More About Math, a GUEST POST BY JIM

Blog-Buddies, have you been following this earlier GUEST POST,  reading the aura and face of controversial mathematician Dennis DeTurck? I’m so happy to have received this Guest Post from a member of our community who is an avid face reader and also a professional in the field of mathematics. Meet Jim through his first Guest Post here:

A mathematician is, above everything else, a servant of the Truth.  Yes, our Truth does come only with a capital T.  So, there is no room in the core of mathe-magic-land for people who too strongly promote self-interest, as people like De Turck do. 

As an attempt to make a business, I have spent months resurrecting a very old (but very successful) way of doing arithmetic.  It had fallen into disuse for many years, primarily because it arose in an area of the world that is extremely anti-Semitic, and there was a rumor that its originator might have been Jewish. 

I, myself, don’t care if mathematics is Jewish or Hindu, Kenyan or Etruscan.  I only care if it is correct and useful.  For the rest—I actually don’t care.  Perhaps I’m a Philistine, but—I don’t care.  It has nothing to do with the Truth. 

As it happens, there are entirely correct ways of doing arithmetic that are much quicker, much easier, and much less error prone than the ways our schools teach.  These ways are truly golden, even though some of them would help me, too.  So, although it would give me help, it is also the absolute Truth—what more do we want? So, I agree with De Turck in one sense.  It is very good and useful to make decimal representations the “home base” intellectually for little kids. That is the case simply because we can make it quite easy and quite quick for them.  Why not teach them in a way that is cozy and warm and not too overwhelming? 

The teachers told me I was totally stupid.  In no possibly way could I teach the kids in 10 one-hour sessions to go so far.

Given the challenge, I gave them a precis of the method on their own blackboard, and their jaws all dropped.  They saw with great clarity that I could go from dead zero—not even a reliable way to multiply—to being able to do any long division correctly, and I could do it in 10 hours. 

They were stupefied.  You see, it isn’t that I’m smarter and faster.  It isn’t that the kids are smarter and faster.  It’s that the way of doing it is just much easier and quicker.  That’s the magic.  Make your job as easy as it is. 

I have a very solid foundation—a BIG reason that I can say that.  DeTurck, by contrast, is probably (not surely) saying it out of a faddishness. 

You see, it is nice—it’s convenient—it’s homey—to make decimals the de fault thinking for little kids.  On the other hand, if you can DO DECIMALS CORRECTLY (pedagogically correctly), then fractions are simply easy. 

So, I think it a crime and a shame that little kids would not be taught fractions, too, especially if they have a wonderful and simple way to make sense of it all—from their intellectual home base in decimals. 

I do think DeTurck is a strange and unreliable person because he has come to a conclusion, apparently on the basis of faddish and wrong thinking.  He may well be motivated, in this, by a wish to aggrandize himself personally by being unusual. 

To be honest, it always annoys me in the extreme when someone thinks more about themselves than they do about the mathematics.  That is not our way! To make it all REAL—to really serve the Truth—you have to have something to put in place that’s better and easier and clearer and faster.