The first part of this article that really struck a chord with me was when it is talking about how many math teachers are really specialists in other subjects and don't understand math as well, and also about how people think that math is about memorizing and using formulas. I couldn't disagree more with this! The majority of people that I know that don't like math don't like it for this reason exactly. Their teacher didn't really understand what to do or how to do it, so if they had an original way of doing something, the teacher would mark it as wrong, and then the student gets fed up and starts disliking math. The dislike for math is, in my opinion, not without good reason. It has been separated from logical thinking and defining the world and now is only about doing well on tests. I am so grateful that I had wonderful math teachers in high school who really understood the topic and inspired me and other students to delve deeper. My grade 12 math teacher actually won a Prime Ministers award for teaching in STEM, and he is the one who inspired me and other students from the same high school, to get math degrees and to pursue teaching as a career. I am grateful to him all the time, especially now that I am in this program and can really see how amazing he is.
The part in the article about the Bourbaki French mathematicians wanting to stop teaching geometry and other visual representations of math blew my mind a little bit. To me, math is such a beautiful thing! Being able to see things represented geometrically really helps me understand them better. In the math art project, the one that struck me the most was the visual representation of irrational vs rational numbers. It is such a clear thing; oh this one has a pattern and all rationals will have some sort of pattern vs oh, this one is messy and hard to decipher, all irrational numbers will be this way. To me, teaching math in only abstract concepts will alienate a lot of students, and seems counterproductive to the goal of having more scientists and astronauts that was around at that time.
Great commentary, Ellen! It’s so important that you had an excellent teacher as a mentor— now it is up to all of us to BE those excellent teachers for others!
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