I have been watching a lot of TSN this weekend, which is strange for me as I am not a sports person at all, and come from a family whose TSN channel was almost never on. However, my sport of choice is Curling. I have been watching for as long as I can remember, and it was a special thing between my mum and myself. Even now, we have gone travel to watch bigger bonspiels and volunteer at the national events. It is something that we share and we both love, even though neither of us curl.
This weekend is the opening weekend of the World Women’s Curling Championships, in Riga, Latvia. My DTVR is set to record all the games, as the time difference makes the time the games are shown live at times that do not work well in my schedule…and I am not so die-hard that I will wake up in the middle of the night.
Also this weekend is the finals of the World Figure Skating Championships. I was a figure skater as a kid and through my teen years, but had to quit due to an injury. I haven’t watched figure skating in a few years, but watching it this week and weekend has brought back wonderful memories and I am in awe of the grace, beauty, and talent that these men and women have.
Looking at both of these sports, they are infused with math and physics. Thinking along those lines, there is a lot of those subjects in other sports-for instance, trajectory in basketball and raquet sports, angles in sports such as hockey and soccer. Why can’t we use these sports in conjunction with our math and science classes? There are numerous possibilities, and taking what was learned in the classroom then applying it to practice while playing the sports, or even more simply just use that knowledge to analyze games that we watch. I think doing something like that would really help the students understand the concepts, after getting a chance to prove that by living it.
I think back to my high school physics, when we studied trajectory, we talked a lot about rockets and such. While that is cool, if we took it into the gym and applied what we knew about trajectory to badminton, we would have such a better feel for it and it would literally be in our bodies.
I find that teaching music, the best way to get students to feel the beat is for them to physically show it: tapping feet, snapping, patting their lap. Why can’t we use that strategy in other subjects? Give the kinesthetic learners in our math classes a chance to apply their use of angles in a game of billiards, finding the best angles to complete the shot.
Maybe it is a radical idea, but personally, I love the idea of bringing in another way to understand and get an intrinsic feel for what we are learning.
Musings 