Posted on 01/20/2006 3:11:23 AM PST by Pharmboy
Nope, which is why I said never mind............
AG, you ole salty dog, you.
You called this ahead of time.
"The unreasonable effectiveness of math." (or something like that.)
HA! Designer indeed!
Definitely not for me. Attending to one ping list is already more than I can properly handle!
However, it was the environment that was just not acceptable for younger child. We always had to supplement the education she got in private school but the learning environment and the social norms were world's better than in public school
All in all, we wouldn't have done it any differently.
Every parent needs to take responsibility for their child's education and make sure it's not left to the school!
LOL! Me, too. My own first thought on seeing the title was that, in my HS geometry class, it seemed clear that those of us who were good at geometry got at sight and just had to learn the vocabulary, and those who weren't good, well, just would never get it (I got the same feeling about logic in college!).
Hadn't thought about it from this angle before.
These self-evident truths are interrogated not for their confessions but for their universality.
Imaginatively, we speak of extra dimensions but logically we can only account for three.
What is better displayed here is the seeming fact that not all children come equipped with the same ability to intuit the obvious and that is a phenomenon for social study, not the science of mathematics, per se.
"points, lines, parallelism, right angles simple pictures, distance, angle, relationships"
All of these exist in the Amazon and tribe. All are used in hunting, farming, cooking and taking care of the tribe.
Look at what has been built over 1,000 years where modern math did not exist - we cannot duplicate today - maybe modern math is incorrect.
This whole article is based on a completely faulty premise. The whole point of High School Geometry is not to teach people how to compute areas of rectangles or know that two points make a straight line. Students are expected to intuitively know that coming in.
High School Geometry is meant to introduce axiomatic thinking and theorem proving.
All this proves is that the hunters know geometry and the guys who designed the study do not!
Hmmm.
Cordially,
Good one...
I only wish that there was such as thing as Angle-Side-Side congruence. It would have made Geometry class a little more fun. :)
You rang?
Sounds more like plain old spatial relations.
I recall that Kant said the same thing more than 200 years ago.
Well, at least you narrow it down to two solutions. With angle-angle-angle, you have an infinite number.
That's because their instruction never goes much beyond this intuitive level. Many educators--many math teachers--do not know that Euclidiean geometry is an application of logic, that it is the only opportunity for the school to teach formal logic to ordinary students.
Well, Kant said that there were three dimensions of space, and that that was all there could be, since it was clearly the case that there couldn't be any others.
Special Relativity blew a hole in that. General Relativity nailed the coffin shut. Quantum Field Theory and String Theory are currently dancing on the grave.
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