<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Walter Bender <<a href="mailto:walter.bender@gmail.com">walter.bender@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html?_r=1&ref=opinion" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html?_r=1&ref=opinion</a> </blockquote></div>Excellent point of view. Thanks for sharing this. Mathematicians in charge of the schools and universities maths departments usually argue that we cannot teach newer math concepts to students that have not studied all the algebra and calculus that comes before. They say that all that background is needed to properly achieve higher ideas without turning them into poetry. I agree in that point, a math object is nothing in itself if not accurately defined, not accurate, but is it a problem if your are not going to devote your life to maths? Concepts, structures and procedures for handling complexity simpler abstract ways than reality is -in my point of view- the value of math in education.. Emphazising rigour in detriment of including newer and more difficult topics is the actual choice, at least in Uruguay I -as a teacher- really would prefer being allowed to discuss interesting math ideas than forcing people to built a hard and difficult construction that leaves people out of any of the maths in use in the last 100 years and not loving the subject in most of the cases. ----- This kind of changes will not start in little places like uruguay, so please go ahead and good luck!!