No matter how you plan your lessons or days it sometimes can resemble the KAOS of Get Smart. You begin to feel like Max bumbling his way through yet another disaster. But wait!  There is the trusty sidekick 99 to haul him out of another messy predicament. Was Max undertrained for the job or did the job just get the better of him on some days, okay every day?  I'm more inclined to think he was the right man but sometimes in the wrong place and the outcome was CHAOS. More often than not, I was like Max with chaos raining down on me in the classroom.  It was ordered chaos and like Max I was the instigator. The trusty sidekick for me was knowing there's an entire mathematical field devoted to chaos theory. PHEW! Wikipedia notes that for a dynamical system (the classroom) to be chaotic the three following properties must exist.
1.    It must be sensitive to initial conditions.
2.    It must be topologically mixing.
3.    Its periodic orbits must be dense.
Before we get started, I'm no mathematician, but I can see how scientists could have studied any classroom to develop this theory. I've muddled my way through the basics of this theory and recognise the relevance of applying its properties to our daily teaching lives.  Read More.....