assume that everything was plain cylindrical there.

Here, I attempted to identify any camera curvatures that would affect my calculations. There was a slight perspective curvature as you went towards the right side (it would get further away), so I was mindful of that when using the tire's diameter to measure.

Here comes the big consolidation. I realized that the perspective's effect wasn't too consequential for the vertical measuring with bike tires. In any case, this is when I used Google Lens to get an idea of how wide the bike tires would be, and 26" seemed to be the general consensus average among women's bikes. I also realized that since the proportions are the same, it's a lot easier to just take the vertical dimension in the image instead of the horizontal one because it was warped less by camera perspective. Coupled with the proportions of a Campbell's Soup Can, I found that the diameter was about 94.9" and the horizontal measure was about 143.2".

(The red comes second. Chronologically, I wrote the yellow first.)

This is when I answered the rest of the questions: 1) The volume was 16100.4L or 4253.3 gallons, which was the more usable unit unfortunately because the website where I found the water demand formula was in American units. How thematic, considering that the fate of the world (America) is being decided tomorrow. In any case, the final answer shows that there is so much more water than is needed according to the numbers that even if it's a particularly bad fire, or if the tank's dents affected the volume more than by 3%, the tank would have more than enough water to put out an average house fire.

For my student bird perspective on getting stuck, I would say the comments I wrote in the images should suffice. Many of my stuck moments stemmed from me aiming for perfection in my measurements, which resulted in painstaking experiments and analyses with image processing tools and other meticulous overboard measures. Some stuckness can also be attributed to how it took surprisingly long to find sources for the missing numbers; I did not expect it to take that long to find non-volume based measurements of a Campbell's can despite thinking that it should be pretty common practice to include.

For my teacher bird perspective, I found that I was getting caught up on too many perfectionist-level details and that I should've just relaxed and fallen back on easier estimates. I feel like there was a brute force approach at first by going for every single possible analytical strategy, when in fact there was a much easier way that would've saved me a lot of time (such as ignoring the camera perspective warps and using more reliable measures from the get-go). I also found that I learned from this a little too late at the end, when I decided to just approximate the effects of the denting on the volume to save time which might've ended up being the better choice than being hyper-meticulous with the dimensions of the water tank warpages. The research was still done in good spots as I had little knowledge of the exact proportions of the can or the amount of water needed to put out a house fire, as well as the average house's square footage, so there are no qualms there. Estimating based on what I've seen from multiple sources was also a good choice in the effort-reward tradeoff. Would it really be worth making a whole mesh frame and analyzing volumes to the smallest pixel? Probably not. Let's just fall back on the average down-to-earth human strategy of estimation instead.

In terms of extending the puzzle, the idea is relatively simple: instead of asking if the water tank can hold enough water to put out an average house fire, why not put the scope of the question into the personal side of things? Inspired by a Numeracy Assessment question that my EDCP 441 professor showed us, I would ask either:

1. Does the tank supports their current household water usage for a given timeframe? If not, what is the plan to reduce their water usage such that they can use the tank for the timeframe, or how many tanks would be needed?
2. How long would the tank support their current household water usage? 
3. How many tanks would be needed to support the water usage of all of BC?

The idea behind these questions is to inspire the students to think about their own water consumption, which adds an extra element of searching within one's self. While they still have to search things such as how much water an appliance would use, they would need to assess the amount of water that they personally use which cannot be searched up anywhere on the Internet. Alternatively, they can answer based on a classmate's water consumption, which would open up dialogue and extend the skill development to include listening and assessing, all while putting the students in the shoes of an assessment officer giving advice to a family on their water usage. The question can also be narrowed down to a specific form of water use (how long could you run the shower for) as well.

(For another extension idea, we can ask students how many specific shapes would fit inside the space of the container. The dents would add an extra layer of complexity, and students cannot simply fall back on the total volume calculation or simple distance measures. Perhaps one of these shapes could be Campbell's soup cans and we could have a can-ception.)

