Whenever I work with my kids on math, I invariably confront the gap between where they are coming from and where I am coming from. This is hard for me, because math is a secondary, not a primary interest for me.
Words and stories are my primary concern, so naturally I quite easily gravitate to reinforcing their own interests in words and stories. All six are great writers and story-tellers, BTW, but only a few are "good" at math.
In that context, let's consider Fibonacci numbers.
They represent one of the lovely mathematical patterns that I'd forgotten about until recently when a math-teacher friend reminded me during a visit to a coffeehouse on Clement Street.
Here's how they work -- the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two.
Thus, these are Fibonacci numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144...Do you copy? At the higher levels, they become more interesting and complex, and therefore useful in algorithms.
But what's more interesting and complex about Fibonacci numbers to me is their occurrence in nature. They show up in the branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, such as in pineapples, artichokes, ferns and pine cones.
Therefore, it's worth considering when and where they were "discovered" by our ancestors. The Italian mathematician Fibonacci wrote about them in 1202, although Indian mathematicians had described them even earlier than that.
The very concept of an algorithm, so central to everything we experience these days online, dates back to an ancient Persian mathematician.
Which brings me back to my main point, which is the beauty of math. I struggle day after day to try and find ways to get my teenagers to appreciate math more than they seem willing to do.
Hour after hour, I labor with my youngest, waiting for the moment that a light bulb goes off over her head and she sees that math is not just an irritation, but music, art, design. Things that she truly cares about.
It's just so hard to bridge the gap from onerous tasks like homework to the world of Fibonacci numbers, or for that matter, Pascal's Triangle.
But that's a story for another day.
1 comment:
this blog left me smiling- my son sees the 'music and beauty' in math and gets very frustrated because I do not see it- it is a necessary evil for me-
I do remember though in high school when the light bulb went on and I was able to GRASP the concepts and thus it made studying easier- however, I cannot say that I see the beauty in it- although, this post made me catch a glimmer of the beauty and made me see that there is hope for me yet!!!!
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