It is definitely Homeschool Wednesday in our household, as Susan has a blog post out about raising active decision makers. My post today will be about math. There are a great many problems with how math is taught in schools but the one I want to focus on is motivation.

Generally math is presented as something you just have to know, i.e. as a requirement for other things. In the lowest form that’s a requirement for passing the upcoming test or eventually the SAT to get into college. This is essentially motivation by fear and a sure fire way to wind up with kids who will drop math as soon as they have a chance to (usually college).

One step up from that is to present Math as a tool for everyday life. The problem with that approach is that it simply doesn’t ring true. Most word problems seem completely arbitrary and kids rightly question when if ever they would use something. Add to this that you can get through many jobs with absolutely minimal math (including being a VC for that matter) and this argument tends to backfire as it is exposed as being reasonably hollow.

What then does work? I think at the end of the day it comes down something quite simple: a teacher who is genuinely in love with mathematics and can use his or her excitement to infect the students. If you want an example of such a teacher at the college level look at Edward Frenkel’s videos on Youtube like this Multivariable Calculus course (start at minute 13 – the link should take you there). Frenkel has a book out called Love & Math that I can highly recommend – I will probably write a separate review for it.

So given that we are doing presentations at home on weekends, I am using that as an opportunity to try and share my own love for this and other subjects. I started this past weekend by just pulling together a bunch of images of spirals to show how they occur in nature and how a very simple formula generates a (logarithmic) spiral which in turn can be related to the Fibonacci sequence. The latter in turn relates to the Golden Ratio which has become a model for beauty in the constructed world. Here is my deck: