``...And I now think the fault in general is that math is taught badly, rotely, mechanically most of the time....I would like to see math taught historically, now that would make it really interesting. But why would they want to do that?..'' Jenny Brown
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Thanks. That's the kind of answer I was looking for, even if I didn't know what it would look like, when I asked.
This is it too: ``..some of the tools of our liberation are also locked up in sciences we can't do without studying math, so it's something to struggle against...''
In any event, I whole heartedly agree that math sucks as it is taught, and anybody like me who for whatever reason had no patience with doing endless exercises that seemed to lead nowhere got disgusted quickly.
A few years ago I had a work buddy who was going to night school to finish his GED and then start working toward the first two years of college at a local community college. And, he had to pass beginning algebra. So during lunch hour and breaks, and then eventually during work time, while the shop was quiet, I helped him work himself through. Man was I releaved when he passed.
I learned a tremendous amount about teaching one to one, trying to get inside his brain, quiet it down, slowly make him relax and focus on a single problem, taking it apart in different ways. Some of it sounds completely silly, but it came down to making him write down expressions just listening to me say them in words and not looking at the book---from ear to hand. Going over and over manipulating fractions, rules of parenthesis, making him memorize the law of signs by writing them out. He never had any of these experiences as a kid, so he had to learn them as a kid again---without any ego attachment.
I was his friend, I wasn't laughing. I know he had been made to feel stupid as a kid, and we had to go back to that and get over it again and again. I felt more like a psychoanalyst than a tutor. Word problems were always the worst.
The real crunch came with factoring and quadratic equations. Of course that was near the end and it was hurried along---exactly when it should have been slowed way down.
But the issue was getting through math, not getting interested in it.
>From that single tutoring experience I could tell that was exactly
what was wrong with probably all math curriculums: let's get through
it. The panic of that mentality, completely betrays any
learning.
What's the fucking rush here? It took centuries to make some of these leaps.
CG