Everyday Math

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 Socratic method of teaching have identified Socrates’questions as the method’s quintessential characteristics. It is true that he 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 the uniqueness of his method lies in the dialectic alone. It is rather that he abandoned the controversial 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 tasks and appropriate rewards. We might not agree with the definition of justice and 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 which elementary mathematics is 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 ground to the beginning, or at least to other interesting mathematical ideas. Adults , whose conceptual equipment is already fairly sophisticated, might best learn elementary mathematics the second time around b diving in somewhere, anywhere at all, and, assisted by an informed interlocutor, proceeding in ever –widening concentric circle.

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The author is SST-1 at Sto. Tomas National High School Sto. Tomas, Sasmuan