Posts on the "Why math?" series
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Listen to this small section of the video.
This is Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and solar city) talking with Sal Khan himself from Khan Academy.
We should tell them why are teaching them these things.
"I think if you can explain the why of things, then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation. Then they understand the purpose" -Elon Musk
Although it is true that with math you can "learn to think", it is much more than that.
It seems that the education system nowadays manages to both
(a) Make math boring and complicated and
(b) Only partly cover math's usefulness.
If anything, it leaves people with a distaste for it, going as far as causing what's known as math trauma.
I put a huge emphasis on my lessons to make Math (and science) interesting, simple, useful and beneficial to my students. I give them a life-long understanding of it that will stretch past improving their school and university marks.
The math we do nowadays is a system built over thousands of years that became more and more efficient. There is no getting away in dealing with quantities and logical relationships, so we've had to make this necessary process as efficient and easy as we can. This is currently modern math.
An example for this is simple arithmetic - doing division in roman numerals, for example, was the work of geniuses. Nowadays, with our 0-10 number system, something like (10/2)=5 is being done by young children. This is simply because we have a better system to deal with quantities.
Our system, then, stretches our understanding of the world.
We start off with a great understanding of "quantity", but in math we also deal with:
Listen to this small section of the video.
This is Elon Musk (CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and solar city) talking with Sal Khan himself from Khan Academy.
We should tell them why are teaching them these things.
"I think if you can explain the why of things, then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation. Then they understand the purpose" -Elon Musk
So, why do we do math in the first place?
Here's a quick overview.Although it is true that with math you can "learn to think", it is much more than that.
It seems that the education system nowadays manages to both
(a) Make math boring and complicated and
(b) Only partly cover math's usefulness.
If anything, it leaves people with a distaste for it, going as far as causing what's known as math trauma.
I put a huge emphasis on my lessons to make Math (and science) interesting, simple, useful and beneficial to my students. I give them a life-long understanding of it that will stretch past improving their school and university marks.
The math we do nowadays is a system built over thousands of years that became more and more efficient. There is no getting away in dealing with quantities and logical relationships, so we've had to make this necessary process as efficient and easy as we can. This is currently modern math.
An example for this is simple arithmetic - doing division in roman numerals, for example, was the work of geniuses. Nowadays, with our 0-10 number system, something like (10/2)=5 is being done by young children. This is simply because we have a better system to deal with quantities.
Our system, then, stretches our understanding of the world.
We start off with a great understanding of "quantity", but in math we also deal with:
- Quantity manipulations, in algebra
- Changes, in calculus
- Shapes, in geometry
- Probability of events, in statistics
- etc...