I decided to follow my path of mathematics because I ultimately enjoyed it and was pretty good at it. It was an easy ‘A’ elective at university. Then when I decided to become a teacher and I settled into a math job, I never once wondered why do we teach math? Obviously I was faced by this age old question in class by many students. But, I always had an answer. There was something that I could relate the topic to in real life and if I couldn’t then I would tell students they would need it for harder topics down the road. I was a strong believer in many aspects of Lakoff and Nunez’s (2000) the “Romance of Mathematics” and felt as Davis (1995) describes this question to be one classified as rhetorical. Why did I feel we were teaching math? My answer would have been very close to how Davis (1995) answered, “[b]ecause we have to...” (p. 20).
My beliefs about math have begun to change and this process started when I began my masters in education almost two years ago. Many of my previous courses got me thinking about the structure of the education system and why we are teaching the things we are and the way we are. As Ken Robinson stated in his video about creativity and education, we are unaware of the future, students need to be creative and learn how to solve novel problems. Students will need to learn to be learners, it’s the only way to prepare them for the unknown. He described creativity as coming up with something original and useful whereas our education system dictates what the students will learn and how they will learn it by illuminating mistakes. We need to allow students to ‘discover learn’ more often and students in mathematics in particular are often told the exact method to use to solve a problem, they are given step by step solutions and teachers will often mark solutions wrong if they have not followed proper procedures. How is mathematics preparing our students for the future of the unknown?
Previous to the readings for this week, I believed that mathematics consisted of known facts, a truth, and always having a correct answer. Again similar to Lakoff and Nunez’s (2000) “Romance of Mathematics” I felt that math existed in the universe whether humans did or not. However, I can now see Hersh’s (1997) that math is a part of the human culture, without our human consciousness it would be nothing. Although we can see small numbers in nature, numbering something is the same as giving it a name. Without humans, there are still four flowers there but the word four is used to help us humans classify and sort objects. We are the ones that find the need to manipulate the numbers and it becomes very complex and confusing to question something that you have always believed. Sometimes it just takes a different perspective to open your eyes and see a different view. I think I would like to know more about the history of mathematics, even as a math minor none of my courses delved into where the many of the mathematical ideas came from. I would also need more information different philosophies of mathematics, I am very easily lead by ideas and I would certainly like to learn of more ideas about what exactly math is all about.
References:
Brockman, John. (1997). What kind of thing is a number? A talk with Reuben Hersh.
Davis, B. (1995). Why teach mathematics? Mathematics education and enactivist theory. For the Learning of Mathematics, 15 (2), 2-8.
Lakeoff & Nunez. (2000) The theory of embodied mathematics. Where Mathematics Comes From.
Robinson, Ken. Do Schools Kill Creativity? Feb 2006. Keynote Address.
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