Daily Archives: June 6, 2012
Epic Ginormous Math Portrait… of me.
Okay, this was EPIC.
After the seniors graduated, I had about 2 weeks of class remaining, the only problem being that I still had three juniors to teach… I needed to do something with them, but pushing forward in a math curriculum didn’t make any sense. Instead, I wanted to do something fun and give them a chance to be creative and do something they could be proud of, so I proposed that we partake in some sort of epic math art project. I gave them tons of ideas from MArTH Madness at Saint Ann’s (and they loved the word MArTH), but they eventually decided on doing something completely different…
Behold the final product!
What is it? A ginormous mathy portrait of my face (if you were thinking about saying something snarky about me being egotistical or something, you’re too late, everyone in the math department has been ribbing me for a few weeks now, but I SWEAR they insisted on doing my face). It is 60 inches by 40 inches (yeah… I said ginormous) but it’s made of 1080 small pieces of paper that are 1.5 inches square. We colored each piece of paper individually using oil pastels and put a math symbol on each one then arranged them and glued them on a canvas. So it’s a math teacher’s face… made of math symbols. YESSS.
It looks better the further you walk away from it… here is a zoomed out version (feel free to squint too, if you are so inclined):
But it’s also pretty cool close up… here are some close up views:
The students finished it today while I was proctoring an exam, and left me this sweet note at the bottom – so nice! What a fun way to end the year. Now I just have to find an appropriate place at the school for a 5 foot tall picture of my face…
Goodbye Card for Seniors
I had a really rough two weeks or so with my seniors before they graduated. There was a lot of tension over stuff that needed to happen for class that wasn’t happening, and a lot of annoying things that I admittedly I was taking far more personally than they were meant. Taking inspiration from Sam’s annual senior letter (because basically half of the things I do are from Sam), and some of the nice ideas expressed in Elissa’s post about Seeking Your Own Compliments, I decided to write quick handwritten notes to all of my seniors to give us BOTH a chance to express how we really feel before they left. It was really fun because I got to reflect on my whole time with them and got some really sweet responses. Also, I love drawing and had a great time drawing this, and coloring it in with Photoshop! I should have done these on real paper, but I was too shy about giving them cards in person, so I made a pdf for each student and wrote on them with a pdf editor and emailed them. I’m too awkward for real life, as are many people in my generation.
Here it is:
(It’s a picture of me in front of my board, and in my speech bubble is the word “مبروك” which means “Congratulations!” in Arabic)
Bowman in Arabia 