Inventing Math

Math query - surveying the factors that could determine a canon

At any point, along your learning life, it is legitimate to ask: What is my relationship to this subject or question? The answer touches upon your history, your assumptions, your talents, your tendencies.

Then match the response to the proposed lesson or course or the larger canon.

A few years ago I taught a math class to a group of children ages 6 - 13. One of the texts that inspired this class was Michael S. Schneider's Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science: A Voyage from 1 to 10.

Michael has recently opened a classroom in a nearby town. Next week we will have a workshop there with kids in grades 6 - 9. In pulling the group together, we queried the parents, What do you hope to get out of this? What are your math interests?

It's interesting to read the responses. (The names are made up.):

James hasn't been doing much formal math recently. But he loves building with legos - he looks at shapes (vehicles, buildings etc) and tries to reconstruct in legos. He also does woodworking. And he really likes working with a compass - making shapes like mandalas and coloring them. ****************************** Lisa has been doing some work with the compass - in line with the Waldorf curriculum - and loves it. She has done work exploring circles, triangles, and quadrilaterals and dividing a circle into 6 equal divisions. That is where we are at the moment. We are currently working on Pythagoras in our Greek studies, so I thought we would do inscribing a pentagon and the Golden Ratio maybe next week. ***************************** And for my own children, I wrote:

I think the emphasis should be on construction. I want that for my two. I am hoping SC will find inspiration to go deeper and resurrect his drawing interests. He enjoyed our visit there. SC loves working on paper with the compass. He loves looking at math in nature. He liked the model of the plant growth.

SE has been taking two art classes recently. I found out today she's drawn to the work of Maxfield Parrish. She sent me some of his posters; they are full of geometric forms.

I am very interested in having SA and SC DO the constructions with the compass. I studied Euclid's Elements in college, then Ptolemy and Copernicus and more. We did lots of constructions and worked as closely with the historical development of the discoveries as possible.