April 12, 2012, 9:45 am
This article in the Chicago Tribune talks about efforts to make math fun:
In the American drive to boost science and math education, it’s science that has all the kid-friendly sizzle: Robots and roller coasters, foaming chemical reactions, marshmallow air cannons.
Math has… well, numbers.
“America has a cultural problem with math. It’s the subject, more than any other, that we as a country love to hate,” said Glen Whitney, a passionate mathematician who worked for years developing algorithms for hedge funds. “We don’t see it as dynamic. It’s rote and boring and done by dead Greek guys a thousand years ago.”
The article goes on to talk about some efforts to spice up math, including MIT’s Labyrinth tournament, DimensionU‘s celebrity-driven “DU the Math”…
November 19, 2008, 7:10 am
If you’re wondering why India is earning a reputation for outpacing the rest of the world in math and science, here’s a data point:
Students of the St Michaels Primary School in Mahim celebrated Children’s Day in a unique way. Instead of reciting poems and participating in fancy dress competitions, these students stumped their parents with their expertise with numbers and logical reasoning.
Intelligence enhancement programme, the brainchild of school’s manager Fr Hugh Fonseca, saw children babble out Vedic mathematic formulas and do complex calculations in a flip second with ease.
“It was wonderful to see my child go up onto the stage and fearlessly rattle out those numbers in front of a huge audience without hesitation,” said Naseem Sheikh, whose son Maqdoom recited skip numbers both forwards and backwards. Echoing her sentiments was Uday Babu, an engineer. “My son Ganesh is a lot…
August 8, 2008, 11:20 am
Peter Wood has a tour de force editorial today in the Chronicle, titled “How Culture Keeps Our Students Out of Science”. Snippet:
Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market’s demand for their knowledge and skills. That market lies a long way off — often too far to see. But they are not insulated one bit from the worldview promoted by their teachers, textbooks, and entertainment. From those sources, students pick up attitudes, motivations, and a lively sense of what life is about. School has always been as much about learning the ropes as it is about learning the rotes. We do, however, have some new ropes, and they aren’t very science-friendly. Rather, they lead students who look upon the difficulties of pursuing science to ask, “Why bother?”
[...] A century ago, Max Weber wrote…