Thoughts About Teaching Math
I would like to say something about the way math is taught.
I am mostly self-taught in math, but I grew up around people who believed mathematics was important, and I went on to win a math scholarship and attend MIT. Almost every person I have ever met is content with "I was never any good at math." I think that's because they have never seen any mathematics.
For 10 years, my wife (an educator) has been mentoring a young woman who is struggling. She wanted me to tell her the formula for the circumference of a circle but I refused. I wanted to hear a struggle with quantity, symmetry, and relationships. If *this* doubles, what happens to *that*? Soon, I heard a discussion about string, rulers, bicycle wheels, skillets, and the difficulty of measuring the diameter of a circle. Everything was going according to plan, so I hid in the other room.
After several hours, the two of them came up with a theory of circles. My wife was up till 3am producing a Shutterfly book documenting the work. (It was published, but in a limited edition of 1). The next morning the young woman texted "It was nice that I got to learn math."
She's 20 years old, and I think that was the first time she saw any mathematics. The ancient Greeks would have been proud of her. She had discovered the number pi.
Ashley and Kath Discover pi
