Nov. 21 Exit Slip - Inquiry Update + Dividing by 0

The end of term is fast approaching and I am very overwhelmed! In the next 16 school days, I have 12 projects/assignments to complete, including 3 unit plans, 2 group presentations, and 3 individual presentations. I think this is what they refer to as "crunch time." As such, my inquiry project is in the early stages. I have collected many scholarly sources, but I've just started individually reviewing them. I'm also realizing I have no "non-scholarly" sources so I'll have to remedy that soon. My sources seem to be taking me in a new direction. My keywords when searching for sources were Indigenous pedagogies and slow pedagogies, favouring sources about math classrooms. So far, these sources are centred around Indigenizing math content rather than the first five minutes of class, as I had previously stated in our video. However, I have many more articles to read, and I'll update this post (or perhaps make another post) when I've settled on a concrete and final question that will be the subject of my presentation. 

In class today, we looked at dividing by zero. Strangely, I realized that I had never been taught in concrete terms why I couldn't divide by zero until I reached Calculus 12 and first learned about limits. What a significant gap in my education! I didn't end up writing a poem but I'll include some interesting excerpts from my free write.

Divide: 

    "Division undoes multiplication"

• This concept of "undoing" is interesting to me and was the crux of Susan's first explanation. 

    "No overlap. No interaction. No crossover."

• Here, I'm almost hinting at asymptotes, which is pretty cool!

Zero:

    "A zero-sum game"

• It's interesting that my first linguistic thought of 'zero' is from mathematical game theory...

    "Zero - an absence. But even silence can be heard."

• I related this to the empty part of the growth near the origin of y=1/x. It's a gap, but really, it's the most interesting part of the graph!