In article <jfl31417fve8ml5eocirv8fa2pqa84qehs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Bob LeChevalier
says...
>
>Beliavsky <beliavsky@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/science/25math.html
>>Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
>>By Kenneth Chang
>>New York Times, April 25, 2008
>>
>>'One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour
>>toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling
>>on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400
>>miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
>>
>>Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many
>>educators in recent years have incor****ated more and more examples
>>from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that
>>making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
>
>Actually, that isn't the idea that I've seen. The idea is that making
>math more relevant makes kids more willing to learn, and provides at
>least some hope that they'll have some use for the math once they walk
>away from the classroom.
From my physics and engineering training, math is exactly *about*
describing the
real world. Indeed, aspects of the real world can only be approached
mathematically (relativity, quantum physics).
So the idea of not invoking the real world in teaching mathematics makes
absolutely no sense.
I haven't read the article, but I suspect it's not invoking real world
examples
that have hobbled math education. Rather, it's the reliance on expressing
math
oin *verbal* terms in the kind of examples that elementary schools have
favored
lately (see many threads in misc.kids about that).
Banty
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