Response to "Arbitrary and Necessary Part 1"

In this article, Dave Hewitt describes his thoughts on the "arbitrary" and "necessary" sides of mathematics education. From what I could gather, "arbitrary" is concerned with the things being taught that are spawned out of thin air, such as terminology, conventions, notation, and other similar abstractions. As someone who is a big fan of standardization as a means to get everyone on the same page, and abstraction to condense ideas and hide messy implementation details "under-the-hood" (similar to abstraction in a computer science sense), I feel that there is an equal amount of value with the idea of abstraction. I appreciate the article for eventually acknowledging that students will likely benefit more from learning and memorizing arbitrary mathematics content for many of the same reasons that I believe: it is a top-down issue of how people have communicated in mathematics for the longest time. While Hewitt goes on about how memorizing is not doing mathematics, I would argue that it is a key set-up step that allows for a richer, more successive form of mathematics. In terms of "necessary" math content, this is likely akin to the whole "progressive-relational-Lockhart-y" form of mathematics that makes up the other side of the grand spectrum of mathematics curricula. I didn't think that there was another way to expand on that further, but here we are. In any case, I see this as being a little more important, mainly because the process of awareness is one so integral to mathematical thinking. To have students thinking is a recurring theme lately with all this talk around Thinking Classrooms, and there are certainly benefits of being more independent learners and deeper thinkers in not just a mathematical context, but also as lifelong learners.

The article's second half goes into ideas on how to think about the arbitrary and necessary when planning one's teaching. For me, I can at least say for sure that there needs to be an interplay -- a dance -- between both of these things. Don't get me wrong; I still believe in promoting the necessary aspect of things, and that students should be taught how to fish instead of being given the fish. If they are given the fish, they should spend a bit of time reflecting on how the fish got there before feasting away, though many people will likely just take the fish and think later or never. That being said, sometimes a fish is needed in the immediate moment. Along that line, I think that it is worth exploring this dance of arbitrary and necessary a bit more as I plan my lessons and units. With every unit in the new BC curriculum, there still exists a wide plethora of terminology and conventions that students have to get comfortable with. I feel that it is okay to impose these on students, AS LONG AS they are given the time and space to truly wrestle with what they represent, and why the conventions are the way they are. This would be one type of activity or exercise that goes into my own lessons -- the idea of getting students' feet wet so they can get a real grasp of the arbitrary, so that they may come up with their own. The reading mentions that arbitrary knowledge can be made in multiple ways with "students making up their own" being one, which I feel is worth exploring in a lesson. In a previous EDUC 450 blog post of mine, I went into a possible activity where students could make up their own *arbitrary* terminology, and I still think that it has merit as an activity where students got to contribute something to the mathematics community while applying necessary thinking. To sum up what I am saying in this paragraph, the article has mostly reinforced my existing beliefs that there needs to be a bit of both in order to have a rich and meaningful educational experience for students. The main *new* element to my planning is really to just ensure that this is the case by providing outlets for necessary thinking while establishing the matter-of-fact of the arbitrary.

One last thing that I thought about was the order of arbitrary and necessary teaching. I have arranged the possible orders into three types:

1. Pre-Necessary: Explain the arbitrary knowledge and wisdoms before getting students to think and be aware, in order to set a foundation first.
2. During-Necessary: When we allow students to work through ideas on their own or when we explore ideas together, arbitrary knowledge can be illuminated as the situations arise.
3. Post-Necessary: We give students and ourselves the freedom to explore and work out the necessaries, and then illuminate what we have discovered using the arbitrary terms.

Personally I am a fan of the first strategy just because it is how things were always done traditionally and I'm admittedly most comfortable with it. There is also a benefit of letting the students be aware of the conventions/terminology/notations first, and then allowing them to immerse themselves with expanding further on them to generate necessary mathematics in a beautiful dance of the established and the unexplored. In fact, this is something I did for a lesson on solving trigonometric equations with identities: I provided advice to keep in mind (arbitrary), but gave students the chance to discover why exactly the advice would be useful in their exploration of the questions of the chapter. However, there is merit in the other strategies; they opt to not bog down students with the memorization details and choose to prioritize a more experiential form of learning new ideas. There are lesson and unit implementations that can follow a Thinking Classroom, lab-like way of discovery-first by encouraging students to think and be aware together to notice patterns, and then consolidating what they have discovered afterwards. I would say that none of these things should be done in a full 0% or 100% manner, but it would be wise to consider which order applies best for the lesson/unit at hand.

