Sorry that I had only 20 minutes to write this because I had to run out the door at 3:00, but I felt it was necessary to give some response to today’s Bloomberg article . . . .
Saw this Bloomberg View article via a Keith Devlin re-tweet this afternoon:
Frenkel’s Slate piece is a good response to today’s article, but this old blog involving another of Frenkel’s ideas is actually what came to my mind:
In that post you’ll see a simple question that Frenkel asks about math – “So how do we make people realize that mathematics is this incredible archipelago of knowledge?”
Dan Anderson’s project with his students is, I think, one great answer to that question. Dan’s students gave short presentations on math-related topics that they choose because they wanted to learn more about them. The list of topics is absolutely wonderful. I’ve always imagined Frenkel sitting through those presentations with a big smile on his face.
He’d smile because math **IS** this incredible archipelago of knowledge and kids **DO** want to learn more about it. It is hard for me to understand how someone could even suggest that we stop teaching math.
Just a few weeks ago I had the incredible opportunity to sit and watch a 6th grade girl make some amazing shapes out of Zometool sets just playing around as I sat in our kitchen eating dessert with her parents – I see a remarkable young geometer at work here:
Here’s one of her shapes, for example:
Just last week my kids and I were talking about square roots – my older son made this wonderful observation about the graph of
You just never know what kids are going to notice or wonder or think about, or what is going to suddenly capture their imagination. How could you even think that we should stop teaching math?
And, finally, give me just one minute more of your time – if you can watch my kids learning about the Chaos game and think we should stop teaching math, well, I guess there’s nothing I can say or show you that would ever convince you otherwise:
Mike's Math Page 