My sense of our emergent narrative over the past month is:
(1) what happens in school is often "schooly" and (with Steve's insight that that's a term worth pursuing) we've worked on what we think this means and have a few ways of thinking about it, but my favorite is the idea: "I'm learning what someone else wants me to know." And, I'd add, providing answers that someone else finds reasonable. It's a kind of performance of someone else's goals. And, with some caveats, this is not what we want school to be.
(2) we thought then about the Bakhtin quote and what words feel like a "performance" of sorts - not really "our" words. (natural log, e, curl, entropy, genus, etc.) - and there were a range of categories (which we represented as emojis), but most interesting to me: these are words we can use for a test and in class, but they don't feel like they are our own. (related): there's a disconnect between the word and any ability to use it in another setting. ('why would i use natural log?')
(3) I suggest that one of the ways we get students out of this "schooly" game is to engage students in puzzles. (I used the analogy to the infield fly rule, and those in our class who understood it were all the same as those people who play baseball; I argue that playing the game is part of being able to understand its concepts.) That is, we don't teach students about ln and practice using it, we get students involved in a puzzle that has, perhaps, ln as its solution. In class, I tried to set up puzzles that get at those ideas. (draw all the kinds of currents that might make a paddle spin; sketch a function where the derivative of the function is also the value of the function (and if you're stuck, start with a function that crosses (1,1)); and then "if 2 has one 2 in it, and 4 has two 2s and 8 has three 2s..., sketch the function for the number of twos in a number...")
(4) from this came the question of "what's a puzzle" (posed by Steve, who always finds the right question) - and the answer (posed by Steve after a lot of discussion) is kind of genius I think - a puzzle is anything that you find worth solving. Don't care about solving? Not a puzzle. (a little aside: I want to push against the idea that - say - "for inner city students to learn about physics you should have them write rap songs, b/c writing rap songs is a fun puzzle to those kinds of kids." -- While I am aware of how complex rap can be, I want it to be the kind of puzzle that has, in its solution, some piece of fascinating content. So I said something like "it's tempting to think this means...")
(5) but from there we became intrigued by "worth solving" -- with competing claims that might not be so different -- With crosswords as the context (something I love to do) some said "but you don't actually care about the solution" and "you wouldn't accept $5 for someone to give you the answer" (what I like is solving, I don't care about the answer.) Others argued that I *do* care about the answer -- it's the pursuit of the answer that drives me. Steve suggested that what you want is to succeed in some kind of rule-governed activity ( I think "rule - governed" just means that 'success' is somehow defined?) ... but I think it's something other than / in addition to / maybe the same as that. It's the idea of vexation. I think vexation implies care about solving / finding resolution -- but I'm not sure that it means "I like playing the game required to reach that solution." but maybe it does mean "I'm willing to work to figure out the solution."
(I remember a student, Dee, saying something about how frustrating our class was at times - because, I would say, she deeply cared about getting the answer; and I remember the students in a different semester really wanting to know what the rule was for how light would bend when it entered a material and I said something like "they're doing a lab on just this thing today in physics" and they were like "we have to run over there and ask them! - TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW!" and I said "you know they don't even think what they are learning is interesting??")
