Math in Germany Concordia College数学在德国的协和学院.pptVIP

Any Questions/Comments? Last year, I spent 10 months at the University of Kassel in Germany. There I took a variety of classes in German, literature, and math. The math classes I attended were linear algebra, geometry, and two math education classes, one that dealt with education in general and the other that dealt specifically with teaching at the secondary school level. Like many people who live abroad, I experienced culture shock as I learned how to go about my daily routine in a different environment. I needed to learn how to use the tram, how to get money from an ATM and, most importantly, how to get a shopping cart at the grocery store. Of course, the most obvious difference between my math classes at Concordia and my math classes in Kassel was the language. Yes, even though math is a universal language of numbers, I had to learn that “linear unabh?ngig” meant linear independent, that “senkrecht” meant perpendicular and my favorite word “hintereinanderausführung” meant composition. But I also had to learn the German structure for writing proofs and how to explain my answers to fellow students. I realized how much language is involved in math when I was supposed to analyze the following story problem and predict some mistakes that a student might make and I couldn’t even figure out what the problem was asking! Luckily, the German students that I met were very helpful when I didn’t understand something and they would correct my mistakes in German grammar and pronouciation. In this way, even though these classes weren’t strictly German language classes, I still learned a lot about the language and I even got a new perspective on some mathematical ideas. For example, once on a test, I was describing about the area of some shapes and instead of writing the German word for area “Fl?che”, I wrote “Flasche” which means bottle. Only later do I find out that I’m not the only person to have made this mistake. Have you ever hear about a Klein bottle? Its a