Cool Math

This is cool. Possibly only if you’re a math dork like me…

Posted by Alexa Harrington

2008
02/21
CATEGORY
Education
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  1. Is it cool because you didn’t see it in school? I didn’t either but I learned about it when I was about 12 from an engineer friend of the family. The history of maths education is one of a long list of such pragmatic tools being discarded for neatoid ideas of no use in solving daily problems of only social importance.

  2. Simple Country Physicist,

    Yes, it’s cool because I didn’t see it in school. Now I’m interested to see if it crops up in a few years when my kindergartener daughter is old enough to be adding more than groups of ten. If the school doesn’t teach her the cool math tricks, I will. It seems so obvious (possibly only to me) that an excellent way to get kids interested in math (or any other subject) would be to show them nifty tricks. And a lot of the time, those nifty tricks also require that the kids learn the subject forwards and backwards, which encourages bigger, more creative thinking.

    I recently met the fifth grade math teacher at my daughter’s elementary school while we were both in the office prepping for different projects. She was already trying to recruit me for volunteering in the math classes six years out. I told her I absolutely will if I can, and then I’ll have my math tricks chance.

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