Building Bridges

I always loved Mathematics. When I was a small child I would have my mother set sums on scrap pieces of paper – the backs of envelopes, the torn off ends of cereal cartons- and while she beavered away ensuring the house looked like it should have been shining off the cover of Women’s Weekly, I would solve the additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions.

Education was delivered differently. We sang song our tables with no real understanding, drew a working out margin to show the thought processes we had used, wrote pages and pages of numbers, and had daily mental Arithmetic. Calculators, if you discount the abacus which we did not have access to and didn’t even know about in my parochial little school, were not available for general consumption. 

I arrived at boarding school at the start of my fourth year at high school and discovered to my horror that I couldn’t do Maths. Or so the teacher finally convinced me. She was known to have a brilliant mind, but to be an absolute dud in transferring knowledge to fertile minds. I laboured for hours, filled pages and pages with working out, setting out, pondering and solutions. But if the answer was wrong, her response was that I had not done my work. And if I laughed, she smacked me with the ruler.

Moving in to my final years I took the basis course that I could get away with.   At the trial external exams no-one in the class go over 15%. Thank god for my father’s foresight in booking me some private tuition with a local teacher who helped me to get a decent pass and restored some faith in my ability to understand.

At university I found logic –The  highest form of Mathematics they say- an discovered what it was to shift into an entirely new brain space.

There have been some light bulb Mathematical moments over the years. 

One was when the new Mathematics syllabus was being introduced into NSW and I had the regional consultant on my staff. His responsibility was to shift thinking about ‘thinking mathematically’. I went to a professional learning session with him where the teacher asked people to do a particular mathematical problem in their head and then to explain how they had arrived at the answer. There were as many different ways of reaching the solution as there were participants in the room. The second thing the teacher did was give us a solution and ask us to devise the problem- The answer is 7, what is the question? This was my sort of Mathematics.

Another was on reading Steven Hawking's And God Created the Integers, when I discovered that the square in Pythagoras’ theorem (which I know and have applied a thousand times) actually means a physical as well as a mathematical square. The theory suddenly made sense.

I read somewhere that 70% of all scientific knowledge is proven to be inaccurate or downright wrong, over a thirty year period. It doesn’t seem to be the case with Mathematics.

This year I am doing  Year 9 Maths. My granddaughter and I tackle it each week. I’m amazed that as I look at the text book I am seeing exactly the same things I remember from my youth – except it now has cartoons. We’re up to quadratic equations and parabolas. This is where my confidence begins to slide and I get flashbacks to Year 10.  But we are saved by a Year 11 student demonstrating solutions on YouTube. 

And we both get it. 

I  recall asking my high school teacher when we would ever use parabolas in real life. She said I would need it to build bridges. 

Metaphorical or physical? I ponder.

I haven’t built one yet

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This week's Art Works

 

Still creating tea cosies. Now for the Epic Christmas Markets to be held on December 14 and 15. I am applying my mathematical skills, but not a quadratic equation in sight.

Pencil me in for tea