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Sunday Night Video: 'Between'

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Mad Prophet Ludwig11/01/2009 9:11:03 pm PST

re: #424 spirochete

My father and I have had a theory about teaching math to children for awhile. He has a doc. in Mech. Eng and mine is in medicine. We have long thought that algebra could be taught to 4th graders if done correctly. My daughter just started 5th grade and we have her up to where she gets the idea of functions. I have taught her the importance of tangents, rates of change, graphing and other things. It has morphed into cool fun time for us.

And she really enjoys it.

Honestly it depends on the kid. Some would go much further than that. The point is to keep them engaged and to find problems that are always challenging, but doable for them. This requires one on one attention that comes best from parents or dedicated teachers.

In my experience, I have met exactly three “average” kids who I felt would just never be able to learn calculus. I’ve met hundreds who thought they could never do it however. I started tutoring it at 12.

Now before you think I am just bragging, I’d like to tell you a funny story where I got quite the come-uppance.

Back when I was in graduate school, and I was doing string theory, my advisor was bragging that he had learned calculus at 13. I said nothing, but he knew from my face… well we had a laugh. Please note, the man is so much smarter than me it hurts, and I suspect that when he thinks hard enough things move… Also note, he was setting me up.

A little later, I was invited to his house where I met his then seven year old daughter.

She was very polite and very sweet and she said that her dad told her I would be glad to talk about math with her. I said sure! What math would you like to talk about?

She said Laurent series. She went on to say that calculus was easy, but complex analysis was tricky.

My advisor laughed at me. I laughed too.