Motivations

As I start this blog, I need to ask myself what I hope to accomplish through it. And why! If there is no purpose in my mind, this will soon devolve into a collection of inane posts, probably about mathematics issues, but will nothing more. So let me describe what I hope to accomplish through this blog.

I have enjoyed – perhaps ‘love’ might not be too strong a word – Mathematics since I can recall. I have memories from when I was just past the toddling phase of attempting to find patterns that were revealed in various mathematical operations.

My mother was a teacher of high school Mathematics for a considerable portion of her career. And I remember sitting with her while she graded papers and helping her total the marks. Patterns for addition and subtraction revealed themselves to me during this phase. For me, these patterns were a source of joy and pleasure. And I could not, for the life of me, understand how so many of my classmates were also not enamored with the subject.

When I started as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Texas, Austin, I had to keep regular office hours. During those periods quite a few students came to me for help. But they needed help, not in Engineering concepts. Rather, most of them needed help in high school Mathematics. They too, like many of my classmates, were either disinterested in the subject or actively detested it. And as a consequence their ability to grasp concepts was hindered. It is difficult to learn when you hate something! Or, for that matter, if you fear it.

Over the course of my reasonably long career teaching Mathematics, I have come to the conclusion that any hatred that most students have for the subject stems mostly from a fear of it. Mathematical concepts and operations seem like some arcane body of knowledge that only a special and very small group of initiates can hope to fathom. I do not fault the students for this.

I teach students in the High School, mostly in the 11^th and 12^th grades. These are the final two years of their schooling and, unfortunately, by the time they reach me, most of them already have a gripping fear for the subject and, for some, an utter disdain for it. The damage has been done. And there is very little a teacher can do at that stage to mitigate the fear.

So as an experiment, I decided to teach in the Middle School one year. I took on the task of teaching students in Grade 6. And what I discovered distressed me. They had no clue about how to use the order of operations (BODMAS or PEMDAS). They had been given some inane phrases to remember while performing operations rather than the rationale behind the order. I spent almost the whole of the first term trying to get them to unlearn the horror that had been foisted on them – to limited success, I must confess.

I realized something very important. Children are curious. And if we teach in a way that suppresses their curiosity, they will think that memorization is learning. And there are many students who memorize tricks related to the operations and believe they are the cat’s whiskers when it comes to Mathematics only to flounder later when ideas become more abstract and the illusion of concreteness that numbers conjure recedes into the background with the study of algebra, trigonometry and calculus.

However, if we capitalize on the innate curiosity of children while teaching them, allowing their questions to jerk us from our complacent stupor, not only will they learn well and learn to love the subject, but also we teachers will reach a better understanding of our subject.

So in this blog I hope to deal with all sorts of things related to Mathematics. I will address mathematical ideas that have piqued my interest. I will also tackle issues of how to teach some concepts to students. While I may not fully be able to make things ‘not obtuse’ (i.e. not difficult to comprehend), I hope that the posts will be ‘acute’ (i.e. characterized by keen discernment and intellectual perception).