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This is how people think of Math class:

"Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way."



That's very sad and very true.

For some reason, I stumbled upon Hubbard & Hubbard Vector Calculus a few days after first reading this essay and it stroke me as the opposite to this wrong math teaching.


And this is a pretty good description of how it's taught:

"Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school"




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