Every actor has their moments when everything goes well.
When Macbeth tells the stars to hide their fires with his worried tone, eyes raised fearfully to the heavens, the audience catches a glimpse of his vulnerability before seeing utter resolve brought on by a lust for power; let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
The audience are entranced for that moment where the actor plays the part perfectly and the audience responds perfectly. We all have similar scenarios where, for a few seconds, everything is tuned to perfection and things couldn’t be better.
It only lasts for a moment.
Then it is gone. Before you have the time to savour the joy and triumph, time has ushered away those few seconds. You must stumble on in the wake of that wonderful moment.
Naturally, I think, we stumble on quite joyously!
We tend to be pretty pleased with ourselves and in fact stride on, head high, proud tone etc.
But certainly we will remember that moment and dance with its memory for a long time.
For me, the latest of these invaluable occasions took place in a Year 8 Trigonometry Class…
For those who have happily forgotten SOH CAH TOA or the relationships between angles & sin(ϑ); for those who would like a weird and wonderful way of teaching Trigonometry, I found a beautiful lesson plan for it online.
I began the lesson as requested in the plan and moved through the work as necessary:
- My youngsters did the measurements of their triangles as requested,
- They established the fractions (Opp/Hyp for instance) were the same for similar triangles,
- They seemed quite pleased that they only had to remember 3 numbers (for one particular triangle)…
- I informed the youngsters that it should be somewhat easy to recall 270 different values,
- I put the first 30 values on the board for degrees 1-10,
- They looked to me in terror, rage, misery (or a combination of the three).
The stage was set!
My heart was pounding in my excitement whilst the teacher observing grinned knowingly at the back of the class.
I asked someone to punch sin(3) into their calculators as well as tan(5).
Simultaneously I moved the presentation on to reveal sin(ϑ), cos(ϑ) and tan(ϑ) above their respective collumns.
A moment of silence passed while the kids looked to the board before the resounding:
“AWWW, I GETTIT!”, “Blummin ‘ell”, “Oh is that what it does?!”
The resounding relief and excitement hit me like a tone of bricks. SUCCESS! Now I sit here in joyous reflection of that moment where, from teacher to pupils, everything was in its rightful place. I continue in the wake of that moment teaching 12/13 year olds who know no more fear of the word that hounded us all in school: SOH CAH TOA.
Reflection on that lesson showed me the value of guiding pupils to see through the screen of “here’s what you need to know” into the cogs and wheels that make Mathematics. If I ever needed justification for teaching for understanding, Dan Pearcy provided it; many many thanks to himself for that!
It is now left to contemplate new ideas of teaching for understanding; not in all topics, but in those areas where our intuition with numbers aren’t quite enough to get us where we need to be! It is also left to entwine this success with festive cheer and make that my early Christmas present to myself!
Child of the Theatre 