Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Bringing Mathematics to the Traumatized and the Perplexed

As many of you know, Steve Strogatz is one of my mathematical heroes. One of the reasons is that he's a master teacher and expositor. (Whenever I get his seal of approval for one of my articles or other efforts, I always feel like I did a good job on it.) Take a look at this new article.

Quoting Steve from this article: "So many of the things that we do in math education—and maybe more generally in education—are giving students answers to questions that they would never think of asking. By definition, that's what it is to be boring."

Conversely, this also speaks to why so many students find networks exciting from the start. They're already asking many of these questions! They just need the words and concepts to make the questions more precise to be able to answer them in a better way.

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