September

Journal 1

I thought the ted talk with the math teacher was very interesting and looked at math as a vehicle to attain knowledge. Personally I feel that math isn’t a very useful area of knowledge. I find I learn little about life in math and I don’t find it useful to explain things that matter to me or help create things. But maybe that’s because the math that i've learned so far is solving problems in a text book with the only incentive is to practice for a test. And I feel in math class in particular that’s the only incentive that the teacher discusses as well, in my math class we discuss why we need to show which steps because of the IB mark scheme and how to get the most points. How could any one get the words “delicious” from that view of math? But the math teacher on ted talks pointed out how the conversation should never serve math the math should serve the conversation, and I think that’s true. In my experience in math, I always tend to hate word problems less because they give some sort of reason to solve the problem, even if it is a foolish textbook reason. I find that more relatable you find material the more you tend to care about and the more you understand it. It’s interesting this topic is the area of knowledge that provoked the most thought in education. Other topics I didn’t really consider how its taught and which was would be the best to teach it. imp curious as to why that is. Perhaps its because I feel I cant apply it outside of school and i'm only interested in ways to make it more tolerable to learn. The thing I find interesting about the way we talk about math is we don’t really say we learn about math we learn math. The same way we talk about a language, we can say were learning Spanish and that has a far different connotation than were learning about Spanish. When learning a language, you learn grammar and vocabulary, which is similar in math, you learn numbers and you learn what to do with them. When you’re learning about math, like what were doing right now in TOK were learning more about its context and uses, rather than how to solve problems. Perhaps that’s why I dislike learning math in school, because we essentially have to gradually learn rules and systematic steps and that’s it. There doesn’t seem to be a cause for the rules besides a the answer to a problem, but the answer is benign as its at the back of the text book, and is only there to check that we’ve followed the rules correctly. The purpose of the rules is not emphasized so it doesn’t seem ridiculous that many people are reluctant to learn them.

Journal 2

Is it possible to have creativity in math? Math generally has the perception of being strictly rational and free of creativity but there is possibility for creativity. In art you are often confronted with a challenge of making a good piece you have overcome challenges, you have to turn a blank canvas and paint into something interesting. In math you can have to use limited information and despite that you have to use what knowledge you have to solve the problem. For example you might have to combine the knowledge of geometry and calculus to solve a problem. And that’s part of what creativity is to have limitations and use what little you have to overcome a challenge or reach your goal. It’s the same concept with a math problem as making a piece of art. And I think in this way it is possible to see a math problem as a triumph, but still when you get the answer wrong you the teacher puts up the proper method on the board. You can use some creativity in finding ways to use the rules of math to solve a problem, but the method was already discovered and written down by your teacher. There might be more than one method but still the methods have all been done before. The solutions are predestined and you just have to uncover them correctly. In math its much harder to have original thought, there are people who continue to uncover more mysteries of math but that doesn’t happen in your standard high school math class, it takes years of training before you even have the possibility to do that. In other classes such as English we often have obvious unoriginal spark notes derived interpretations of work and were not saying anything ground breaking, but we have the opportunity to debate and change our interpretation and form our own opinions on work no matter how uninsightful they are. Plus when we work out what we think the author was trying to say we can usually relate it too our lives if we want. Once you solve a math problem and you find out the answers is 2, there’s mot much you can think or feel about the number, you just move on to the next problem.

Journal 3

In class we brainstormed the number of times where we used math or were labeled by a number. And I think math is under appreciated. It’s an essential tool in our daily lives, which we often don’t appreciate and ignore, and for me at least when every other weekday I have to hear about it for an hour and a half I detest it. That’s because its serves a purely functional purpose in our lives. But when we have a class on it where it feels like the math doesn’t serve us we serve the math it feels a bit backwards. But is math something that wave created or just a greater a thing that the world is governed by. It’s omnipresent in the economy, in music, in biology, etc. some as a sort of higher power that governs the universe could see it. The British mathematician who sought to prove an ancient theorem shows how a person dedicates their life their mind to math as one might for a religion. And still there was so much struggle to prove math and solve it even the minds most fit for math still struggle comprehend it in its entirety, its clearly much bigger and much more complex than the human mind.  So those who have the interest and intelligence to pursue it and try to understand it do, and then they print their findings in books which are distributed and people read it and learn its rules. Its like a universal religion backed up by reason.  And like religion it evolves, people have mathematical and scientific theory’s that are widely accepted, then some one finds flaw in their argument and comes up with a new theory and people choose to accept it or not. Mathematics and science are based on absolute ideas and proof but because of this ideas in mathematics and science can change quickly and soon go out of date. The same thing doesn’t happen in other areas of knowledge. Socrates works and is still read by English students today but we don’t teach the same science or math that was taught at this time. It’s true that there is always a right and wrong answer in math but there is still so much of math that we don’t understand that these absolute truths can very easily be crushed and replaced with new ideas.