Flow

 From my experience, when people see high interest, high value matching their world view, truth that worth knowing, challenge that matches and tests their skills in doing something they are into it. They are willing to spend time and energy into it. According to TedTalk, it is not that income and living standard, but it is something meaningful and worth doing for the person. It is ecstasy or a state of the person’s mind that transports the person into alternative reality. It is a completely engaging process in which the person sees creating a new thing. According to Peter Liljedahl’s presentation at SFU (Engaging students, understanding flow, 2015), there are nine items involved in the state of ‘flow’ in which a person is completely engaged and delighted. These are:

1. There is clear goal every step

2. There is immediate feedback on one’s action

3. There is balance between challenge and skill

4. Attention is focused on one’s action

5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness

6. There is no worries of failure

7. Self-consciousness disappears

8. The sense of time becomes distorted

9. The activity becomes satisfying in its own right

In teaching math, teachers can take part in dialogue with students on the world we live in, the society humans have built out of natural resources and the planet, the villages, towns, trades, transportations, necessary skills needed to contribute to work and earn, and sports, arts and so on. We will see that math can be found in almost every component. That way, teachers can establish interests in students. 

Students have their family and friend circles or communities. They grow up in certain neighbourhoods in which there are also works. Therefore, students may already have some interests. Or students can be interested in some other works they found in movies, the Internet or from someone. Teachers need to be well rounded, mature, or able to learn the subject matter of student interest in relatively shorter time. 

Teachers then ask the topics of interest of high value of the students. After getting a list of topics of interests, students are asked to rate their interest on a scale to each of the topics. That creates an interest level (1-5) table like this.

Teachers can declare that there would be a certain number of projects (3 or 4) to be undertaken in the semester. So the class would use the table and vote for the project topics. On each project teachers carefully plan the start point, possible process and ending so that the level of challenge is appropriate to the class, and design the project question based on the students’ inputs. Teachers also explain to the class about the concept of ‘flow’ ahead. Students will participate in keeping the project process within their challenge boundary without losing goal in each step. Students participation is important to let them keep themselves in ‘flow’.

Or the class can be divided into two or more subgroups working on different projects of interest to the sub-groups. This sub-group method could make the project and level of challenge more suitable to each sub-group. 

It is also important for teachers to discuss with the students that we as humans living on the planet earth (which is not our design and construction) can face any event in our life. Some events we have gone through in our life can be not our interest but we have to face it. So it is necessary to raise the issue that students need to be able to solve the problems of not only their interest, but also other problems.