Getting out of “but the teacher said we have to do it this way” way of thinking is about the best thing you can do for your mental development. Yeah, maybe you have to do it that way in school, to get a grade, but please realize that grading is a way for schools to keep you obedient, not make you enlightened. [...]
|
||||||
|
Math Mojo will be aimed at helping anyone who either feels a bit intimidated by math, or would like to learn interesting ways to think about some of the math that they already understand. [...] This is a continuation from the previous posts:
At the end of the previous post, a reader wrote in:
Professor Homunculus sez: Tommy, Well, you’re on the right track. What kind of idiot would tell anyone they’re too old to learn anything? Only someone who’s own brain has prematurely calcified. Modern research has shown that it’s time to get rid of that myth. I’m going to suggest that there is a possibility (just a possibility, OK, I don’t know your situation well enough to be sure at all) that age is related, but in a totally different way. Ostensibly, this has nothing to do with math. But it is good Mojo. Ayelet Waldman has written a book called “Bad Mother.” I read this post on a blog about how to market not-for-profit businesses (something which MathMojo wasn’t designed to be, but has been for much too long a time). The post is about the good-mother/bad-mother false [...] It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, but I’ve been posting like crazy to the http://mathmojo.com/kenken page. I’ve already got 24 videos up about how to do KenKen®, from simple 4×4 KenKen, to sadistic 9×9 KenKen puzzlers without operation signs. I’m finding that the feeling I get from KenKen is similar to that “numbers juggling” feeling I get when I [...] Many mathematicians and some math educators are aware that a lot of the stuff that passes for “math” in schools is simply number manipulation, or rote memory of math “facts.” [...] Thought you might enjoy this bit of [...]
There is an alternative argument that argues for the opposite. Many pedagogues try to plead the case that first you must teach the “basics” (meaning the basic skills, like the “multiplication facts”) before you can expect a child to acquire any meaning about it. There seems to be a big “fight” about “which should you teach first, math skills or math concepts.” A popular example is the “multiplication tables” versus the concept of multiplication (as repeated addition, for example). “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom. - Georg Cantor Not much math this time, but there is a math joke at the bottom. Today is our little dog’s birthday. Our “little” dog is an eighty-pound Golden Retriever named Maia . (Our hundred-ten pounder is a Golden Retriever named Galileo.) I went down to the local [...] |
 |
||||
|
Copyright Magic and Learning; 2010 - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
The previous post was about the value of learning conceptually before you start practicing for skill. 
