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Re: [xmca] a minus times a plus

Anna, is there any way you can share your paper on the list without violating someone's property rights?
I am inclined to agree with von Neumann. In my limited experience of maths teaching I recall kids objecting to the rule change (and you are quite correct about this) by just having difficulty making sense of the extended meaning which underlies the rule change, of being led into what they thouht was forbidden territory. I don't know that "I'm changing the rules here" would be my preferred way of explaining it. I think our discussants are saying: "Hey, if you look at it this way ... it's not really a rule change, it's just going a bit further."
So I am inclined to think of a cycle of participate - accept the change - participate again - then reflect on the change. 

Hope to see you here again, Anna!
Andy

Anna Sfard wrote:
As a lurker, who never spoke on xmca before, i feel a bit awkward to begin with the negative... But for what it's worth. I just happened to have been looking for quite a while at kids learning about negative numbers. My conclusion, in a nutshell: The difficulty is not with deriving the rule for minus-times-minus from those properties of numbers one wishes to preserve (while at the same time giving up some others!) - this is easy! Rather, the difficulty is with the fact that this is what one is doing when one wants to find the rule and justify it. 
More specifically, for negatives to be accepted as numbers and be seen as objects in their own right some of the unspoken old rules of the mathematical game need to change. From now on the process of endorsement of mathematical statements (the process of labeling them as true) will be different from how it was so far. One will no longer appeal to any extra-discursive evidence and the only criterion for the endorsement will be consistency of a statement with the  system of formerly endorsed math statements. Alas, nobody tells the kids as much as that. Nobody is explaining that  from now on, their mathematical talk will be incommensurable with their former mathematical talk. Well, try to explain such a thing to a kid! Or, for that matter, to the teacher. Or even to a mathematician who is not  particularly philosophically minded! In fact, 'explain" is not the word to be used in this context. As von Neumann, a Hungarian-turned-American mathematician, once said, "One does not u

nderstand mathematics, one gets used to it" (of course, he did not mean the whole of mathematics , but rather those special tacit turnarounds that happen in it every so often.) Or, translating this into vygotskian: when they change the rules and forget to tell you, all you have to do is to participate, participate, and participate again, and you will see the transformed discourse gradually growing on you.  This, of course, only if you really want this. And what if not? A good question. Is your granddaughter, Mike, motivated enough to persist? Is she confident enough to be able to suspend disbelief while trying to overcome circularities and looking for a reason? And if she is not, can anybody - you, for example - boost her confidence and motivation? I'm not sure what would work, but I am pretty certain about what wouldn't. The prospects of school examinations and of whatever people are going to make of and with the grades are reliable confidence-, fun-, and motivation-suppress
ors.
Does it make any sense? anna 
PS. if you want all this elaborated, you can look into my recent paper "When the rules change and nobody tells you" in the Journal for Learning Sciences
----- Original Message ----- From: Andy Blunden Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 8:29 AM 
Subject: Re: [xmca] a minus times a plus


Emily, I quite candidly introduced my earlier message as
"the world's worst maths teacher". I developed this identity
partly by being given the task of teaching "New Maths" to
almost-innumerate kids in Brixton in the 1970s.

I was an Engineering PhD who could solve integral equations
but couldn't sing, and had no teacher training.

I was asked to teach for example, the algebra of
transformations of a figure in 3 dimensions (eg rotating by
90deg 4 times = null). This was not my choice. That was the
syllabus! But because of my own background, I couldn't
understand what they found so difficult. :)

Later I had a seminal chat with the English teacher who told
of how he only learnt to understand the workings of the
differential (those things on the back axle of motor cars
which allow the 2 wheels to go at different speeds), by
having someone tell him in words, and going over and over
those words. The diagrams meant nothing to him. My first
glimmer of thinking about thinking.

What sort thinking designed that maths syllabus?

Andy

Duvall, Emily wrote:

I think you bring up an important point, Andy. In what ways do we understand and convey concepts?
I go back to Karpov & Gindis (2000) and the levels of problem solving, an hierarchical arrangement that suggests to me that it is not so much that we think differently but that perhaps we have come to accept different levels of understanding... yet our level of understanding could be developed:

Symbolic or abstract
Visual or visual-imagery
Concrete or visual-motor


Karpov, Y. & Gindis, B. (2000). Dynamic assessment of the level of internalization of elementary school children's problem-solving activity. In: C. Lidz & J. Elliott (Eds.), Dynamic assessment: Prevailing models and applications.(pp.133-154). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science

~em


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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
From Erythrós Press and Media <http://www.erythrospress.com/>.

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