Battleground Schools

Note: I'm going to try to write this reflection/commentary live based on the three stops I will be making while reading this.

1. Within the cultural presumptions and assumptions outlined on page 393, the last point really resonated with me. It reminded me of a Numberphile video which really inspired me featuring Professor Edward Frenkel titled Why do people hate mathematics? Frenkel provided an analogy for the irrationality of having no shame when people express their distaste as one would never say this about subjects like Art. At least, I've never heard anyone say that they "hate art" (although I'm aware that people hate doing art).

2. On page 396, there is the argument that "students must be given the challenge of doing and experimentaion in mathematics" which provoked a stop in my reading. Reflecting on the discussion on page 394 about students that "excelled under the transmission model of presentation combined with lots of exercise and drill in applying algorithms," I thought about my own success in math and how I attributed this success to practice. This is in-line with Paul Halmos's quote "The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics," which prior to this reading, I thought of this from the conservative viewpoint of repetitive practice. However, seeing Dewey's argument and the methods taught at this UBC teacher program, I can see that this is very narrowminded in thinking and understand that students need to experiment through inquiry based learning.

3. What I found interesting about the latter math curricula reforms is that they seem like predecessors to BC's current Precalculus curriculum. In our curriculum, there's a strong emphasis on the math required to understand Calculus which we belive to be the prevailing form of math in the sciences. I think that our emphasis for science in BC has developed this curriculum which is why we gloss of more theoretical math like logic, set theory, and combinatorics. However, the perspective I took from the "New Math" is that math ideas such as set theory, abstract algebra, and linear algebra were deemed to be important as well in the sciences in contrast to what we see today. Perhaps the Math Wars removed the need for these topics in favour of Calculus to where we are today in BC.