[greentxt]

"ask whether, in the urban Indian context, the arithmetic skills that are used in market transactions transfer to the more abstract maths skills taught in school."

I have a hard time with this notion of 2 different maths. I wonder if it is specific to the "urban Indian context" as the authors seem to suggest in their literature review -- I didn't pursue their references. Intuitive math that is not associated with memorization sounds like g.

[dkarl]

My father, who had a PhD in history, had exactly the kind of math skills the study describes in Indian children. With ordinary arithmetic, he was fast and accurate. Money and baseball statistics were no problem. Algebra? No fucking way. As soon as x and y were involved, he struggled. Strike that: he wasn't able to struggle. He wasn't able to engage the gears that would allow him to apply effort.

One time, when I was in high school and already contemplating majoring in math in college, he told me that a math professor had told him that in modern mathematics you didn't have to know what you were talking about. All their theories could apply to anything. Like you could pick up a paper, and they're talking about X, and you could decide X was Donald Duck! He told me this like it was an exotic glimpse into another culture -- he knew that it looked ridiculous to him, but he also knew that it probably looked ridiculous because he didn't understand what he was looking at. You could tell that one part of his brain felt like it was a gotcha moment for the mathematicians, but another part of his brain could see that they weren't embarrassed about it, and he taught WWII every year so he knew that Donald Duck could also be artillery shells or atoms. He had that last defense of common sense that stops people from embracing crank theories about other fields of study.

This was a guy who taught recent history and accepted the abstract ideological struggles of the 20th century without blinking, but when you told him that someone could write an entire doctoral thesis about X without knowing concretely what X was, it was such an alien idea that it was out of range of his curiosity.

From this I would be confused about how he got through high school math, except that my sister, who also has a PhD in history, explained how she got through calculus: she studied all the homework problems and all the solutions over and over until she had memorized them, and she reproduced the patterns on the tests. At our high school, that was good enough for As. In college, it was good enough for Bs.

(It makes me feel a tiny bit more empathy for the condescending mathphobes who denigrate virtually all school mathematics work as pointless, deadening rote learning. For many of them it might be a sincere belief. They might have actually experienced it that way and never experienced any of the worthwhile aspects of it. But, on the other hand, they should have the grace my dad did to stop short of declaring it worthless just because they didn't get it.)

[greentxt]

It is very sad to me that so many people can't enjoy that aspect of math. I was lucky, pbs used to show math stuff to kids, so it was fun and interesting before it was a school thing. Of course a huge part of math learning is just hatd work for most if us. But kids should taste the delight first, it motivates them to do the less delightful practice.