The first thing that surprised me in the article was the word problem about converting grain into protein on page 21. From my experience, and maybe I am the exception, when I received word problems in my math classes, I never thought about what they were really saying. I guess, maybe I was conditioned by a lot of contrived problems, but when I see a word problem I am immediately thinking of how to translate it into math, and paying little attention to the actual message or politics it might be conveying. We can take a look at it from the point of view of an art class. Do we make children paint global crises in the art classroom? Sometimes, perhaps, but definitely not something we'd see in every class.
The second thing that surprised me was how the author is set on "ethics of mathematics". If we think of mathematics as humans reasoning abstractly about the natural (or artificial) world, then mathematics is free of "ethics". Ethics would just come from what we do with it. Mathematics, as a language that has added reasoning, is by definition free of judgement or ethics or politics. Infusing any of these with it, is our decision in how we shape it.
That is not to say we cannot discuss such topics in the classroom. My view is to keep math pure, with psychological, political, social problems to be addressed separately, not enmeshed with the material. Math is hard enough. That is not to say that we'd never have real world math problems with contemporary issues, but as we all know that teaching is more than just delivering the material, I believe getting students to like math for its own sake is a priority.
No comments:
Post a Comment