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Re: EUCLID’S ‘ELEMENTS’ AS A VIDEOGAME " - NPR
Math Guy
Posted:
Nov 18, 2009 11:05 AM
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On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Michael Paul Goldenberg
<mikegold@umich.edu> wrote:
> Quoting Robert Hansen <bob@rsccore.com>:
>
>> I have no problem with experimentation on how to get all those kids
>> that are disinterested in math, interested. I just think it should be
>> labeled properly and should not affect the curriculum for the kids
>> that are interested and that do get it.
<< trim >>
> Whose "authentic," Robert? Yours? Not on my watch. Yours is way too narrow.
> Kirby's would be far more to my liking because it's not just one choice and
> it isn't predicated on one group pissing on the backs of another. Everyone
> gets to play. Everyone gets to do WAY more than is dreamed of in your
> philosophy.
Hey MPG, it's not clear whether this is either of our watches these
days, have to go along to get along some, make compromises.
Out here in Oregon, you have the usual fork, left over from one room
schoolhouse days, twixt the elite college bound, and the likely
dropouts. The carnivores in the military, other social services, feed
on the latter for job security. The elite, in the meantime, are
supposed to innovate and create new job opportunities, even energy
independence and a peace dividend if the universities are any good.
We have a three year math requirement pre-college, for that high
school diploma, and most start down the algebra and geometry track
before encountering "the fork", which might be a 3rd year decision.
"Do I stick with pre-calculus (college bound) or should I try
something else?" There's a trig and stats combo, then there's ye old
digital math (DM), a rebranding of discrete math (you can still call
it that in Florida, but we're a trailblazing state in the great Wild
West, so we're thinking digital math, wave the Litvins text as
prototypical though mostly in PDF). Haim should approve as that's
like Phillips Academy i.e. we're on the same page as the Empire State
with a lot of this stuff (not that Andover is in New York, but ya know
what I mean).
Now, if you've been reading my postings to this archive, you know I
have these ulterior motives and not so hidden agenda around being this
Silicon Forest exec who hungers for a bigger diameter DM pipeline,
would gladly run it all four years pre-college and let analog math
(AM) fend for itself, with some real competition for a change. We
even cover a lot of calculus topics, don't discourage taking the ETS
APs in that area. Some kids wanna do that.
However, on the ground, few teachers would be prepared to teach our DM
track, would need years of schooling at Intel or one of those. So
instead we have those "2nd tier" math refugees, already falling
through the cracks, turned off by AM, and wanting to get off the
pre-college math train (calculus just doesn't seem worth the effort,
never mind the sound of slamming doors, opportunities diminished --
other doors opening?). They see this bright shiny "math lab" with
dumb terminals sharing Python. They learn about bash, LAMP, version
control (git, hg, svn). More important, they learn how to work in
pairs, in teams, in small groups. It's a constructivist heaven and
yes, it's vocational (trains in job-relevant skills).
So I suppose some will argue we're "anti-college" because we're not
trying to herd the disillusioned back onto the calculus based railway
system. We're diverting initially small numbers, through our various
pilots, into a more discrete and concrete math subculture, somewhat
closer to computer science. We're feeding the ranks of the engineers.
We're even pretty good at keeping women happy with our content, in
part because of our First Person Physics angle, which celebrates
health care, the ethics of care giving more generally, even cooking
(we tend to be philanthropic in our outlook). The new high school in
Hillsboro has state of the art home economics. Sherwood HS has a lot
of the right stuff as well.
In other words, there's still an implied tracking system, with the
non-elite headed in our direction, attracted in part by our better eye
candy (computers running spatial geometry programs are more appealing
than those rinky-dink calculators amidst lots of chalk dust and
squeaky white boards). Like the Math 2.0 folks, we realize that
Internet Math is a social activity, and it pays to think consciously
about your networks, the company you keep, the identity you develop.
On-line savvy, being smart on the Web, is another one of our foci, a
way of attracting a non-elite that is nevertheless technologically
equipped. Our GIS/GPS focus is likewise geared towards getting around
in the real world (lots of Google Earth or some similar KH-derived
service).
Finally, the place-based approach means faculty is free to customize
locally, and that means to politicize. You may recall those debates
in which I took the position that teachers are free to weigh in, so
long as they do so according to the debating principles upheld by the
wider curriculum. Ad hominen is a fallacy. "If p then q" does *not*
imply "q therefore p" and so forth.
You want students to be able to follow the action, to understand the
stories they see in the papers. That means needing to know some of
the long-running themes, which in my neck of the woods have to do with
forestry, energy use, irrigation, drinking water. All of these
industries are subject to mathematical treatment. Some will scoff
that this is just "rain forest math" but I came back on that already
- -- with "Katrina math" -- showing how we don't sacrifice "story
problems" to the gods of irrelevance. That's not a selling feature
for us, just wasted opportunity, as there's lots of real world
geography to master. Making all that chair time around math be about
fictional farmers and their fictional fences, is just wasted
bandwidth. Our supermarket math component is about real supermarkets
(features SQL for starters).
Kirby
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