I have been in Thailand for three days and have had some interesting times here. On the first day, we arrived after 38 hours of travel from Antigua to Bangkok. We spent a little time resting, then began a long afternoon of visiting the palace (pictures on facebook). It was an exceptional place and most informative about the view of a monarchy here. That night I slept for 12 hours, and felt recovered enough to begin our workshops.
The workshops involve a series of presentations by myself and my colleague Colleen Eddy on curriculum, action research, music and mathematics, and activities in mathematics. I am presenting on the level of elementary mathematics and educational research and Colleen is talking about math at the secondary level. We each have six half days, and yesterday I presented in the morning, then all day today. I close tomorrow with content pedagogy, then we head to a beach for the weekend. The people for whom we are presenting are themselves workshop presenters for teachers of science and mathematics in the country of Thailand. Today we assisted in helping them through some of their frustrations over presenting once, with no use by teachers afterward. It lead to discussions of CBAM and other tools that extend the training and potentially assure higher levels of use. It was a good day.
One of the topics they wanted to me to present was on music and mathematics. Although we could demonstrate in a short experiment that music and math have no direct influence on the other, their initial beliefs that they are connected continued. This was terrific because it led beautifully into the need to conduct action research, so that we can verify our convictions about connections and influence.
Tomorrow morning it seems that I am going to tour a palace made of teak tomorrow during the morning session, but am back on duty in the afternoon. I am enjoying the people, food, and general atmosphere.
Hope all is well for you. love jt
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