Sunshine Day!

It's sunny. I'm wearing a pink pleated miniskirt. The world is a happy place again :)

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I just thought of a beautiful analogy. It stems from my growing frustration with the quality of math education in high schools. I've come in contact with a large range of high school, middle school, and elementary school students lately while tutoring at Sylvan, and with every student I meet, I am less impressed. My overall impression is that these students are being taught by people who have barely begun to comprehend real mathematics for themselves.

My analogy: the mathematics that the majority of college graduates learn is comparable to learning to do a paint by number. There is no sophistication, there is no why, there is no reflection.

I don't blame high school students for hating math. I only liked it because it was easy and I liked patterns. They're being taught to fit shaped pegs into the proper holes by people who tell them that the red block goes in the second hole from the left, without mentioning that they have the same number of sides. I have seen so many lightbulbs go on once I explain something from the bottom up.

So for those of you who "don't like math," you don't know math unless you at least have a respect for the ordered beauty of pure logic.

It's also been raining for the past two and a half weeks.