http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LivingMathForum
I’ve been enjoying this forum quiet a bit. Ever since I tutered math and chemistry at the college of Lake County in Illinois, I’ve been curious about how people learn math. Actually, I’ve been curious about that since I was a 6th grader hoping I’d be recommended for pre algebra so I could enter the calculus sequence in my school, even though I often made calculational errors, and had messy handwriting. My teacher gave me a semester to prove myself, and did let me take the more challenging class, and eventually let me skip a semester of college, and saved me time and money, and also to enjoy my school more. I had a weird habit of getting good grades in "difficult" math classes, and poor grades in "easy" ones. I loaf off when I’m bored, conceptual math is more fun than computational algorythms, and I remember things better when I know the why as well as the how. This was also my first introduction to John Holt, my mother had me read his book about children and math. I remember his take on gender math differences: boys are often told "oh the silly mistakes you make, you are so smart, if only you’d line up your columns so you wouldn’t get confused!" and hear the you are so smart part. I was messy.
At Lake county I got to work with many newly arrived Eastern Europeans. They were my favorites, though a tuturing session could feel like a polite wrestling match. This seemed to be their method:Test everything, track down every theorem, don’t accept an answer without a proof, sometimes two proofs…then thank your tutor profusely. They made my brain hurt, but it was a good hurt. I’ve been interested to read that Russian culture puts mathematics on a level of beauty with other cultural things, as well as the belief that everyone suffers, so what, things don’t have to be fun, work hard. It reminds me of my friend S, who was the valedictorian of my college class. He always brushed aside compliments on his intelligence to say, "I’m a hard worker." If you take on math as something you work hard at, you will learn it. If you think there are math people and non-math people, you may not work hard at it.
There surely are folks for whom math is harder to learn, but the hard working attitude will do more for them than saying "oh well, girls aren’t good at math." My other favorite group of people to tutor were the ladies finishing up their nursing degrees, after several decades of raising a family. They had been told in the ’60’s that girls weren’t good at math, but they needed algebra to continue their degree.
There needs to be joy! Who learns to read and keeps reading if they don’t get read fun things – magazines about their interests, good stories, living books? Math should be joyful. Let the kids play with word problems, look at sunflower seed pattern in the flower, think about fractals as well as learn the multiplication table so they don’t HAVE to have a calculator. Math shows the beauty of God’s creation, in order, in chaos, in proportion, in usefulness, in games, in strategy…
Anyway, the forum is fun.