The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.
Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.
All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.
Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.
Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?
Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?
Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.
The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.
Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.
All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.
Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.
Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?
Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?
Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.