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I worked in college as a Digital Librarian and my degrees were Theology and Library Science (Not many of us) PROBLEM: It is a socially acceptable to be bad at
by baldfat 10y ago
I worked in college as a Digital Librarian and my degrees were Theology and Library Science (Not many of us)
PROBLEM: It is a socially acceptable to be bad at math and I am talking 4th or 3rd grade math!
2nd Problem: We teach pure math (Think algebra) to soon and place applied maths like Trigonometry and Calculus where only a handful of student will ever even attempt and God help them if they have a weak math teacher.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoYou need algebra to do calculus with any sort of rigor... Your suggestions are the real problem with teaching mathematics; do people learn science only to learn practical stuff? Read literature only to gain literacy skills? No! That is not how classes are taught. Mathematics is seen only as a tool, but if it was taught as an art, or even a science, people wouldn't hate it!
- baldfat 10y agoWhy do we have to only get to calculus or pre-calculus concepts so late and why is it so extreme like it is all or nothing? There is plenty in Applied math in calculus that doesn't hing on algebra. Children natural love pattern recognition and we don't teach anything pattern based till we have beaten them into boring show your work work sheets? See (A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart) http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.p... "In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soulcrushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education." > Rigor My trigger word!!! Rigor, the most hatred word in all of education philosophy!!!! > Three Dirty Words are Killing Education by Deb Jensen RIGOR VS. RELEVANCE The second problem term is rigor (also known as “high” standards). The term is associated particularly with college readiness. The term might call up images of learned individuals from the 1800s, but today's rigor is imposed artificially — it requires only more algebra or more credits. While the mind needs information to build beyond the concrete to the abstract, much of the random information is actually screened out. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/003172171009200120 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/003172171009200...
- baldfat 10y agoAlso lost 20 minutes on this article. https://betterexplained.com/articles/a-gentle-introduction-to-learning-calculus/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/a-gentle-introduction-t... A note on rigor (for the math geeks) I can feel the math pedants firing up their keyboards. Just a few words on “rigor”. Did you know we don’t learn calculus the way Newton and Leibniz discovered it? They used intuitive ideas of “fluxions” and “infinitesimals” which were replaced with limits because “Sure, it works in practice. But does it work in theory?”. We’ve created complex mechanical constructs to “rigorously” prove calculus, but have lost our intuition in the process. We’re looking at the sweetness of sugar from the level of brain-chemistry, instead of recognizing it as Nature’s way of saying “This has lots of energy. Eat it.”
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoBy "any rigor at all", I meant how do you express the concepts of differentiation without knowing how to manipulate symbols?
- charmonium 10y agoA part of the push for rigor in calculus is being able to prove results instead of appealing to intuition. They are both important aspects of mathematics when working together (often intuition guides a slower, rigorous, methodical proof), but we don't want people relying on intuition where a proof is necessary. This kind of critical thinking and logical reasoning are both important cross-disciplinary skills that almost every field requires.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoMaths is not pattern matching. There's a lot of beauty to be had in playing around with numbers; some of the biggest, deepest unsolved theorems of mathematics can be expressed so that fifth and sixth graders can understand them. Combinatorics and probability can be easily taught to kids, and even the basics of abstract algebra can be expressed in an easily understandable way. These topics are much more fascinating than mere calculus could ever be, but this requires people to stop viewing mathematics solely as a tool, and start viewing it as a way to reason about the world.
- sporkenfang 10y agoThe basic concepts of calculus (area under a curve, areas inside shapes in 1, 2, 3 dimensions, relationships between forces, etc) don't need anything more than some basic physics experiments and the ability to perceive the world around you. Calculus can be explained in terms of algebra, sure, but it can also be explained with visualizations and with experiments (and/or you can learn the algebra at the same time).
- hemdawgz 10y agoExplaining the basic concepts of calculus is very different from teaching someone to actually be able to apply them.
- sporkenfang 10y agoApplication of calculus to the real world, in its most basic form, is basic physics. The whole point of people who aren't planning on building on calculus with further mathematics taking calculus is to better understand the world and how it works, not to be able to derive stuff, I think.
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- exDM69 10y ago> PROBLEM: It is a socially acceptable to be bad at math and I am talking 4th or 3rd grade math! This is a huge issue and some people even take pride in being "bad at math". That's like being proud of being illiterate. And these people hardly know what math means. They are bad in arithmetic and stopped there.