School mathematics as a special kind of mathematics英文资料.pdfVIP

School mathematics as a special kind of mathematics Anne Watson University of Oxford Introduction In this paper I argue that school mathematics is not, and perhaps never can be, a subset of the recognised discipline of mathematics, because it has different warrants for truth, different forms of reasoning, different core activities, different purposes, and necessarily truncates mathematical activity. In its worst form, it is often a form of cognitive bullying which neither develops students’ natural ways of thinking in advantageous ways, nor leads obviously towards competence in pure or applied mathematics as practised by adult experts. The relationship of school mathematics to adult competence is similar to the relationship between doing military drill and military leadership; between being made to eat all your spinach and becoming a chef; between being forced to practise scales and becoming a pianist. There are some connections, but they are about having a focus on a narrow subset of semi-fluent expertise in negative social and emotional contexts, without full purpose, context and meaning. That some people become effective military leaders, beautiful pianists or inspiring cooks is interesting, but what is more interesting is the fact that most people who go through these early experiences do not: instead they merely follow orders, or hate green vegetables, or give up practising their instruments. The image around which I hang this paper is the cafeteria at the heart of the mathematics faculty at Cambridge. It is a large room with coffee at one end, small tables covered with papers and laptops, each surrounded by four chairs, students (mainly male), some undergraduate, some graduate, pure and applied, some alone, some in casual groups, some in self-organised study groups with their own internal disciplines and plans, taking time, talking, arguing. There are many furrowed brows, people leaning forward with arms and hands working away to express