Everyday Math

Nenita S. Gopez

Socrates’ best known treatise on government does not begin at the beginning. Rather it starts with an idea, the notion of justice, which is somewhere in the middle of the subject. Many who have written about the Socratic method of teaching have identified Socrates questions as the method quintessential characteristics. It is true that he is asked his colleagues to start with what they knew and got them to think in response to his probing . But I do not believe that he uniqueness of his method lies in the dialectic alone.It is rather that he abandoned the conventional way of thinking about a subject. He started somewhere,anywhere at all, much as he might throw a stone out into a river and then systematically pursued the ripples it produced. Thus the discussion of justice, for example, moved into the subject of appropriate rewards, We might not agree with the definition of justice as it finally emerges from the Dialogue, but we have learned a lot about government from the progress of the debate.

In the same way , the sequence in the elementary mathematics I learned may not be the only way to study it. Instead of starting at the beginning, wherever that might be, we could start somewhere in the middle, with an interesting question that inevitably will bring us around to the beginning, or at least to other interesting mathematical ideas. Adults, whose conceptual equipment is fairly sophisticated, might best learn elementary mathematics the second time around by diving in somewhere, anywhere at all,and, assited by an interlocutor, proceeding in everwidening `concentric circles.

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The author is Teacher I at Eliseo-Belen Elementary School- Annex