A Small Stone

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I was having a conversation today about this blog and my writing of it. The topic of yesterdays post came up: mathematical learning and more specifically, calculus. The sad truth of it is that most people are put off, or more accurately, actively discouraged from learning mathematics, and calculus in particular, by the way it is taught. As I've said before, I count myself firmly in this category of the actively discouraged, arbitrarily excluded from so many subjects that I could have enjoyed so much and potentially excelled in, by the 'niceties' of the educational conventions and poor pedagogies of the era (this probably still obtains to this day, sadly).

I learned more about algebra and logic than I did in school, after graduating in Fine Art nearly a decade after leaving that school, by teaching myself to code on the crude microcomputers of the late 1970's whilst working at the University of Birmingham [blog-posts passim]. Calculus was still a mystery to me as it was taught to us in a vacuum, sans context, at school: and thereby lies the rub. Calculus is the mathematics of the real world: it deals with the one thing that is inescapable in that world: change. Platonic solids and Euclidean geometries are mere static abstractions afloat in a universe of inconstancy: stuff moves and alters over time.

Without the purpose of a goal and a real-world context, most people (myself included) will not see the point of the abstractions of the calculus: the simple fact is that if a teacher provides real-life reasons for using calculus (or any other mathematical process, for that), the learning of those abstractions is rendered easier by dint of it's application within the learner's ambit. As I think I might have mentioned before, my grandfather was practically illiterate and innumerate, but he could calculate odds in horse-racing and gambling games with incredible accuracy and speed, mentally. Needs must...


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