I'm running for local office in Virginia and proposing a two-year trade school degree that teaches coding and nothing but. Would appreciate any comments and suggestions for how to improve.
This is like learning art history instead of how to draw. How does the "majestic harmony of Platonic solids" help a middle schooler actually do some math? Why should the average sixth grade class learn about Riemann surfaces when most of them haven't even learned what an exponent is yet?
An occasional lecture on a 'fun' topic (or even better, an assigned reading and short essay -- expository writing should be practiced in every subject starting in middle school or earlier) could be motivational. But the author wants to spend "20% of class time opening students' eyes to the power and exquisite harmony of modern math," which he expects would "feed their natural curiosity, motivate them to study more and inspire them to engage math beyond the basic requirements." That's fantasy land. The author sounds like what he is, a UC Berkeley mathematics professor. If students are going to succeed in his college-level courses then they need the basics down cold, which means memorization, repetition, and application to concrete problems. That is, the "stale and boring" stuff.
I've taught a lot of enrichment seminars on Saturdays. They involve "clock arithmetic," or Fermat's little theorem and the basics of RSA encryption for older students, or fractals and ways of computing fractal dimension (and exploring polynomials and iteration and Newton's method), or the differences between geometry on a beach ball, a paper towel center tube, and a piece of paper, or even a bit of Mill and Frege's ideas on how to define a number... Kids love this stuff and they get really excited and they start asking questions about infinity and making connections with their other learning. They have fun, but the topics aren't fun -- they are important and useful! Learning about solids has applications (if that's what you value) to proteins and polymers and all sorts of funky stuff. Check out http://phys.org/news/2014-02-years-mathematicians-class-soli... for some new solids mathematicians have just discovered, inspired by biological research.
Seems better than just learning to hate math. Our current system is certainly not effective in teaching young people to add fractions, which I see as the single greatest indicator for competence in college mathematics (sigh).
Ok, after another moment's thought your argument seems similar to "Why should kids read stories and books? To succeed in writing dissertations they need grammar. All that extra reading of literature should be confined to the side..."
I don't see how teaching the motivations, history, context, and future uses of the current topic of study on Mondays (while using the other four days for more traditional teaching) would be significantly worse than what we do now.
It actually sounds a lot better.
> If students are going to succeed in his college-level courses then they need the basics down cold, which means memorization, repetition, and application to concrete problems
Further, the only time I ever needed it "down cold" was when college professors were insisting I not use a calculator on exams. The rest of the time, I was better off knowing about the context and motivation behind what we were doing, not calculating faster.
This experience is shared by friends of mine who are now pursuing PhDs in the hard sciences or working in finance: the computer does the calculating, but you need to know how to write mathematics, not how to manipulate numbers (by hand).
Nope, no minimum room size for single-room occupancy. Minimum square footage in NYC for 2 people is around 140 square feet I believe. I lived in a 6'x10' space on east 82nd street for years, and paid a fourth what my neighbors paid in rent. Of course that was still more than I pay now for my 2BR in Seattle...
