I have been working with some of our younger learners lately. One of the questions I ask them is, "What do mathematicians do?" This question seems to puzzle them a bit. They believe the answer is far too obvious: "They do math". When I follow up with, "What kind of math?", the usual response comes in the form of a math fact.
While I expect that this would be their answer, it is a very narrow view of the work of mathematicians. Mathematics is a dynamic and varied study of a multi-faceted discipline. Within this discipline is number sense, shape and space, measurement, geometry, data management, patterning, algebra, and probability. All of these strands are interwoven, but we tend to study them as discrete entities. Herein lies one of the reasons students struggle to make sense of mathematics, but I will talk more about that in another post. Our question is: What do mathematicians do? Mathematicians:
When your child comes home, ask them how they were a mathematician today. Hopefully they will be able to see mathematics beyond the math facts and talk about how they persevered with a problem, or the connections they made, or learned a new strategy.
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