Reading & response: From Indigenous mathematician Ed Doolittle

By -
Doolittle (2018) Off the grid. In S.Gerofsky (Ed.) Geometries of liberation. New York: Palgrave, pp. 101-121.

Please read this very interesting piece and write a blog post on it by Sunday, December 8 at 8:00 PM. Suggested prompts:
  • Talk about 2 or 3 'stops' you had in reading this: things that stopped you, surprised you, etc.
  • Think about how this paper might offer new approaches to Indigenizing mathematics curriculum and teaching. Does it challenge or stretch any of your ideas around this?


The author questions the grid concept "We know well the benefits of using the grid, but what are the dangers? What are the preconditions for the grid which may not be satisfied
in real-world applications? What are the extremes at which the grid can fail? What are the consequences of failure? And what are the alternatives?" This questioning process makes me think of the development of Non-Euclidean geometry which also starts from questioning the truth of Euclid's 5th postulate, then think of the alternative types of geometry.

It is very interesting to read the Saskatchewan's grid system as one of the failure of the grid. I went to high school in Saskatoon but never noticed this fun fact. The curvature of the earth plays a big role in our daily life.

 I think indigenous perspectives can be brought into education as a way to teach students to think out of the "grid". As an example given by the author, ancient Indigenous tradition of string figures can be used in modern education to teach concepts in geometry and algorithms. I think students will benefit from seeing the same topic in two different perspectives.

Comments

  1. AmandaDecember 9, 2019 at 11:23 AM

    I agree with you that students benefit from working with different perspectives for the same topic. It's interesting that you have lived in Saskatchewan. Grid based roads have more challenges in BC!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Reading - Thinking of Math Textbooks

By -
Here is an interesting critical-thinking take on the ways that math textbooks may 'speak to' their readers (assuming that people actually do read and listen to math textbooks...) Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann on math textbooks and the ways they may position their readers Please read this thought-provoking article and blog on: •How you respond to the examples given here -- as a teacher and as a former student •What are your thoughts about the reasons for using/ not using textbooks, and the changing role of math textbooks in schools? The author gave an example that TMM's initial "investigation" whose instruction included much more exclusive imperatives (or "scribbler" imperatives such as "write", "calculate" and "copy" ) than inclusive imperatives ("thinker" imperatives like "describe", "explain", "prove"). I agree that it is appropriate to scribble before thi...
Read more

Wordy Puzzle (due Sept. 25)

By -
Image
From the first sentence we knows that "my father's son" is the speaker. So, "that man's father is my father's son" can be converted to that man's father is me who is the speaker. So, that man is speaker's son. The way the speaker used to illustrate their relationship is not straight forward, which makes this problem difficult and interesting.
Read more

The Wine & Rats Puzzle

By -
Image
Solution: We can use the following Binary number system to solve this puzzle. First, number the bottles from 1 - 1000. Convert the bottle number to binary. Number the rats D1, D1, D2, ...., D9 representing the binary digits. Then, rats will drink wine in the following rule: Binary number of bottle 1 is 0000000001. Rat D1 will drink wine from bottle 1 Binary number of bottle 5 is 0000000101. Rats D1 and D3 will drink wine from bottle 6. Binary number of bottle 12 is 0000001100. Rats D3 and D4 will drink wine from bottle 12. ..... Hence, by seeing which rats have died, we can figure out which bottle is poisoned. For example: If rats D3 and D4 die, then we know the bottle 12 is poisoned. 1000 bottles can be represented with 10 binary digits (binary number of bottle 1000 is 1111101000) , and we have 10 rats (each rat represents 1 digit), so we are able to use 10 rats to test 1000 bottles of wine.
Read more