I've been kind of stressing myself out over the upcoming CMC South Conference and the fact that I am presenting by myself for the first time (twice in the same day, mind you). I am a different teacher now than I was when I submitted those proposals, and I want to offer the best of my knowledge and experiences. So... I wound up changing everything at the last minute.
I actually do that all the time for my lessons too. I plan out everything - sometimes I even have made copies of things ahead. Then I get an idea or someone challenges my thinking and I have to go and change things at the last minute. I mean, I actually like that I'm willing to be flexible, but the fact that I can't just let things be sometimes is actually very annoying... Especially when I am a busy type of person and I have deadlines looming and piles of unfolded laundry and I didn't clean the bathroom this week and somehow I need to figure out how to get my 8th graders through 3 days of subs without losing too much mathematical momentum and I'm trying to ignore the fact that I'm kind of freaking out about presenting in 6 days and I think you get the picture.
It's funny. I showed some of the Jo Boaler videos to my math students at the beginning of the year and we had discussions about fast vs. deep mathematical thinkers. I am definitely one of the latter - I can't really take action on something until I see it from various angles and understand it and come to my own conclusions about where I think I should head. But once I get my mind wrapped around something, I can power out a ton of stuff. The problem is that I don't know a "fast" way to get to the point where I'm ready to be the work horse.
So... When I had my thinking challenged and found new ideas and resources and awesome people doing awesome things, I had to update my "mental model." This meant that all of the ideas that I had planned out for presenting suddenly were in flux and I wasn't sure where I was going to wind up. So after getting a TON of stuff together over the summer and feeling pretty sure of things in terms of my presentations, I suddenly had this ridiculous need to change it all around to match my updated (and still changing) view of what mathematics education should be. BUT, since it's still changing, I was feeling kind of paralyzed about how to move forward.
Well, today I decided that I was going to keep the best from the past, add in what new stuff I could already wrap my mind around, and ask the audience for the rest. I will admit, the idea seemed crazy at first, but I was realizing that 90 minutes is really not a very long time, and I want so much for the experience I offer for my attendees to actually fill a need for them. If I pre-determine every little thing, I don't think that's really possible. So I made my spiel, created an example to demonstrate, and then I'm going to poll the audience and go where they take me. Hopefully my audience is awesome so my presentation can be awesome too :)
