Random thoughts on a reading process

I have to confess I am an obsessive reader. I like books, I like to read them a lot, I like to read them daily. It seems like the most efficient way of reading books or doing other tasks is doing it in a sequential way, where each book completed before the next one is read. The issue is that I cannot help, but defy this approach. I can read a number of books in parallel, jumping from one to another and returning back again. I also can be distracted by a reference to a different book, and so it goes.

Now, we may ask is there any point is such haphazard reading, where the focus is constantly lost, things and thoughts are getting mixed? Personally, I do not find this confusing or disorganizing, but actually, I see some merit in this approach. First, you do not get bored and have some fresh point of view when you return to a book (if you remember where you’ve left last time). Second, since good books are just like candies, it’s difficult to decide where to start, what have next and when to finish.

Stack overflow of the books

Having described my non-linear approach to reading I should mention that nevertheless, on average, I usually able to read 1.5 books a month. This is nice, but there are a couple of books that are still in the stack and they tend to overflow it. There is this book What’s Math Got Do With It by Jo Boaler, then there is The Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch, underneath is the Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire. Further below is All Things Being Equal by John Mighton, traveling by US post is a Number-Crunching: Taming Unruly Computational Problems from Mathematical Physics to Science Fiction by Paul Nahin, and last but not least is infinite powers by Steven Strogatz.

Speaking of Steven Strogatz book. Last year I was looking for a good book on applied mathematics and stumbled upon Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering which is very good. Then I checked other books Steven wrote and found that in addition to textbooks he also wrote a number of popular science books. One of them was infinite powers. It is enough to read just a few pages of this book to understand that it’s a pure gem in the world of popular science books and if you’d like to really get a good understanding of what differentiation and integration is without going directly to a calculus course then this book may be of interest to you. When I finish reading it, I’ll write a more extensive review of the book.

Random walking

For now, keep reading and try reading sequentially, otherwise start a random walk. Who knows what you stumble upon and where it take you.

This post continues a number of post were I kind of reviewed books that I read and thought it would be helpful to share them with other readers. All Things Being Equal: Why Math Is the Key to a Better World by John Mighton is such a book that deserves to be shared and read by people who care about math education, their children’s math education and math in general. The title of this post is not a mere gimmick, but it means that good books always mention or reference other authors or books that worth reading. This is what exactly happened when I read the book by Anders Ericsson that I mentioned in the previous post. In the Peak Ericsson mentioned John Mighton a Canadian mathematician that incorporated elements of deliberate practice with clear goals and problems that had increasing level of difficulty to teach math to children. This approach is now known as JUMP Math and it is taught to thousands of kids helping them master mathematics while enjoying the subject, unlike in the usual way math is taught in schools.

What is so interesting about this book?

I am past 1/3 of the book, and so far I wasn’t disappointed. The book itself is not only about teaching math to kids. John Mighton discussed also psychological approaches, such as a research into Expertise that plays important role in education in general and in math in particular. He also provides us with an interesting observation that usual math education results in the same distribution of grades among pupils of public schools and among pupils in private schools. It worth mentioning, intellectual poverty a term he coined to emphasize that even though there is a research in to expertise that resulted in clear guidance on how to effectively approach teaching, we as a society still do not incorporate this approach, and what we get is a suboptimal outcome, where kids dislike math, since they think they are not good at it, they have no innate ability or inclination towards it.

Apart from this, John Mighton incorporates a number of examples from math lessons at schools, where he shed light on some of the arithmetic operations that are usually taught as a mere algorithms, without explaining how they work and why. For example, he provides a neat explanation why one could substitute a division of a number by a fraction, by a multiplication of the inverse of that fraction.

Overall

The book is worth reading, since it provides a fresh approach to teaching math to kids and adults alike, in an engaging and exciting way, where kids are gently guided by discovering math step by step, building on the knowledge they gain at a previous step, facing gradually increasing challenges along the way.