Small edit: I also see many teachers leaving certain things for formula sheets. This is another implementation of arbitrary teaching that curbs the mental load of memorization, which I've found that no one really objects to. Especially in an age of instantaneous information, it does feel a bit silly if we have to dock points from students for having to search up matter-of-fact information that could've been a Google search away (as opposed to being critical with the process where they use this matter-of-fact information). Thus, the article has influences on how I separate the "need to know on the test" with the "it will be on the formula sheet"; with the sheet, we can ask richer questions and students can spend more time on being aware instead of being bogged down by trivia.

Pro-D Day Reflection

On the October 25, 2024 Pro-D day, I went to the Computer-Using Educators of BC conference at Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam. I will be reflecting in the order of the workshops that I attended. A small screenshot with the CUEBC website's description will be included under each section of this reflection.

For anyone wanting to see the Google Doc of resources surrounding generative AI, the link is: http://bit.ly/bccue-ai

A. Keynote: Harnessing the Power of AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges

Funnily enough, when I walked into the cafeteria/stage area that this was hosted in, I met with Erica (442 TA) and we had a chat to catch up about how my practicum was coming along. All I will say here is that my practicum is going smoothly, but it has certainly been a lot. I didn't realize that it would make me crash at my desk at 8PM, but it seems like something I'd have to adapt to if I want to keep this teaching thing up!

Anyways, this keynote was basically about AI tools, with some minor coverage on the advantages and disadvantages of AI as well as possible considerations. A variety of generative AI tools were presented, including language models that could answer questions and synthesize writing, image generation, audio generation, even video generation, and more. The recurring theme in this keynote presentation was how far generative AI has come, and there is an important distinction that AI as a whole has been with us for a long time now -- even things like "the algorithm" on a social media site are considered AI, but the difference is that generative AI, well, generates products.

Going into this keynote presentation, I already had my opinions on AI. Since I considered myself a bit of an artist and immersed myself a bit with the online art community, I was naturally adverse to the idea of AI. I also had a weird sense of pride that would stop me from AI tools at all. I also had concerns about the ethics of AI especially due to my artistic background, and the environmental impacts of generative AI were just extra icing on the negative perception cake that I had baked. That being said, I also had a belief that if the AI tool was trained ethically, I would have no issues with its usage. I also knew that it was becoming more and more prevalent, and that I would need to adapt to its existence.

I had a bit of a mixed reception to the presentation because of these opinions that I had going in. When the presenter demonstrated ChatGPT and other language-based AI tools, I didn't feel too strongly about it, but I could see the time-saving intent that they were trying to go for. As someone who has to do a million readings for this teacher education program, I know that there is a usefulness to summarizing a long paper. However, I think even after witnessing what these models could do, I would still like to keep my senses sharp and see-to-believe instead of letting the AI do the information processing for me, lest it misses vital information.

The presenter was also particularly enthusiastic in bringing up the media-generation side of generative AI, which was probably the source of most of my surprise. While yes, AI generated images are progressing, there is still a weird air of inauthenticity that I feel was underaddressed by the presenter. It was surprising to me to see everyone in the audience so... accepting? of the AI-generated images being shown to them, because to my eye, the images had this glossiness and sloppiness to them. The presenter asked the AI program to create a slide deck for cell mitosis, showed the poster for 5 seconds to the audience with a "this looks legitimate!" tone, and continued.

All this being said, I did like that the presenter was mindful of the issues surrounding generative AI usage. He was very adamant in communicating to us that generative AI should be a tool to save time and provide inspiration, but not to replace the process completely (which also came up in the first workshop I visited). He also communicated the scarier implications of the technology by using Grok to generate a picture of Donald Trump stealing Cheetos from a grocery store and highlighting the possibility that these images could be used to fabricate incriminating evidence of people (whether this specific example is comparable is in the air, but the point still stands if we consider the velocity that generative AI is taking).

