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Hi, back,
Can I ask what we mean by "entire
discussion?"
I'm hoping that we make moot "entire" by
all bringing in all the aspects that we all value. I assume that part of
Bill's "cooking" will be well informed by thoughts we all bring.
I remember Apple II's fondly because the chips
would get fried from time to time and, in the early 5th D's, that gave us a
chance to take them apart and use our chip pullers and the kids would peer
inside with us and notice all the country's where the chips were made and we'd
take the time to ponder why we thought they were American
computers.
I also remember early days with kids communicating
by computer when Lonnie Anderson's club members asked how nappy some
distant kids hair was, taking it for granted that they were some degree of
nappy, and telling us a lot about socio-cultural life.
I think mathematics is a human right; it is a
cultural heritage we should have access to. Doing the early days of
thinking about mathematics in ways that lock out some kids for a long time
if not for ever is just wrong. I think the mathematics that Nancy
and her colleague is working on is a powerful and hopeful approach to myths
like the ones Michael W-R brings in.
Can someone chip in about mathematics and
its origins in the middle east?
Peg
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 9:22
AM
Subject: Re: education, technology &
chat (The Mathematics of it)
Hi,
I was struck that in the entire
discussion, there was no cultural historical analysis of the situation in
which children do these mathematical things not because they are (considered)
useful and its outcomes have any relevance to anything but to the reproduction
of a society, where, as in the US, 15 to 20 percent of the population live in
poverty, and where education is used to systematically exclude parts of the
population to share in the wealth that is collectively produced. Students are
supposedly taught in mathematics, but cannot analyze the myth in the growth
equation of the market, and cannot analyze that every time you buy something
at a bargain, or cheap, you actually take from someone else. Every time
someone buys a pound of coffee in the supermarket at a good prize, a number of
children in Nicaragua go hungry. Every time you sit down in your local
Starbucks, you contribute to children somewhere else having to work rather
than get an education because their parents work doesn't suffice to provide
for the basic needs. That is, our educational system cannot get teach some of
the basic mathematical principles, equations, and that you cannot have growth
without resources.
Michael
On 10-Nov-04, at 9:52 PM, Peg Griffin
wrote:
Thanks, again, Bill.
The links were
useful. I can see that teacher and child discussions could
develop quite
elaborated apprehension of the attributes of the shapes and
compositionality.
I
was curious about three things on the easel note. Maybe the talk in
the
class allowed the
group to address the matters or to dance past them because
another part
of the curriculum is going to highlight them. Anyhow, the
first thing was
the squares and rectangles in the list of quadrilaterals:
Does
it come up that squares are rectangles, that the sort of things that
make a rectangle
different from, say, a rhombus is of a different order
than
the difference
between squares and other rectangles? The second thing was
about the "big,
small" and "big, skinny": Are those treated in the
talk
more like, say,
color (and not mathematized) than they are like, say, side
or
point? The third thing is the difference in sophistication
of terms
between types
of triangles and types of quadrilaterals: If you use
'quadrilateral'
doesn't it fairly ooze out that some triangles are
equilateral, and
isn't it wonderfully odd that one shape has laterality as
the hypernym but
the other uses angularity?
I'm
guessing that the so-called correlations to the NCTM standards that they say
are provided by Scott Foresman would have the most information about what
mathematics learning/development ideas motivate the lesson content; is that
so?
Peg
Peg
Griffin
329A
Cloverdale Rd.
Montgomery,
AL
36104
(334)
265-4468
Peg.Griffin@worldnet.att.net
Research
Affiliation: Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
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