In my previous post I implied, inadvertently, that we should only teach useful math. That was not my point. My point was that we should not teach math if the effect of that teaching is to cause most students to hate it. Of course if we could teach it such that the effect was to cause most students to love it, I would be all for teaching it!
Maybe every seventh grader should be given a copy of Erich Steiner's The Chemistry Maths Book.
ReplyDeleteI loathed math at school, though I got good grades; I stopped studying it as soon as I could. When I got to college I started Ancient Greek, for which we had a terrific textbook, Chase & Phillips' A New Introduction to Greek. The great thing about this book was that you could look ahead in the book and see all the glamorous, difficult constructions we would one day master. Interspersed were quotations from classical authors, so you were reading real Greek as you went along, and could see you would be able to read more when you had mastered the optative + an, the pluperfect and so on. This was nothing like any book on mathematics used at school: they were all chopped up into little chunks of the subject. Geometry. Algebra I. Trigonometry.
Steiner's book was written to bring a British chemistry undergraduate up to speed on the mathematics necessary for the course. "This book describes the mathematics required for the full range of topics that make up a university degree course in chemistry." It starts out with subjects a student might well encounter in school (algebraic functions, transcendental functions . . . ); it gives examples of the use of each method; footnotes provide historical background to the concept. At any point one can flip through the book and find Maclaurin Taylor series, Fourier series, the matrix eigenvalue problem, all sorts of glamorous topics the reader can expect to cover having worked through the early chapters. I am sure I would have enjoyed school more if I had discovered Maclaurin Taylor series in 7th grade.
The book was typeset in LaTeX, so it has a quiet, clean design that makes it easier to engage with the material than many of the math books used in schools.