Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Numbers Are Beautiful or Ugly

Some numbers I love, some I hate. I have all sorts of reasons for these biases of mine, but only some are based in logic. Others are based in emotion. I tend to blame the calendar for the dates of the early traumatic deaths of relatives when I was a child and had to view their bodies in coffins.

But numbers, rationally, have no inherent biases.

They are actually simply sequences humans comprehended many millennia ago.

How you express numerical sequences really matters. In the East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) there is a superior series of word choices. *That* is why students from those countries appear to be better at math than our kids here in America.

English, which in my opinion is the best and most expressive language on earth, does not have a logical numerical language. We force all sorts of awkward things to happen, like "eleven" or "twelve."

These unfortunate choices stifle our kids as they struggle to embrace math, whether they think they like it or not.

Language confines our national ability to excel at math. That is my point.

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