I'm going to be a literary analyst here, just for a moment.
The title on the cover of the book is for merely attracting kids. The real title of the booI'm going to be a literary analyst here, just for a moment.
The title on the cover of the book is for merely attracting kids. The real title of the book, actually, isn't explicitly mentioned anywhere in the book.
However, teachers of English literature can see through a poet's "the curtains were blue, why so I have not a clue", that the reason behind the curtains' being blue was actually the poet's sadness, though the poet himself never said so.
As you read this book, you see something similar. It screams in every page "You guys don't have the faintest idea how to teach maths", "math education done right", and so on. The real title, hence, I believe, is "A boring teacher's guide to the fun world of mathematics". Recommended for kids, yes. But much more recommended for those who teach kids....more
First let me tell you what this book ISN'T about. It's not a book that will teach you about relativity or quantum mechanics or any other area of physiFirst let me tell you what this book ISN'T about. It's not a book that will teach you about relativity or quantum mechanics or any other area of physics or science. If you're going in expecting a bunch of explanations about how the world works - this ain't that book.
What, then, is the point of reading this book, titled "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", if it doesn't tell you any of the fun stuff?
You see, we spend all these years in school "learning" science. We call ourselves scientific and all, but no - we ARE NOT. All we do is take the works of the previous scientists for granted, as long as they don't directly contradict our own beliefs and prejudices. But science isn't about blind belief. It's about constantly doubting your understanding of nature. In fact that's what experimental science is all about - finding data that our theories can't explain, leading to better theories. We tend to think of science as "the subject that gives you all the answers". No, that's not science. That's never science. Science is about constant questioning of your previous assumptions.
Feynman puts it this way: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." But that's not all. If you just keep on believing that the experts are wrong - that ain't science either. You have to TEST your (and the experts') beliefs to call your opinion scientific. And that testing too has to be rigorous, eliminating biases, minimizing false positives and all that.
We have a tendency of calling everything "scientific" nowadays, because that gives things a humongous shield of credibility, though a major portion of those are, in reality, pseudoscience. They tell you "this is a scientifically proven way of teaching best" "this is a scientifically proven way of pooping" or stuff like that, but most of those are poorly experimented - people just believe those are true with little asking for evidence. This book serves as a guide for living in this world, for understanding why "unscientific" isn't always bad. This teaches you the REAL essence of the scientific method - which probably was never taught to you in school. A must read for any man wishing to live in this era of science where distinguishing between real science and pseudoscience has become tougher than ever for the lay people....more
Presumably, something like this was said by the Prince of math, the greatest of all time, Mister Carl Gauss"What we need are notions, not notations."
Presumably, something like this was said by the Prince of math, the greatest of all time, Mister Carl Gauss. What's interesting is that after hundreds of years of scientific and technological leaps, this quote still is as relevant as the day it was born.
Education was "invented" as we needed ideas about how the world works, and it would be foolish to waste time working out from scratch something that already has been worked out by someone. In simple terms, education was supposed to be a "file sharing app" of sorts, where the file would be "mechanisms of action" of the world. Why do we need that? Well, if we know how the world works, we can live better, and perhaps try to tweak those nuts and bolts here and there if we need to.
Somewhere along the line, traditional education became more about mindlessly storing data without ever really connecting the dots, without ever seeing the bigger picture. We became more obsessed with NOTATIONS, i.e., the names, when we should have been spending time on the NOTIONS, i.e., the ideas.
Like other fields of knowledge, mathematics too has suffered this. Well, it still is. Schools just teach you to memorize a constellation of rules with no insights into what they MEAN, why we need them, what their connection is with the world, and how they work. That just sucks the fun out of math. People spend their whole lives believing that it's an esoteric language that's only supposed to be understood by the 'priests'. Yet others think it's just jiggling around symbols that have little meaning, in ways that have little meaning.
But that isn't the case at all. We humans are built to be pattern recognition devices. And mathematics is, at its core, the study of patterns. The ART of patterns. We love patterns. Then why should we fear math? We are infatuated with detective shows fitting in different pieces of a puzzle through pure reasoning. Then why fear math?
Sadly though, most teachers and books fail to represent math like a Sherlock Holmes movie - aesthetic, breathtaking, and simply pleasurable.
But this book isn't like them.
If what I've said about math hasn't convinced you to love it yet, this book will....more
Nice little science book for kids. But has some interesting stories that really amazed me. Explores a variety of science topics from earthquakes to raNice little science book for kids. But has some interesting stories that really amazed me. Explores a variety of science topics from earthquakes to rainbows, starting off with a few myths surrounding them, finishing off with an actual explanation of the phenomena....more
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