What a nice coincidence that we read the article on teaching climate change when the 2021 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to climate scientists Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann and physicist Giorgio Parisi.
I really like Renert’s point about not making math black and white. In my opinion, it really is essential to let our students know that some questions, such as the math about climate change, might not have a clear answer. It’s important for students to see how adults also struggle with concepts like large numbers and chaos theory.
My favourite part of today’s class was working with the compass and straight edge. It was fun to do some geometry again and I was reminded that somehow, this wasn’t really covered well in any of my math classes! It’s definitely time for me to read through some of Euclid’s Elements and try some proofs and constructions myself. I liked how easy it is to see how we can bisect angles and draw perpendicular bisectors with the basic tools. I found out that these were just propositions 9 and 10 in the first book of Euclid’s Elements so I will be working through the propositions in order to see how the reasoning flows.
I also enjoyed seeing how circles and straight lines can be used to sketch a leaf. I think that this activity would be really fun for my students. I noticed how many curves can be approximated as segments of a circle and I had a good time playing around with the compass. Here is my drawing:
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