Why try to change what is done at present?
Because so much of it is misguided, misleading or even wrong.
Why do I care?
Because math is nowhere as difficult as people (students, ex-students, teachers etc) think it is. Treated as a magic code with confusing ideas and apparently arbitrary rules, math rapidly becomes a closed book to many people. Treated as a tightly and precisely coded representation of meaningful statements etc, with a firm basis in measurement and counting, and a real progression from the ideas and actions to the coded versions, AND back again, math is accessible to many more. Do we teach languages in the way we teach math? “Learn these words, don’t ask what they mean. Learn how to combine them into sentences. Don’t ask why. ….”. No, of course not. So the reason I care is that I feel that people deserve better, and deserve to know and understand what they are doing.
Why do you think we teach math in such ways? Why don’t we focus on the “why”? How can we remedy this phenomenon? I know those are huge questions, but I’m really curious what you think!
I am writing a reply to you and will send it by email. I think it may also be suitable for my “WHY” page.
Thankyou (UK style) for getting me to do this !
That’s great! I look forward to reading it!
I apologized that I deleted my original post since its formatting was quite messed up and I can’t fix it for some reason. To answer your question, you can find it here.
http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/blog/khayyam.pdf
You can also find it here.
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/geomsolu/geomsolu.html