Math from grade 1 to about freshman year of college is all about calculating. It's pretty boring and you tend to make a lot of silly mistakes, requiring lots of erasing. It's also not particularly difficult (at least conceptually). Because of my experience erasing lines and lines of work when forgetting to carry an exponent around, and because I have never had to go back and refer to previous work, I had done all math in pencil.
"Real" math is different. Homework problems are sentences; solutions are paragraphs. Instead of having to crunch numbers, you have to grapple with an idea. This semester, Csaba (the animated Number Theory professor) said something the first day that really struck me:
Never use pencil when you're doing math, only pen. If you make a mistake, don't scribble it out so you can never read it again. Just cross it out with a single line. That way, if you try a new method and realize that your first approach was right, it is still there on the page to remind you. If the idea was sound, but it didn't work for that problem, it might work for another problem. If it turns out that it was nonsense, you just won't look at it ever again.It struck me as an interesting philosophy, so I tried it out the first day. I haven't looked back.
Webpages that may or may not be relevant:
When writing - so many times I regretted the fact that I deleted a sentence or a paragraph and could never go back to it again... Luckily, you don't do math on a computer...
ReplyDeleteIn your "from grade 1" paragraph, at the end, make that say "pencil"...
ReplyDelete"I had done all math in pen."
...or if that's not what you meant to write, I'm totally confused.
Miss you!
Actually, since the 3rd grade, I've been doing all my homework in frindle.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I give you permission to proofread all of the blog.
Frindle! I remember that book. I liked it.
ReplyDeleteAlso you. I remember you. I like you.
Both my pens have run out of ink.
ReplyDelete