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Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

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Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#301

Post by GarvielLoken »

tl;dr A couple of numbers-nerds are sad and offended that math is not as recognized as reading and literature, where there are great works that speaks of the human condition and illustrates life.

Also they have the mandatory "everything is really math! ™". "LeGrand notes that dancing and music are mathematics in motion. So ... dance, play an instrument."

Just because i can describe history through the perspective of capitalism or Marx theories, does not make history the same thing as either of those.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#302

Post by bojo »

When I first saw it I thought the sign in the mentioned tweet may have been because the deli was next to a mathematics department and the professors/students would stand around and hold up the line while discussing math.

Overactive imagination I guess.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#303

Post by [deleted] »

ashark wrote: post #63
kungito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this point, I have been doing a plenty of 1on1 lessons with kids trying to catch up with Math in high school/college/matura exams and one this I have noticed is that things which are problematic to these people are things which were covered quite well already in elementary school. Later the curriculum only expands on these problems so it's even harder and harder to catch up. I have been working with college freshm…

Schools (at least around here) do not hold kids back anymore. No matter what. Some of them get behind in one or more subjects (math, say) as early as 1st or 2nd grade and all their later teachers are stuck trying to give them the remedial math help the desperately need, while teaching their other students on-grade-level material, and also trying to teach the remedial kids enough of the new stuff that their scores on…

[deleted]

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#304

Post by redial »

dahart wrote: post #66
redial wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbols are symbols, are symbols. Instead of trying to compress everything into a very limited set of "daily language" symbols we should be trying to expand our ideas, including our language(s).

I'm not sure what that means. Are you saying the use of Greek letters is a good thing, and that we need more of them, not less? Or do you mean that all symbols are equally easy to learn for beginners, whether they're English or Greek or Chinese or abstract? Or do you mean that we should do away with symbols that don't mean anything and use real language to describe math instead? The symbols we use in math aren't to b…

I'm saying when you learn something new, you are learning new things, including the "language" that "thing" is expressed in in order for others to understand you.

What you seem to be saying is Japanese is too hard to learn, so let's just discard Kanji and use the english alphabet instead. You can do that, but at some point you are not teaching Japanese any more.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#305

Post by digitalshankar »

Balgair wrote: post #209
Merovius wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late. I indeed believe you are wrong. I started getting interested in STEM when I was 16 and now have a masters in mat…

Anecdote time: I was a late bloomer in math too. From about 6th to 10th grade, I was terrible at math. I think it was because of inapplication problems. Yes, you get a word problem about Jack and Kwanzeeah trying to fill up a pail or something, it was nonsense to me. Why are they filling up a pail? Why are they using a bucket that is 173/9th's the size of the hose? Why do they have to not let it overflow? Why do I ha…

Hi Balgair, your comment made my day, i was feeling the same as you at that age.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#306

Post by Tommyixi »

For me, math has always been a source of unplugging. I'd sit at my kitchen table, put in some headphones, and just get lost in endless math problems.

Interestingly, now as a masters student in a statistics graduate program, I've learned that I don't like "doing" math but get enjoyment from teaching it. I really like it when students challenge me when I'm at the chalkboard and I'll do anything for those "ah-ha!" moments. The best is at the end of the semester hearing students say "I thought this class was going to suck but I worked hard and am proud of the work I did." I'm hoping that on some small scale I'm shaping their views on math. Or at least give them the confidence to say, "I don't get this, but I'm not afraid to learn it."

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#307

Post by Sean1708 »

Merovius wrote: post #159
d3ckard wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late. I never had any problems with math until I went to university, so I was merely a passive observer of everyday stru…

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late. I indeed believe you are wrong. I started getting interested in STEM when I was 16 and now have a masters in mat…

You say you weren't interested in maths when you were young, but were you bad at maths when you were young?

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#308

Post by andrepd »

ice109 wrote: post #276
andrepd wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But math isn't about intuition, much to the contrary, it's about rigorous reasoning. In math "intuition" and "common sense" are worth nothing. Only objective proof matters. It's a valuable lesson too, learning not to take anything on a hunch and only take as true what what you carefully and logically prove.

you use intuition to come up with the argument. then you use a proof to convince others.

No, you use intuition to come up with an idea the use that idea to write a proof for yourself. Intuition is invaluable as a starting point, but it's often misleading.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#309

Post by jostylr »

yequalsx wrote: post #74

I teach math at a community college. I've tried many times to teach my courses in such a way that understanding the concepts and thinking were the goals. Perhaps I'm jaded by the failures I encountered but students do not want to think. They want to see a set of problem types that need to be mimicked. In our lowest level course we teach beginning algebra. Almost everyone has an intuition that 2x + 3x should be 5x. It…

A large part of the problem is that problems are presented to them, instead of coming from them. And then the solutions are presented. Humans just don't appreciate it.

In a course I teach, I have students reading Guesstimation and doing two blogs: 1) A Guesstimation problem similar to that in the book, 2) Watch a TED Video and come up with a mathematically based skepticism with doing a guesstimate if possible to get a feeling for the skeptics answer.

My students love that part of the course and it gives them way more value than the rest of the course covering standard mathematics. They start to incorporate the guesstimation ways into their work and slowly start to see the true fuzzy outlines of real math.

Reading all their blogs and making appropriate comments is quite a bit of work.

Re: Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learning how to think

#310

Post by watwut »

Merovius wrote: post #159
d3ckard wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late. I never had any problems with math until I went to university, so I was merely a passive observer of everyday stru…

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late. I indeed believe you are wrong. I started getting interested in STEM when I was 16 and now have a masters in mat…

Not being particularly interested and not being taught math is not the same. You probably had normal math just like anybody else and was not behind other people all that much.

But I agree that the tendency of programmers and public to assume that if you already don't know a lot about computers, you are lost case and stand no chance is harmful. There is strong tendency to overstate how difficult things are and that makes people look elsewhere.

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