0 thoughts on “1magine”

1. Hi Swan :). Thanks for the link :). I laughed all through that song – great parody lyrics and choice of images. It reminds me of the classic parodies by Tom Lehrer :). For those of you reading this and who don’t know me like Swan does, I have a mathematics phobia. It’s genuine – not just a general dislike of the subject, but the real hysterical tears and rushing out of the room into the bathroom McCoy – and even looking at an equation gives me the same shiver as looking at a photo of a large hairy spider :(. Intellectually, I can see the point of mathematics – just don’t make me do it!!!

   We’re having a big discussion over here in the UK about the best way of teaching maths. The latest figures show that kids are leaving school with only a rote knowledge of just enough maths to get them through exams and allow the schools to cross off another little box on their “success” charts but no knowledge of the thinking behind it – all frosting and no cake. Most of my problem was that because my father was in the Royal Air Force I went to many different schools. From extremely early years I was reading fluently at way beyond my chronological age, which enabled me to catch up in other subjects because I could just go into my local library wherever I was and read up on other subjects so I could write convincing essays on them. However, I never managed to learn the fundamentals of maths – it’s one of those “absolutist” disciplines which is either right or wrong and I was wrong every time :(. TWO teachers – in separate schools in different parts of the country – point-blank refused to have me in their maths classes because they told me (and my parents) that I was “completely unteachable” and it would be wasting their time, the time of the rest of the class and my own time for them to even try!!!

   So, I’m throwing out a challenge to you folks in here. Tell me how would any of YOU go about teaching kids so they developed a real love and ability for maths and wouldn’t grow into someone who just went through the motions to pass exams or else, like me, freaked out at the mere mention of the subject until very late into my adult life?

2. Re: Caroline

   I suppose the best way to teach math would be to make sure each lesson is taught along with a useful application. Some people don’t immediately recognize the application when it may be obvious to others, so it’s important to see it put to use, and it’s a special bonus if the application is something already of interest to the students…perhaps something they can immediately apply in their free time.

   I remember the most frustrating experience of my own mathematical education was when I was in a math club my sophomore year of high school. We were being taught matrices and determinants for a math competition, but nobody bothered to explain what they were used for. We were performing all of these mechanical operations without any use for the result. It was very frustrating, and I have to admit I wasn’t as compelled to learn it as with other topics. Since then, I’ve discovered that they’re incredibly useful, and seeing their applications has given me a better intuition into the mathematical operations themselves.

   Conversely, when I was taught Fourier series in diff-eq, we were given up front the problem of a vibrating guitar string. By expressing the initial shape of a bent guitar string as the sum of sinusoids, we could immediately see the string set into motion as it was released and each those sinusoids vibrated at its characteristic frequency. We could see the solution to a differential equation being played out right before our eyes! Who wouldn’t be interested?

   It was the mathematics department head in college who taught that class, and it was by far my favorite math class. He certainly knew how to make math interesting.