Sept. 19 Exit Slip - Colouring and Quanitifying Nature

Today in the garden, we tried to match colour palettes to natural elements of the Orchard Garden. I found this activity fascinating because of how my expectations of colour contrasted with reality. I'd take a few green paint chips from the pile that I thought would match leaves, vines, and grass, but I found that as soon as I put up the sample, it didn't capture the same essence. I realized that colour was only part of the appearance, and depth, shadow, and finish also had a role. My attention was also drawn to the variation of colour within the same natural elements -- different leaves I observed probably contained dozens of green hues. There is a deeper metaphor in this activity of the futility of categorizing or quantifying nature.

This idea of quantification as a Western utilitarian tendency has been at the forefront of my mind this week. In another class, we heard the example of one school teaching kids to count trees instead of tiles and calling this an Indigenous way of learning. This struck me as utterly ridiculous because all it did was take Western ways of knowing and map them onto the natural world. It was a superficial and unsubstantive approach to integrating Indigeneity into a Math classroom, but I think it's a trap that many new teachers might fall into. Today, my own bias towards quantification arose when I thought how much easier it would be to determine the exact colour with a hex-code calculator.

In that line of thinking, I began the thought process for my own class activity that would have students quantitatively and qualitatively analyze natural things. For example, they might want to get the exact colour code or take a physical measurement, but then I'd also ask them to describe the colour, appearance, and size of the object in qualitative terms. Afterwards, I would look forward to hearing which approach resonated more with them, evoked different emotions, and felt more worthwhile.