Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'

Ok, two days into riding the bike to the bus has already made me lazy. Now that I know I can get there in 2 minutes, I'm running around just like before when I was driving in to work. This seems a bit disconcerting because I actually felt like I could "sleep in." Whoever invented the wheel must have gained weight rather quickly. It would be interesting to see if a society that had never used a wheel, start using it and to see how much weight the populous gained after instituting its use on a daily basis. Did people start getting taller after adoption of the wheel?

It took me off guard to see myself revert to previous behaviours so quickly when it came to speedy transportation and what a realization that the wheel is such an amazing piece of technology in and of itself. That got me to thinking about "pi" or π in regard to the wheel. Pi is defined as a numerical constant that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter on a flat plane surface.

According to Howard Whitley Eves (1969). An Introduction to the History of Mathematics. "Pi is one of the most important mathematical constants: many formulae from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π.[1] What strikes me is that Pi is an irrational number meaning that it never repeats and even after they worked it out to a trillion digits, there is still no identifiable pattern that emerges from its fabric. It is infinite like the circle itself, this leads me to believe that the universe is round or a series of tightly interwoven circles that radiate out infinitely. And if the universe is indeed infinite, then every point in space is the center of the universe. Everything is cyclical they say. What comes around goes around. And where there is Pi, there is infinite uniqueness.

Today I went to visit friends in our financial group and found that one of the employees there had left to fulfill their dreams of not working here anymore. In her empty cube sat the daughter of one of the other leasing agents and I'd commented jokingly, that so-and-so gets younger every time I see her, which led to the old standby, "We had to fill the position quickly," pretending that this child was the replacement. I commented that she must be very good at math to which she responded that she hated math and that she wouldn't need math being the zoo's habitat designer. She then said that she'd rather work at a car wash or Amy's Ice Cream, where she definitely wouldn't have to know math unless she worked the cash-register. It was ironic since she was working on math problems there at the desk.

She said the only reason she cared about it was because she needed to manage her allowance. I proceeded to tell her that she'd probably need to know math for building habitats and that she better know how much water a hose could put out before filling the habitat too full of water and drowning the residents of her habitat. Just kidding.

I did tell her that math was the key to her unlocking her potential and that math was her friend. She scoffed at the notion and went about her summer homework. My heart sank as I realized that we've fallen so far behind in our basic math literacy that I shudder to think what the future holds as the infrastructure put in place by those who understood the basics and elementals of the numbers and physics behind all our greatest societal achievements retire from the workforce. Heck, I wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid, but I never found my stride in mathematics. I never had a teacher who exhibited any kind of passion for the subject or who went out of their way to show me the beauty in numbers and how, when solved, created some of the greatest symphonies of engineering and human accomplishment of the present and the past and hopefully, our future.

Who will care enough to ensure that the knowledge is passed on to future generations? It's kind of ironic that our greatest decline in our educational prowess seemed to accelerate as we de-emphasized the basics but in turn, created a sea of computer users who had no idea of what to do with them beyond send email, play games and surf the web for their "research" papers. An unending tide of "preparing" students for the business world by teaching them "computer skills" for the sake of using a computer instead of applying it properly to the pedagogical methods of learning. In short, the transition from instructional teaching to a more constructional method seems to have been overlooked, not to mention the deterioration of the community and family unit as well as a reduction in discipline and devaluing of moral values.

If you'd like to learn more about using computing methods properly with proven results, check out the book, Teaching with Technology Creating Student-Centered Classrooms by Judith Haymore Sandholtz, Cathy Ringstaff and David C. Dwyer. This book was written as the culmination of 10 years of study into teaching with technology and remains one of the best studies to date on the subject.