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Understanding the world through mathematics

    mathematics

     

    Understanding the world through mathematics

     

    The body of knowledge and practice is known as mathematics is derived from the contributions of thinkers throughout the ages and across the globe. It gives us a way to understand patterns, quantify relationships, and predict the future. Mathematics helps us understand the world — and we use the world to understand mathematics.

    The world is interconnected. Everyday mathematics shows these connections and possibilities. The earlier young learners can put these skills to practice, the more likely we will remain an innovative society and economy. 

    Algebra can explain how quickly water becomes contaminated and how many people in a third-world country drinking that water might become sickened on a yearly basis. A study of geometry can explain the science behind architecture throughout the world. Statistics and probability can estimate death tolls from earthquakes, conflicts, and other calamities around the world.

    It can also predict profits, how ideas spread, and how previously endangered animals might repopulate. mathematics is a powerful tool for global understanding and communication. Using it, students can make sense of the world and solve complex and real problems. Rethinking mathematics in a global context offers students a twist on the typical content that makes the mathematics itself more applicable and meaningful for students.

    For students to function in a global context, mathematics content needs to help them get to global competence, which is understanding different perspectives and world conditions, recognizing that issues are interconnected across the globe, as well as communicating and acting inappropriate ways.

     

    mathematics

     

    In mathematics, this means reconsidering the typical content in atypical ways, and showing students how the world consists of situations, events, and phenomena that can be sorted out using the right mathematics tools.

    Any global contexts used in mathematics should add to an understanding of mathematics, as well as the world. To do that, teachers should stay focused on teaching good, sound, rigorous, and appropriate mathematics content and use global examples that work.

    For instance, learners will find little relevance in solving a word problem in Europe using kilometers instead of miles when instruments already convert the numbers easily. It doesn’t contribute to a complex understanding of the world. 

    Mathematics is often studied as pure science but is typically applied to other disciplines, extending well beyond physics and engineering. For instance, studying exponential growth and decay (the rate at which things grow and die) within the context of population growth, the spread of disease, or water contamination, is meaningful.

    It not only gives students a real-world context in which to use the mathematics, but helps them understand global phenomena – they may hear about a disease spreading in India, but can’t make the connection without understanding how fast something like cholera can spread in a dense population.

    In fact, adding a study of growth and decay to lower level algebra – it’s most often found in algebra II – may give more students a chance to study it in the global context than if it’s reserved for the upper-level mathematics that not all students take

     

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