I appreciate that symbols can be an odd way to represent every day quantitative problems, but I have never had a problem with it. Sure, some people do, but this guy seems really royally pissed off at ordinary mathematics.
I have always been a proponent of having more than one way to teach a certain subject. Studies have shown that different people perceive and interact with information in very different ways. The current "one size fits all methodology" to teaching is lame, to say the least. So a new way of teaching people mathematics is welcome.
But that's not to say the old way didn't work for people like me. If this site kills math so that English majors can cope, I hope someday someone will kill poetry so that I can cope.
(Compacted for space. Original. Use tr '/' '\n' | sed -e 's/^ //' -e 's/ $//' to reëxpand, with a paragraph break being "\n\n". Sorry for the repeated initial edits and such; I had to try to work out the HN formatting rules.)
When humans try to learn symbolic math / How many of them struggle with the test! / The teacher thought of like a psychopath / Dishonoring the realm of human zest
“We must have our emotions!” students cry / “Or else we'll run around like apes, confused / Our brains are built for stories, not to scry / A world of numbers, strangled and abused.”
The teacher sighs, “They always drag their feet / Unless they're cornered, up against the wall. / To risk my job with answers incomplete! / They'll never use it later, after all.”
Then, big surprise! The math is found at fault / Tear-stained by cringing memories of school / “Dispense with all the symbols, and Exalt / Thine Intuition”—that shall be the rule.
Professors' lamentations curse the air / Hung out to dry for calling any bluff / “To shun defective math must be unfair / For surely no one understands the stuff.”
So woe to ye from near the world of forms / Who strain to show the populace your realms / They're immunized against your grand transforms / And explanation only overwhelms.
(Now, please don't take this poem at its word / Or treat it as authoritative fact / Exaggerated story and absurd / Polemic leave specifics inexact
The author's nearly made of symbols, note— / Despite the slow decay of some to blanks / So though he doesn't mean to seem to gloat / He'd rather keep his “freakish” symbols, thanks.)
What's you background? What kind of math did you learn by looking at mathematical symbols rather than natural language explanations? I have hard time envisioning how such a leaning process would work.
There are several pretty obvious problems with mathematical notation.
- Meaningless one-letter names.
- Meaning of notations is usually highly context-dependent. (Exponentiation and matrix inverse operation are denoted in exactly the same way, for example.)
- A lot depends on arbitrary conventions.
- People rarely explain how notations work syntactically. It's all ad-hoc,learn by example.
I have always been a proponent of having more than one way to teach a certain subject. Studies have shown that different people perceive and interact with information in very different ways. The current "one size fits all methodology" to teaching is lame, to say the least. So a new way of teaching people mathematics is welcome.
But that's not to say the old way didn't work for people like me. If this site kills math so that English majors can cope, I hope someday someone will kill poetry so that I can cope.