The Mathemagic!

Gilbert Labelle, Université du Québec à Montréal:

I like mathematics because it is beautiful, full of surprises,

gives me complete freedom of thought and, at the same time,

it can be applied efficiently to solve problems in science and society.

Art and mathematics are similar in that 

they both use human imagination and skill

to combine things to create new things.

Maths is the most loved and the most dreaded field of study that could ever be encountered by the human race. It sparks strong emotions, negative for the majority, divine for a few blessed souls who seem to see the invisible, comprehend the incomprehensible and vizualise the alien characters as part of their own make! I wasn’t one of them, ever as a mathematics student. What makes a few of us the blessed ones was a question which I believed ought to make me a billionaire, if answered! But that wasn’t supposed to be! When I discovered this God’s gift called Mathematics, I was surprised to see the simplicity that is needed to become a blessed one. While we are all trying to master technology and beat up every new one now and then, this king of all sciences and technologies, queen of languages rests, relaxes and chills, so do all the blessed souls whose heavenly abode is the MathWorld. Yes, mathematics is simple, plain and straight. The secrets to mastering it are clean and clear. That’s the basic nature of mathematics. It is least confusing when handled from the basic level on which the foundation rests. When that happens even confusions and problems become fun, enticing and stimulating. That’s what happened to the blessed souls like Rene de Cartes, Euclid, Archimedes and so many more like them. The love for mathematics is pure and unconditional. It’s the truest form of love, the most divine form of worship. Study of mathematics makes you humane. It also helps you imbibe qualities of fairness, justice, truth, responsibility, reliability, consistency and predictability. Its commercial viability is endless.

So that explains my love for the subject chosen by Gods. Plus I decided to become a maths teacher. So I had to spend a good chunk of my waking hours trying to understand why we should study each concept in the maths book and how to do it in the best possible manner. I was never able to excel in maths with the teaching methodologies used by my teachers. So I had to think differently for my students, who I expected would be just like me.

Luckily for me, there seemed to be a paradigm shift in viewing maths teaching when I became a teacher. Sine a few years the focus of the classroom especially the maths classroom has been steadily shifting from a teaching-centric approach to a learning-centric approach (Barr & Tagg, 1995). This shift calls for a rethinking of the traditional classroom, replacing the standard lecture with a blend of pedagogical approaches that more regularly involve the student in the learning process. Under a learning-centered approach, the teacher retains “control” of the classroom, but thought is regularly given to:

(a) how well students will learn the material presented, and

(b) the variety of pedagogically sound methods that may be employed to help the students better understand the core information to be learned.

There is now strong empirical evidence that active involvement in the learning process is vitally important in two areas:

 (a) for the mastery of skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving and

(b) for contributing to the student’s likelihood of persisting to program completion (Braxton, Jones, Hirschy, & Hartkey, 2008; Prince, 2004).

 So I have devised a few key strategies that form part of my core teaching. It includes some pedagogical  tools as well as certain simple tips and techniques which every teacher should have in her toolkit. But more importantly, what I have tried to do as a maths teacher over the last ten years has been to add fun to my classroom teaching. I will like to share those with all the math lovers in my upcoming posts.