Greetings, Blogosphere! First off, here's something you should see and understand if you're gonna be sticking around for this:
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| This really is how it is. Well... How it SHOULD be. Most people forget about us way over here, in return. (source) |
Mathematics is probably the most important thing anyone will learn, and (at least in my experience) one of the most neglected skills in the life of your average bear. (Or person, whatever. I'm sure bears neglect math, too. Bears are jerks like that.) Math is complicated, but carries no baggage of its own. Sure, people bring baggage to math all the time, like poor teachers or poor previous explanations, but in math, only what is defined or explicitly involved by the writer is actually there. Every problem or proof starts with a blank slate.
Everything in the world deals with math: Take grocery shopping, for instance. First, you have to know "how much" money you have (this is a simple counting problem, but it's still math). This total then dictates that you can afford less than or equal to that value in groceries (using an inequality) Then, once you've added an item to your cart, you have to multiply the cost of that item by the number of items of its type (estimation plays a big role in this), and then sum the values of groups of items (polynomials can be used for this). Then, you have to return to the original inequality, and compare the total value of your cart to the amount of money you started with. If it violates the inequality, you have to decide what to put back, until the inequality is satisfied again. To some, this is simple. To others, not so much. But it's still math, and it's still useful.
I should introduce myself and the point of all this, so here goes:
Presently, I'm a pre-service secondary-level teacher going to school full time at Utah State University, and (if you couldn't already tell) I plan on teaching mathematics and statistics. I grew up in Idaho, in the Snake River Valley. I am a nerd, and I'll probably take offense if you call me normal. "Normal" is one or more of three things to me: 1) A setting on the dryer, 2) A reference to the Gaussian distribution, or, for you laypeople out there, the "bell curve", 3) Boring. (I'm sorry if you identify as "normal". Normal is boring.)
Hobbies... I probably like video games too much. I appreciate them as art, and as something that is beautiful. (...and they contribute to my procrastination habit.) I play tabletop role-playing games with my friends, and I'm always up for a good book. I'll always join a conversation about Star Wars or the Force. (If you like math and star wars, check this out.)
There's a couple reasons that I chose to pursue mathematics and statistics education as a career. First, I understand it and enjoy showing others how it can be understood. That was the biggest reason by far. Second, I had good math teachers in school that inspired me, and made me want to share my talents.
So I've talked about math a lot, and you may have looked at the title of this blog, and noticed it involves literacy. "What does math have to do with literacy?" you ask. A couple of years ago, I would have asked the same question, probably with some disdain for English as a subject. I know better now.
Literacy is more than just being able to read and write. (Definitions are kind of sacred to me as a mathematician, because they have to state everything you're going to use and work with from the beginning. I may cheat and change that over the course of time, but for now, they're sacred.) My definition for literacy is: Literacy is the ability to understand, demonstrate, apply and/or use information gained from a text. (Wait, what's a text? A text is defined (here, at least) as any resource that relays information the same way every time it is used.)
(If I change those definitions later, you can burn me as a heretic.)
Does literacy apply to Mathematics? ABSOLUTELY. First and foremost, you have to understand the axioms and basic rules that comprise the basis of mathematics. Definitions are here, and this is why they're so sacred. All of math is built on them. Then there are symbols that denote certain processes and definitions. There's hundreds, if not thousands or millions, of theorems, postulates and corollaries that allow for more and more complex uses of our basic rules and axioms. And that's all just understanding how math relates to itself. Using mathematics in the real world is a topic that's just as big, if not bigger, than just understanding the mathematics itself. (Here, "big" is used to refer to the amount of information in a topic, not the importance. I'd say they have equal importance.) So yes, in short: Literacy is important to math.
Now I need to find a way to go slap past-me for being so shortsighted...
