Origin Story 1: From Mimicry to Meaning

The Spark: A realization in a small-town Alberta classroom.

For a long time, I taught Math 20-1 exactly the way I had been taught. It worked for me as a student, so I assumed it would work for mine: demonstrate a procedure, provide a few examples, and assign the practice. Rinse and repeat.

Everything changed one morning when one of my strongest students approached me before class. She looked defeated. "I understood it when you showed us yesterday," she said, "but when I tried the homework, it didn't make any sense."

That hit me hard. I realized I wasn’t asking my students to think; I was asking them to mimic. They were regurgitating procedures without building an ounce of intuition.

That night, I scrapped my notes and built my first "guided exploration"—a simple set of sliders on a virtual graphing calculator and a handout designed to let students play with graphs to find the patterns themselves. I was terrified it would flop. Instead, the classroom hummed with genuine discovery. When I checked back in with that student, her response became my new North Star: "It makes so much sense now."

Since then, I’ve been on a mission to get out of the students' way and provide the architecture they need to sense-make, identify relationships, and truly own the mathematics.