Building Connections

We know that school is a place where students learn, but did you know it's a place where teachers learn, too? This year, one of the topics our teachers are exploring is what it means to teach from a Christian perspective. "Teaching for Transformation" is the name of the program the teachers are using, and its aim is to equip teachers to help students to grow in their understanding of who they are as God's creation and what their role in God's world is.
 
As one of our Teaching for Transformation activities, the calculus and physics classes have been working to understand the relationship of mathematics to wonder and awe. Each month, they have looked at quotes from mathematicians in history that express worship, wonder, or awe, and tried to understand why the mathematicians responded to mathematics in the way they did. Here is an example from Galileo, who helped the world understand gravity better, among many other things: "Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe." 
 
One student wrote in response: "Mathematics can be seen as a building block to the universe as it helps explain intricacies and helps us, as humans, to use our God-given thought processes in order to build and create. Mathematics helps explain occurrences and leads us to understand God's creation in a way that intuition and observation cannot tell us. Some examples of this in the real world are in how mathematics and sciences fit with each other in order to create a wider worldview. Within our calculus class, this has been exemplified through the way in which certain ideas connect to others and can be applied to other sciences such as Physics and Chemistry."

-David Marshall, Director of Teaching and Learning


The many thoughts and quotes from other students have been woven into a tree on the classroom wall, shown in the picture below.