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"How mathematics works rests on no absolute timeless standard, despite what many assume today, given its precision and efficacy" Exactly this is key to teach p
by Meai 8y ago
"How mathematics works rests on no absolute timeless standard, despite what many assume today, given its precision and efficacy"
Exactly this is key to teach people to like math, stop trying to train me in it. It's like math has become so saddled with politics or ego that people want to train everybody in the same system of values and they are willing to lie to get you to use to the same symbols, the same way of thinking, etc.
Disclaimer, I'm really bad at math. But I hate how math and physics are taught, it should always be taught from a spirit of exploration as if you are discovering new islands or continents and you get to name the things you discover.
Try getting a math professor to admit that he doesn't actually have an intuitive understanding for any of the stuff he teaches. I believe the vast majority probably don't have any such understanding but they are understandably scared to admit it. It's a cycle of lies.
Who are you to say that I have to use that particular symbol or term to describe this math?
People have a large stake in interopability between mathematicians so they teach us these symbols as if they are facts of nature when in reality they are just arbitrary drawings that people invented to name stuff that they found in nature. Fields of math stack on top of each other because they happen to work together but in reality we dont know why. They just do and it's interesting that they do so we keep doing it that way because it works and hasnt broken yet and it's useful. There were cultures that did math with a completely different set of symbols, not just symbols but even way of thinking. Multiplication, addition, entire base ideas were thought of differently. Yet our current way of doing math is taught to us as dogmatic, accept it or you are a troublemaker. No wonder people dont like math, nobody wants to be a slave to somebody else's ideas and value system.
Every math class should start with something like "This is the symbol for addition: '+'. This was invented by some person, you could use something else, you could try to find some other way to add numbers but the way we teach you to think has proven to be fairly fast and convenient so we teach it."
That in my opinion is how you make people interested in math because you treat them as equals instead of subjects to be trained in your favorite cultural way of doing math.
Math should be seen like a weird natural phenomenon that we observe, from the getgo. From childhood on. Explain it like that and I believe kids (and adults) will love to discover more about it.
- thrmsforbfast 8y agoThis strikes me as fairly unreasonable. The full range of human thought is probably possible to express in the language my sibling and I made up as children, but I'm not arrogant enough to assert that my teachers are all incompetent liars just because they refuse to grade essays written in our made-up language. Every mathematics professor I've ever known would readily agree that part of teaching mathematics is teaching how to communicate ideas using the established linguistic customs of modern mathematics. That's reasonable, just like it's reasonable that literature professors insist on essays written in modern English.
- sillysaurus3 8y agoI didn't see any assertion that the professors were incompetent or lairs. Just that the median teacher is bad. Which is true about anything.
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- s_m_t 8y agoHave you considered that this perspective is also an almost perfect ego preserving technique? It's not my fault I'm bad at math, its just that those other guys have memorized the language. I just think different so of course I wouldn't be suited to the normal way of doing things. If only someone had nurtured my special way of thinking and treated me as the individual that I am I'd surely pass by those who so readily conformed to the standard without really understanding. We should teach math with a child like curiosity, because children have infinite potential (and so do I). I also suck at math. I have had these thoughts. I don't think they are healthy or constructive, they probably come from a place of pride and ressentiment. I'm not saying you have these thoughts or there is a direct connection between what you wrote and what I did but it certainly reminded me of that thought pattern.
- trustmath 8y agoIf math is invented, math is the union of thought, in relation to an objective measurement of reality, because the language expresses consistent and testable truths that can be observed and measured. If math is discovered, math is the reality, that is tested against itself. As for thought patterns and special ways of thinking - there's nothing wrong with nurturing an interest. I think any thought patterns that exaggerate or minimize one's ability in math simply get in the way of doing math, eventually. Pure mathematics is done for itself. Applied mathematics is done for something else. These things are so simple when they can cleanly be separated in descriptive rhetoric, but in the actual domains of math, they could not be more complicated.