This week we interviewed Dr. Arthur Benjamin – a Mathematician and Mathemagician. Now normally ….. Math would not be the kind of topic I would want to spend a lot of time talking about. So let me explain why I chose to pick this as a topic and Dr. Benjamin as our expert for the week.
Click here to listen to the interview.
Really, after about the 3rd Grade, Math and I never got along very well. While there were times when it clicked and I would find it really fun and fascinating …. those times were very rare and easily offset by the times I’d have that unpleasant academic drowning feeling. I remember swearing off Math countless times in High School as I brain strained through another seemingly pointless homework assignment or test. My main question most of the time was …. “When the heck (okay, I didn’t always say heck) am I ever going to use this stuff in real life?”. I realized at a pretty young age I wasn’t going to be an engineer or rocket scientist so I figured once you get past the basic math stuff …. why bother?
Besides I had a calculator and computers are all over so anything that I needed to have answered could probably be found somewhere. Unfortunately, my negative experiences with Math at a younger age kind of soured (or actually, it was more like my “math confidence” was smashed) to Math as I got older. Not unlike, I’m sure, a lot of you reading this right now I just figured that I “wasn’t a Math person” and figured life would go on easily enough with that reality.
The problem is of course that Math is everywhere – though it doesn’t always look the same as it did in my post lunch Algebra class. Statistics, probability, percentages and all the stuff we hear about on the news is easy to manipulate precisely because so few people understand or bother to do the Math. Once I had a child I realized that much of this stuff had a much greater importance than I had at first allowed room for years ago. I don’t like being lied to or swayed by the latest report but quickly realized when you start diving into the numbers there’s some Math education that would have been helpful. I couldn’t help but wonder why so much of my Math classes seemed to be focusing on finding “x” in problem, after monotonous problem (screw X – why does he keep getting lost) when if we would have been figuring out real stats and percentages, etc. in a real world context (can anyone same gambling?) it would have probably kept my attention longer.
So anyway, my son started having a bit of trouble with Math and I was having a hard time breaking out all of his test scores / bell curve scoring / standardized testing scores / etc. (hey my kid is 75 percentile – that’s a C, right?)
Even if you’ve sworn off Math and have no interest in EVER having
someone talk Math to you again ….. trust me, you’ll want to watch this video. IT IS AMAZING….
- Arthur Benjamin | Profile
- Arthur Benjamin’s formula for changing math education
- Mathemagics–the art of mental calculation
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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