Starting to read it, fantastic stuff. One initial comment:
One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I’d have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.
(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they’re watching, and crossing their arms tighdy, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less ‘involved’, less ‘subjective’. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)
I’ve always felt this is quite awful about mathematics classes, and very vindicated when I can get a bit of a reaction from people with a particularly nice proof. Tangentially related is an idea I’ve had that it might be possible and useful to build certain mathematical ideas or techniques into muscle memory.
Have you read Impro? You’d like it, a lot.
Starting to read it, fantastic stuff. One initial comment:
One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book
and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature
could affect me in such a way. If I’d have wept over a poem in class
the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had
been teaching me not to respond.
(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the
physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play
or film they’re watching, and crossing their arms tighdy, and tilting
their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less ‘involved’, less
‘subjective’. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)
I’ve always felt this is quite awful about mathematics classes, and very vindicated when I can get a bit of a reaction from people with a particularly nice proof. Tangentially related is an idea I’ve had that it might be possible and useful to build certain mathematical ideas or techniques into muscle memory.