How Not To Teach Math

No wonder Dan Meyer is a heralded educator: he’s a pragmatist who would have our kids’ minds be crammed into and restricted to the immediate moment.

  Would he have us look at the universe, look at broad abstractions and large contexts, a la the Greeks and Galileo? No! Heck no! He says to look at the local basketball court — where you can find an application of math no one cares about and no one uses. Such examples are easily dismissed as artificial, since no one ever uses algebra and parabolas to shoot a basket — first-hand experience in the class room tells me so. And such examples are as narrow as the book examples Mr. Meyer is trying to oppose. And such examples do not naturally lead to further thought and investigation. He responds to Platonism by giving us Pragmatism — but they are two sides of the same false coin. We need a rational approach, a la Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Galileo and Gauss.