Moving forward, I don't think I will be using generative AI tools simply because I think that a) people have gotten along fine without using these tools, including myself; b) I still don't think they are completely reliable, especially in terms of media-generation (and I think media-generation misses the point of creating media entirely, which is our human expression; I am aware that prompt engineering is a practice with some creativity, but the degree of agency given to the machine is far too much for my tastes); and c) personal pride-related disincentives. However, I realize that people will be using them more and more, so as an educator I would like to guide people in using these tools not as product generators, but as things to be considerate of, maybe save some time, and assist in the processes.

B. Workshop 1: AI in the Classroom

Since this workshop covers many of the topics from the keynote that came before, I will try to keep this section short. 

I feel that this workshop was much more agreeable because it took on a more considerate approach to generative AI in a school setting. It was explicitly stated at the start that this workshop will not give us AI tools to try, but instead get us to think critically about their place in our schools. My favourite part of this workshop was that it stuck to its thesis that generative AI is here to stay, it is advancing, and we need to be able to navigate it and use it with consideration. By following this central idea, the workshop went into the strengths of generative AI (saving time, translations, information synthesis, and providing ideas that our own human imagination can bounce off of) and the limitations (its lack of empathy and authentic emotions, contextual understanding, ethical thinking). I especially liked the idea that "AI is product-based, but learning is a process", because it's true! Generative AI shouldn't be used to skip the process of learning which many students may feel tempted to do, but at the same time they can provide products that we can take advantage of as long as we are critical of the input that is provided. Other ideas I liked were the ideas of being transparent and public with AI usage.

Surprisingly, many guardians of children were not aware of their children using generative AI, how they used it, or how they learned to use it. This played into the ideas of urgency that the presenter had -- essentially, he encouraged us as educators to be part of the AI teaching process. At the very least as a follow-up, I would see myself having deep thinking sessions on what acceptable AI use is in my class and school and being very clear and transparent about their use. If AI is used, it has to be communicated. The biggest part of such a policy is that "banning AI use would not work well", because it's as effective as a social media ban in schools -- the kids will still use them when they're home and not under the rules of school, so the best policies surrounding AI usage address their acceptability where it can be controlled, and educate students so that their AI use is optimal for learning, not to replace learning.

C. Workshop 2: eSports in Schools

I'm a little biased because of my volunteering background being almost 75% in high school esports, so this workshop was probably my favourite. The workshop was centered around esports in schools (as the title implies), and covered topics such as: how the presenter got started in SD43 and Pinetree, the goals of high school esports, possible games, benefits, considerations, and possible competitions.

A lot of this knowledge I already knew going in because I did a lot of the same work -- esports is a form of equity addressing by providing students who can't play traditional sports a chance at the same benefits of sports, community building, etc. -- but the one thing that I learned was that the organization PlayVS (esports league organizers for North America) has improved greatly since my time volunteering. During my time, the company was run by a for-profit CEO who tried to do some nasty things like claim exclusive rights to running competitions for certain games and charging exorbitant fees for poorly run leagues. This was the impression I had of PlayVS going into this presentation, but I was incredibly happy and surprised to hear that they have improved the past couple years! They switched CEOs to a more non-profit-oriented CEO who made the leagues free and allowed teams to play either from home or school (which is very important, because many schools may have hardware, logistical, or admin-side issues), as opposed to forcing teams to play from school like before. They also improved their matchmaking system, so teams don't have to go through the frustrating experience of constantly getting teams that were consistently no-shows, or getting teams way above their level multiple times in a row.

The presenter and I also knew each other because of our lines of work, so we had some fun conversations about going forward. The idea is that I want to work on esports at my practicum school Killarney, but the main challenge is that none of the students stepped up to succeed the club from last year. From this workshop, I got ideas on how to reach out to students, and I hope to advertise through the housekeeping moments of my lessons on practicum, and seeing if I can put any "contact me here!" posters on the bulletin boards and other announcement channels that the school may have to offer. I have some ideas for what the club can do, and I aim to bring the joy of esports back to my practicum school. (It's also a nice way to get involved in the school in a way that I already have expertise and passion in.)

