Shad’s Blog for Week #6
Wanted: A new name for “Mathematics”
Isn’t it time we replaced the word “Mathematics” with another word?
Mathematicians who created the earliest curricula for dispensing it among young minds, stuffed it with exclusive and inclusive definitions fortified by formal language. The language often sounds like Latinised legal jargon: incomprehensible, intent on mystifying things instead of clarifying them. Over the centuries “Mathematics” has increasingly taken on a forbidding image, like a fortress in a spooky forest, standing ominously against a dark and stormy sky. The knowledge that lurks within it feels inaccessible, a preserve of those who wear cloaks and mantles, and speak in riddles. It evokes fear of a sort associated with authority and power, which in turn is somehow associated with deep, penetrating minds. Not kind, gentle and generous ones but the unfriendly kind, the kinds that speak in stern voices.
Mathematics’ earliest association goes back to those who performed curious calculations to predict impending doom, warn of catastrophes, wars and plagues, and help the powerful ward off evil with the magical power of certain numbers and patterns. So the ancient priests and Mathematicians injected into Mathematics, for generations to follow, a fearful dread among ordinary folks who have always been in awe of their other-worldly omnipotence.
That power, centuries old, can still be felt in the haloed halls of Mathematicans’ culture. It has been transmitted to the school curriculum centuries ago and now contaminates it with its dark academic spirit of formalism and linguistic mystifications of the simplest Mathematical notions. Its adult, male-dominated precepts and perceptions define the context from which it has drawn its metaphors, terms, examples…..and even teachers.
The opaque, disconnected world of the past, anchored in the permanence and certainty of its conjectures and truths, has changed considerably since. Today, in startling contrast, the world is an increasingly connected one, made more complex and uncertain by a continuous flood of changing information. Soon it will be filled with gadgets and gizmos that will speak to each other within an “Internet of Things”. Already, today’s technology can let you open your front door from 20 feet away with a breezy wave of your hand. Three seconds after you enter your house, the water starts to boil to your desired temperature, a robot takes off your shoes and a foot-rest rises from the floor before your chair. The armrest has an embedded device that can be removed to scan messages sent and received, check out home security, select your favourite TV show, check if your coffee is ready, make a call, see where you left your glasses, obtain a brief health report, read your favourite book, or catch up on all international developments that have a direct bearing on your personal or professional life. In short it can keep you informed of every aspect of your life over which you exercise your personal executive power.
All the how-to for the above is already within reach. It conjures up a fragmented, divided world at one level, but a seriously connected one at another. A complex, sometimes paradoxical, mesh (or mess?) of choices and decisions confront critical decision-making on travel options, work, jobs, relationships, enterprise, international economy, and family issues. Technology does not just connect people. It also connects their problems, their rights and wrongs.
What does the word “Mathematics”, with its pre-medieval connotations and its medieval associations have to do with this world? The word “Mathematics” in education ought to be re-contextualized as a complex body of knowledge for transmission to our children throughout their school lives. Such a task should be trusted to teachers and educators who can give it a fresh new start. Perhaps that fresh start should begin with a new name.
Like Neuristics, for example. It fuses into a single word : (a) number patterns (b) numerical reasoning (c) heuristics (or stratagems for developing problem-solving approaches) and (d) developmental neurology that indicates substrates of Mathematical learning cues in the evolving human brain.
Neuristics sounds a lot more contemporary, derived from the body and spirit of today’s (and tomorrow’s) world. It is sharp, brief, neutral sounding, and embedded in our reality like micro-chips in our environment. It is evocative of something new and exciting e.g. the study of a discipline that teaches you how to think in ways that integrate (a) Connection-making (b) Pattern matching and correspondence (c) Quantification and Measurement (d) Functional Relationships (e) Solving for Unknown Quantities (f) Analysis and Synthesis (g) Numerical reasoning and so on . One could easily come up with a list that can serve as the foundation for defining a new curriculum . It would have something in common with “Soft Psychology” as much as with the “Hard Sciences” in so far as Neuristics guides our understanding of reality from the point of view of devising innovative interventions (not always inventions) to produce desirable changes. (Is it any wonder that “hard” and “difficult” are semantic siblings?)
Neuristics evokes nothing of the dread and horror associated with the word “Mathematics”. The feeling associated with the M-word is pervasively negative in the minds of learners. The anxiety it generates is generic and global. All the glitzy, gimmicky, animated depictions of it to project user-friendliness on the computer cannot disguise its essential, intimidating complexity. If anything, such transparent attempts to sweeten what is essentially understood, accepted and acknowledged to be a bitter pill, only serves to reinforce old fears. Why after all would the Disneysian power of high-tech be harnessed to dilute Math(s)’ unsavoury taste if it didn’t really nauseate the brain? From inside these fancy new techie-bottles, the sour old wine of numbers and definitions, the same old traditional templates, compressed with oppressive abstractions, (cleverly disguised) and the antiquated language that defines them…..all these inky dollops from the past keep spilling out, staining one’s contemporary consciousness with Neanderthal fears. Only those exceptional Math(s)-smart kids are spared this primordial sense of doom and defeat that the M-word invokes in most minds.
A new-generation program of Neuristics will need to break away from past traditions and develop novel and new ways of communicating Mathematical concepts. I suspect that it will initially have to go the CLSO way in which the program-design’s interface with the user (not teachers) gently guides much of the learning process. The Neuristics teacher will (a) supervise the learning process, (b) remove impediments to learning by designing absent communicative materials (c) diagnose the reasons why a learner is experiencing difficulties based on a deeper knowledge of his/her personality and patterns of learning . All new-generation programs like CLSO should bring to convergence three aspects essential to neuristic learning: (a) re-organizing the hierarchical structure of the neuristic content in new, flexible ways (b) employing highly communicative educational designs for displaying neuristic concepts and operations and (c) making the design and content of Neuristics congruent with the mind’s learning patterns.
Mathematicians please note: we need you increasingly,for consultancy ! J
Okay. Snap! End of bubble! You can return to your dreary old world of Math(s) now!
Stay keyed-in-and-connected!Until next week.
Shad