[Edu-sig] A fact on the ground

[Michal Wallace]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Kirby Urner wrote:

> I think any fork in the road between being a "math head" or a
> "programmer" could/should come later in life.  In K-12 at least,
> we don't want to overspecialize.  Synergy, integration, making
> connections, is what's good for young and growing neural nets.

Maybe... But.. You could just as easily say programming ought to be
tied in with writing. In my whole career a professional software
developer, I've used next to no math. I think the "hardest" thing I've
had to do was calculate a weighted average once. In my shopping cart
program, and all the libraries underneath it (a fairly large amount of
code), there's one procedure to calculate sales tax, and a couple
places where I add things together, and that's it. That's pretty
typical of business software, I think.

On the other hand, every single day I'm writing code that tries to
explain ideas a logical, easy to read manner. Kinda like those
"how-to" essays we always had to write in school. Most of the time for
me software has a lot more in common with rhetoric than with math.

Programming should definitely be used to teach math, and I really
admire your work in doing so.. But programming is about modelling, and
expressing those models in code. Math's just one model out of many.

Haha.. I just had a vision of high school quarterbacks writing python
scripts for those x-o play diagrams they always draw, but
animated.. It could even suggest how the opposition would respond.. :)

Cheers,

- Michal
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