Mathematics

ME

I never really understood math.  I could add, subtract, multiply, divide and use pi somehow in an equation to find the circumference of a circle (if I could remember the formula).  Distance = rate X time is one that I usually remember.

Math was always something that was done.  "Do the math".  That is how it was taught by the nuns.  The function of math is the doing.  The structural relationships of things that are used in the doing (the numbers) seemed to be an after-thought in teaching that had to be accepted on faith. 

Even in high school physics, the teacher, Marvin Shanks, taught it on the "what it does" basis.  He would say so often "you take and do this" that it was a joke among us that was often used to explain things like: You take your feet and put them on the floor and that is how you stand up.  All we had to say after a while was "take and do this" and everyone laughed.  Tom was the one that used the phrase so often, imitating Marvin Shanks so well it became his joke because he said it so well.

The only bright spot in grade school education was diagramming sentences.  I loved it.  I put the nouns on a line and everything was structured in relation to the noun.  The thing came first and the doing, as well as the modifiers came second.  To me it was the way to learn stuff.  I always wanted to learn that way but was stuck in a system that was oriented to teaching the doing.  Maybe that is what people mean today when they say that the education system remains aimed at teaching for an industrial society.  Producing workers to do things on an assembly line.

Today I read this and was determined to understand it.  While the headline was about the market crash the math was about the things that were behind the crash.  It described the things in the equation in the forefront.  Not what the market did as a result.  The explanation excited me.  I understood it but not the equations.

So I went to Wikipedia and started with "Equation"  then went to "Equality" then "Differential Equation" they are all the conceptual "things" of the system.  Maybe the first day of math in school was a definition of term but there was no explanation, maybe I missed the first day.  The rest of the school year was learning by doing something with the things.  Did I miss the boat.

It was not my way to learn and stubbornly I was not going to learn that way.  I failed to understand a lot of things because I want to know what a thing is and what its parts are.  The general world is more structured on what things do and the pyramiding of actions to get things done.  Two different ways of approach.  What a thing is.  What a thing does.  That is why I like the object oriented approach to programming.  That is why I want to know what money is.  Then I can figure what it does.

Money is a lot of things.  It is information.  It is decision making. It is a social media.  Finally, I see today that money is mathematics.  Specifically the mathematics of the things primarily behind what money does.  All the economics math models bore me because they are employed by those that understand the things behind them to explain to the rest of us what those things do. 

Politics is the same.  So much focus on what it does, not what it is.  I doubt few politicians understand what it is.  They run on what it does.  At the Palin stupidity extreme that is all they understand and got that wrong.

I might have been a great mathematician!  Maybe not.  But I can go back to school to learn it my way.  The school of the internet were I can find the description and the nature of the thing and how all the things relate before looking at what they do.

In high school I got an old Ford flathead V8 engine from Terry's dad.  I took it apart in the murder room did some things to it, reassembled it and returned it to him.  I did the same with a Wisconsin engine that I got from Judy's dad.  I learned by working with the parts.

Conceptual things like credit cards, mortgages, money used to be hard things to take apart to their component pieces.  Hard to understand by looking at the information that was more readily apparent:  The being what they did.  The internet now makes these complex conceptual things easier to take apart, relate the pieces.  That is what I am doing on the internet.  Taking apart V8 engines called money, knowledge, computer programs all the other "things" in life to see what makes them tick.

Hooray for the internet!  Things are still hard to understand but at least I can gain the understanding in my own way which makes them possible for me to understand, to the best of my ability. Ability that was handicapped by a round peg in a square hole approach in early education.

Education for the new age is different.  Choice is offered on the internet.  Not so much choice is offered in formal education which is lagging with legacy thought.

Back to Wikipedia to explore things that link to mathematics!