Name: Max Zinman

Essential Question: How does teaching while learning affect how one learns?

Prompt: Describe a moment and analyze

In week one of senior project, I started working on my research component (I began the class components in week zero), and I did what I always end up doing with research: I jumped right into the main topic from the start, and just started taking notes. This always worked to where I fully understood what I was talking about. But as I was learning about industrial laser cutters in one of my first hours of research, I remembered a moment from week zero when I had to answer a question from a tenth grader about what momentum is. I started by trying to just explain momentum to them as its own concept, and how it’s a relationship between mass and velocity, which is how I understood it. However, this wasn’t helping the student to understand momentum, because obviously they weren’t me and didn’t have the same base level understanding of momentum. So I changed my tactic to going over the foundational information rather quickly, such as how if a big thing hits a small thing, the small thing goes flying, and how velocity has direction and magnitude because it’s a vector. This started working and finally I related momentum, mass, and velocity to the IF charts they had been using, and they ended up getting it. 

As I was sitting there starting my laser research, I asked myself whether or not I could explain what I was learning to that same student, and I determined I couldn’t. So I changed course just like I did with momentum, and restarted by making sure I understood and could explain the fundamentals of lasers before going into the more complex subject of laser cutters. This was the clearest moment I’ve had so far where my experience teaching completely changed my learning process. I’ve since had several other moments like this one where I decided to back track several hours of research because I didn’t start with the basics, but regardless of how exasperated I may have been with my decisions to do so, I still kept pushing because I loved my research, and I couldn’t wait to eventually be able to explain what I was learning to my friends and family, clearly and with all of the background information required to get a full understanding of the subject matter.