Two Philosophies on Teaching Math
April 24th, 2010
Two Philosophies on Teaching Math
Published on April 24th, 2010 @ 08:42:36 pm , using 261 words, 376 views
In learning the science of snow, there happens to be lots of math involved. After all, mathematics is the language of physics, and physics is the radness by which we can start to describe some of how snow works.
But how math should be applied...what math should we learn...how we should learn it...all of these questions are complicated and unanswered. For those of you interested in math education, I've found two talks especially interesting.
First, a statement that statistics should not only play a larger role in math education, but be the pinnacle of it:
I find this quite interesting as (a) Dr. Benjamin is a professor at Harvey Mudd, (b) I went to Mudd, and (c) one of the things I wish I learned more of at Mudd was statistics, because I use them all the time in snow science. It reminds me of how much I love small schools, that ideas like this can crop up and become real in a very short time.
Speaking of making ideas real, another (longer, but worth it) video describes how having less information actually inspires people to go out and really figure things out:
Dan Meyer, the speaker, does a good job of not only describing why I think math is really cool ('the language of our intuition') but one of the reasons why I think snow science is cool -- i.e. that there is so much real, hands-on information that we don't know, that we can be inspired to find out.