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26. A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart

Education Bookcast

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How to Get Kids to Practice Writing Out the Words to Be or Not to Be

In an era when rapid and precise shipboard computation is no longer an issue thus we clutter our math classes with pointless nomenclature for its own sake in practice the curriculum is not even so much a sequence of topics or ideas as it is a sequence of notations apparently mathematics consists of a secret list of mystical symbols and rules for their manipulation. Young children are given plus and divide only later can they be entrusted with square roots and then x and y and the alchemy of parentheses. They're indoctrinated in the use of sine log f of x and then if deemed worthy d and integral sign all without having had a single meaningful mathematical experience this program is so firmly fixed in place that

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