Reflections on: Integrating history of mathematics in the classroom: an analytic survey

I think teaching math history is important. When I reflect on my own high school experience, I didn’t learn any math history and it is something I felt that I missed out on. In university when history was slowly introduced to my courses, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it made me more interested in what I was learning. I felt that I had a personal connection to the people whose theorems I was learning, and this made me more excited and engaged with the material. My goal is to sprinkle math history throughout my teaching. There are so many fun anecdotes and characters in math that can be told and introduced alongside the material they involve.

I liked how the article mentioned “The role of doubts, paradoxes, contradictions, intuitions, heuristics, and difficulties while learning and producing new mathematics in the context of specific questions and problems, and the motivations for generalising, abstracting and formalising in such a context.” I connected with this idea a lot. It reminded me of a personal experience I had while studying mathematics. It was during my master’s degree, and I was mentally struggling because I had been working on a problem for a few months and was really stuck. I was feeling like a failure, and I was scared that I wasn’t going to make any progress. These feelings of course made me discouraged, and my motivation for working on the problem was dwindling. My supervisor at the time I think could tell that I was feeling this way and said something that stuck with me. He said mathematicians have a batting average of close to zero. We try and try and try again, and most of the time things don’t work, we don’t hit the ball. When he said this, it helped me realize that I wasn’t alone in my experience, and that in fact it was quite natural and inherent to studying mathematics. This moment for me was a paradigm shift, and it’s something I hope to share with my future students. One thing that confused me in the article was “The didactical background of teachers”. I didn’t know what didactical meant, so I looked it up and got “intended to instruct, especially excessively”. This left me more confused. When I got to the part in the article about didactic source material, I understood didactic to mean material made from primary and secondary material, but I don’t feel that this helped in my understanding of what “the didactical background of teachers” meant. I look forward to discussing this in class and hopefully gaining insight into what this means.

After having read the article, my feelings have only strengthened on the importance of teaching math history. Prior to reading the article I thought including math history would be about teaching direct historical information. Now I’m happy to say that my ideas about math history have become more inclusive and I’ve learned that there are many different modes of introducing math history to the classroom. Additionally, my idea about what is and what isn’t mathematics has slightly changed. Prior to reading the article I thought of math history as something adjacent to math, but not math. After this reading, I think I am moving towards the philosophy that math as a subject is inclusive of its history.