To maintain your motorcycle, first you need to have a motorcycle. That sounds so Zen, I could not resist.
How do we spark an interest in motorcycles? Ask that question to an advertising company and they may suggest you change the name, since the old one has a negative connotation already.
So, from now on, instead of ‘motorcycles’ I will say ‘math.’
The problem has been around for centuries. Teachers blame the parents; parents blame the schools; they all blame the government; the government blames a crisis; those on the fringe even blame a civilization. It all sounds as preposterous as a fisherman blaming the waves.
And the truth is, those who play the blame game do so because they do not have a vision to offer.
Maybe that is why math is considered hard, because it is visual. Kids must be able to ‘see’ the numbers before they memorize the rules of addition or the rules of multiplication. Try to explain to a 5-year-old how to divide 52 by 4.
Simple, get a deck of playing cards and ask the kid to count it to make sure it contains 52 cards. Then gather the family (of four) and hand out the cards one at a time to each person. Ask the kid to count the cards in front of each person and watch how they enjoy the fact that each person has the same number of cards.
Division is just counting. What a discovery.
High schools as well as many (service) classes at the university emphasize the teaching of rules: rules of algebraic manipulations, rules of differentiation, rules of integrations, rules of thumb that make you dumb.
If math were a bunch of rules, computers would be very good at it.
Rules are simply invented to save time when you manipulate objects. If you teach a kid how to play with those objects, very soon she will want to do it faster (think about the Rubik Cube craze) and the rules will naturally enter the picture.
So rules are out and play is in, and when you play a lot you start seeing patterns (often in the form of your mom nagging you to do your homework instead).
Who does not love finding patterns? Any kid with an iPad and the right apps will agree.
As the story goes, the primary school teacher of the now famous mathematician Gauss gave his class the task to sum up all integers from 1 to 100. The teacher was probably hoping for some quiet time. It was not the pupil fastest in addition who got the answer first, but it was Gauss who saw the pattern first: 1+100 = 2+99 = 3+98 = … = 50 + 51. The sum turned out to be just 101 x 50 = 5050.
Finding patterns is useful. If it rains in Chicago, often a day later it rains in New York. Surprisingly, humans had to invent the telegraph to see that ‘obvious’ pattern. If you get so excited when you find a pattern that you need to explain it to me, then no matter how you do that, what will come out of your mouth will be mathematics.
So math is a language and, to maintain interest, one needs to have realistic expectations.
Hard work is necessary and memorization is required just like when you learn French. Nobody complains when a teacher expects them to memorize the conjugation of the French verbs, but God forbid a math teacher asking for some memorization.
The beauty of the language of math is that you cannot write ‘I was cool listening to Uriah Heep on a chilly July morning in Canada’ because readers in Britain will understand something different than readers in the United States. But in math, even if the Martians read your work, they will have to agree with your statements.
Your friends from the advertising agency may say that to learn a language, you need to go on a discovery mission. It is the same with math. Discover how to measure the height of a tree if you cannot climb it or cut it. Discover how to measure the width of a river when you are on one of the banks. Discover how to measure the weight of the Earth, the size of the galaxy. There are plenty of nuggets waiting to be discovered to keep you interested in math for a lifetime.
Motorcycles are here to stay.
As one 19th century philosopher put it: No area of human knowledge could consider itself developed until it starts using motorcycles.
Hristo Sendov, a Western Statistical and Actuarial Sciences professor, will host on March 24 at Western one of 13 Canadian events as part of the international Math Kangaroo Contest, a competition that introduces Grade 1-12 students to math challenges in a fun way, thus inspiring their further interest in mathematics. More than 6 million students from 46 countries around the world participated in the event last year.