Lockharts Lament, Id tell you that you should read it, but I dont feel like putting forth the effort to type that much. Okay, I lied; everyone, regardless of their perceived or actual intelligence, their mathemagical abilities or lack thereof should read this essay. At least the first few pages and the last two. If you dont enjoy math, thats okay, but dont you dare try to tell me or anyone else that its ugly, illogical, doesnt make sense, and is useless. Ive seen people laugh and talk about how The devil said, lets mix numbers and letters. or something along those lines. ...dont even. Think about the people who invented algebra. They didnt use letters (variables) what they did was a glorified word problem. x^2+57x+4=3 took at least a paragraph to explain, and several more to solve. Math is beautiful, intricate, amazing, and my mental thesaurus is failing me. If you didnt feel that in school, your teacher(s) failed you. The same with any other subject with the possible exception of English/grammar/wordy stuff. This is important. You cant fix our educational system without changing how you view basic math, or any of the other subjects. Take history, for example. History is not about names and dates. History tells a story. A story about how things interact, a story about blunders, a story about interwoven events, a story about how things worked. A story that tells us as much about today as it does yesterday. Math tells us a story too. So does art, so does physics, so does geography, chemistry, physics (bleeeghk), biology, etc. If youre lucky, your instructor(s) will tell you about this story, and how you fit into it, but more often than not, they muddy the water, causing students to hate otherwise beautiful subjects. https://maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 22:18:10 +0000
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