What’s the Big Idea? Recognizing and Forming Patterns

          Patterns are everywhere and we experience them with all of our senses.  There are patterns in music, language, history and science.  By recognizing patterns we are able to find solutions to problems and sometimes identify problems that we didn’t know existed.  I often associate patterns with math.  Rarely does the word pattern come up when I am teaching other subjects, but it is just as important to the other disciplines and completely appropriate.  Helping students to see patterns in poetry, science, and history will help them to organize the material in their heads and hopefully help them to make predictions and imagine a different outcome supposing a certain aspect of the pattern was changed.  Once students are comfortable with recognizing patterns, they can more easily form patterns of their own.  In the chapter 7 there was an example involving a Koch curve.  Seeing the example, it was difficult not to play out the different variations in my head (and a few on paper).  Having simply been given the picture or description I may not have given it any further thought.  Knowing it was a pattern led my mind to consider what other outcomes this pattern could yield and what they might look like.  Isn’t that what we want from out students?  We want them to make connections and form patterns that will help them make sense of things.  In the process they may also show us new ways of seeing things.

            

          Before reading these chapters I thought about patterns as templates.  I imagined a teacher saying “Here is the pattern, now create something that fits this pattern.”  I had not considered that a pattern could be a scaffold.  After reading I can imagine a teacher saying “Here is the pattern.  What can you create with it?”  We can challenge our students (and ourselves) to question the pattern, alter the pattern, or continue the pattern.  I have already made some notes about how the concept of patterns can be applied to subject areas other than math.  In language arts I often use the word connection, which I believe can have a similar connotation.  I often ask them to connect something we’ve read to another story or event.  This is a way of recognizing patterns.  Asking students to form patterns is a bigger challenge. 

            

          Considering patterns in terms of poetry was not too big of a stretch.  Poetry almost always fits a pattern.  Some poets have said that it is a bigger challenge to write a poem that does not fall into a pattern.  Poems are also very conducive to creativity.  Just writing poetry in itself is an act of creativity.  The challenge then is to help students not only to recognize the patterns in poetry, but to form them for themselves.  Beyond that I hope to give them the opportunity and freedom to challenge the patterns.  In order to do that I will have to accept the same challenges for myself and the material I teach.