The Myth of the Difficulty in Learning Mathematics
I was a very intelligent boy at the age of 14 and became an excellent student in Mathematics.
This happened after having been a student until then before the age of 14 who was only reasonable, almost mediocre in learning Mathematics.
It wasn't that I didn't like it, on the contrary, I was very curious and believed in the myth that knowing Mathematics was enough to be intelligent and a skilled connoisseur of the logic of the universe, everything would be just a matter of following the path of rationality and that's it, only a person with cognitive dysfunction or heuristic dissonance was not qualified to learn Mathematics.
In other words, only a stupid person cannot learn and understand Mathematics.
Since the times of the Greek academy, it was placed at the entrance "Do not enter here anyone who does not know Geometry" which was the most inclusive discipline of Mathematics, so for the Greek philosophers Mathematics or Geometry was the formula for understanding the universe.
From an early age, I was a skeptic about science, religion, and philosophy, and I believed in the ideal of freedom of thought and that anyone free from prejudices and mythological fantasies would be a scientific thinker and protagonist, endowed with neutral thinking and always ready to assimilate new ideas without any a priori restrictions.
This is the ideal of scientific skepticism, science completely neutral to ideology, prejudices, and dogmas, even those most dear to science.
When I read a book donated by my father, an army sergeant with a degree in Social Sciences, talking about study techniques, I realized that Mathematics, like any other discipline, follows rules and that in fact Mathematics is just a closed set of norms and rules, some of which are demonstrable and others are absolutely ad hoc, are dogmas and are merely deductive.
Mathematics is a set of rigorous norms and precepts that only work if you follow them in a methodical and disciplined manner, just a set of procedures linked together as if it were a cake recipe or a Boy Scout manual.
My frustration was enormous, all the enchantment I had built for Mathematics was gone, and when I was in the third year of Electrical Engineering at university studying the 32 methods for solving differential equations, there was no longer any illusion regarding the belief that Mathematics measures intelligence or that it deserves some specific skill that required some genius. All you need to do is know the algorithms and follow the rules and norms of operation and that's it, mathematically, mechanically, methodically, you can solve most Mathematics problems.
Mathematics is nothing more than a set of operations on a set of deterministic rules that are applied mechanically, methodically and rigorously to solve problems previously formatted to obtain the teleologically expected results by the tautology of equations and inequalities that always represent both sides of the equal sign: the right side or the left side of the formula or system.
This clever and interesting guessing game is nothing more than a manipulation of the language of Mathematics within patterns and rules that do not require creativity or intelligence; only discipline and method.
Frustrating.
Learning Math is like learning a new language.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário