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by SamuelMulder
4490 days ago
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I think you're absolutely right that math has to be motivated. A lot of the effort to motivate it is to provide problems that students understand relate to the real world. Most of them come across as contrived. You hit on a good concept with the idea of incorporating the history of math. I'm working on a Geometry curriculum that does just that. Understanding math in the context of a grand story of mankind trying to understand the world around us is a lot more interesting than as a set of received wisdom that must be memorized. I would love to see more math material along these lines, but there isn't much out there, and it takes a long time to produce. I've been working on mine for around 6 months and am just up through looking at how the discovery of incommensurable lengths influenced Plato's philosophy. The idea is to work through the history and philosophy in parallel with Euclid's Elements, relating points back and forth where possible. I've tried teaching a history of math class to local homeschool kids along those lines, focusing on Egyptian - Greek history, with some success. It takes a lot of research and work though. |
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Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'd say that it's just as important that students receive confirmation of this history and motivation in their other subjects. For example, in various history classes, we learn about kings and wars and important philosophers. But we rarely learn about mathematicians and why their contributions were important, of if they were polymaths, we discuss their non-mathematical contributions, but omit their mathematical ones entirely.
Then in writing and literature we spend endless hours on appreciating tiny non-relevant symbols, but don't read something like Ringworld and spend part of a session calculating and relating the size of it. Conversely, in Math class, writing a paper on the history and influence of Platonic solids or similar would have been an interesting break and let kids struggling with crunching numbers take an interest and shine a little.
Or imagine a math course that analyzes things like agricultural output from Roman times to modernity, involving geometry, arithmetic, algebra, percentages (taxes to the king!), nutrition, etc. Extend out to how greater agricultural output per unit land produces surpluses that enable people to take up other labors like politics or art or music.
Off the cuff examples that would need more careful thought, but hopefully the idea is sound.
Bringing math into other non-math subjects, and bringing arts into non-art subjects I think helps prop up what students see as isolated subject "silos" that have nothing to do with anything.
Literature and history courses mutually reinforce each other, and math and science course mutually reinforce each other, but there's a tremendous gap between these two groups of courses where they don't reinforce each other.
This really needs to end because it all is connected and builds relevance for students.