Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Revisionist History

For some reason I think of my brother when I say that term.  Probably because we had many conversations based on that.  Both of us incensed that school text books would be written with anything other than the "truth".

Well, I am in the middle of a project with Tangle.  I decided to see how methodical I could get with my teaching, how dedicated to every detail I would be, and video the whole journey.  At periodic intervals I would put together an edited video of our progress so that I could look back and see what changes there were.





So tonight I was reviewing our video from a couple of days ago and was thinking about how well that session went.  So, I decided to look back on all 7 milestone videos and see if I still thought there was progress or not.  I was thinking that we had made some strides, I was thinking that I started at a certain place in the instruction.

!! Revisionist History !!

So the "truth" according to the video is mostly that I had wiped out of my brain some of the experimentation that I did at the beginning.  Glad I had video, it is good to remember that I was gathering data in the first session or two to see where the skills were.  Made me appreciate exactly how unskilled certain things were compared to a month later.  Made me feel silly that I remembered things differently :)  (we all do, we are human, need to allow myself to be that eh?)

So glad that I am keeping a video diary of sorts with this project.  Keeps my revisionist history to a minimum, remember the techniques that did or did not work, and helps me visualize the progress we are making.

Video is King!!