Side note: I also learned that I simply could not compete against the presenter, Aaron Lu, in Street Fighter 6. My main game is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but in this one I wasn't able to get a single game off (though I did come close a few times, which is great because he's been playing SF his whole life).

D. Workshop 3: Make MYEd your hero: Thinking about assessment and making your teacher life easier

This workshop was centered around MYEd, the infamous teaching platform where report cards are communicated, attendances are checked, seating plans are made and remade, and more. I went into this workshop because I wanted to learn a bit more about how it works, but to my surprise, it was a workshop where actually having access to MYEd (on a laptop, perhaps) would make the workshop have the most value. While I felt out of place in the first half where the presenter showed us cool tricks with the comment bank, the next topic was far more interesting for me because the idea behind that was on moving away from MYEd.

In the first half of the workshop, the presenter showed us some tricks on making report card commenting more efficient. The main ideas were: a) Using {{...}} codes in your comment bank items, such as {{person.firstName|capitalize}}; b) Categorizing your stored comments for easier access; and c) Combining stored comments into a single comment. While I couldn't get a hands-on feel for these tricks, I could see them being useful if I have to write report card comments for up to 120 different students. Of course, I liked that there was a clear disclaimer given to us: we HAVE to double check what we pull from the comment bank, especially if we use {{...}}s in the stored comments. For example, maybe a student had a data entry error and inputted the wrong thing in the pronoun field. If they accidentally put "them/they", your auto-generated comment could come out like "Them were being very helpful in class. I would recommend this course of action for they." That being said, I could certainly see myself using these tricks, because while I knew about {{...}} codes from other contexts, I didn't think they could be used in report card comments.

As for the second half of the workshop, I found the topic far more interesting and applicable for me because it covered one of my favourite topics: assessment. What I took away and want to experiment with as I proceed in my teaching career is this trifecta of triangulation between observations, products, and conversations to assess. The idea is that products are usually what are put on the MYEd mark book, and the reality is this: for each quiz, test, exam, exit slip, homework check, etc. that goes on the mark book, there is a fairly substantial time and energy cost to the teacher. Are there better ways to assess authentically while reducing the cost to the teacher? Some may argue that the traditional method of marks-gathering assessment is easier (usually because they're more used to it), but I could definitely see merit in a more active approach to assessment. In fact, because my SA's are more traditional in their assessment, I want to immerse myself in that style of assessment to truly experience (experiential learning!) the pros and cons. 

Another idea I want to explore (possibly in my long practicum) is the idea of student-focusing the mark book as opposed to assignment-focusing. Instead of sorting products (like tests and assignments) by assignment types and labels, I liked the idea of a portfolio. The idea is to sort products by student instead, so that when you need to get evidence of their learning when everyone inevitably asks "what's this student's mark", it's a lot easier because the file is right there! The file could also contain on-the-fly observations during things like class activities, and altogether reduce the amount of time you spend crunching marks into MYEd. In other words, the less time you spend on MYEd and the mark book, the more time you save yourself, and the more authentic assessment becomes. The main concern is that I'd need to get a folder for every single student-course combo that I have to teach, but hopefully the office supplies hoard can alleviate that a bit. All in all, the presenter's ideas and beliefs sounded a lot like what my mathematics assessment professor, Kevin, believed in.

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Aside from everything I've typed out, I would say that this was a very productive Pro-D day for me! Sadly, I did not win anything from the end-of-conference giveaway draw (which included an iPad), but the people were nice and the lasagna lunch was surprisingly scrumptious. We also got some swag, which included a USB-C and A charging bay and a flat pouch with multiple compartments. I also want to note that I dressed up way too nicely for this conference; I arrived in my practicum outfit consisting of a button-up collared shirt and nice pants, but I really had to look to find someone else who dressed like me. Everyone else was in their most comfortable look, with hoodies, t-shirts, sweats, and all that. This is certainly something I will keep in mind for subsequent Pro-D day conferences, because I'll say it: I do NOT like dressing nicely if I don't have to. (That being said, I recognize the fact that I'm a student teacher who may need to make impressions. As such, it wasn't a completely wasted decision to dress up for this occasion.)