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| 157 11 Mathematics and Culture William Irwin Thompson The chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham is passionate about the disastrous impact of the plague of “math anxiety” on American culture (see Abraham, this volume). I am a living example of the educational damage that the conventional American approach to mathematical instruction can inflict. In spite of my interdisciplinary interests, and an Ivy League PhD in cultural history and literary studies, I am practically a functional illiterate in mathematics. What I remember of math instruction in parochial, private, and public schools is rote “drill and kill” commands in soulless operations completely disconnected from any larger meaning. The sort of person who flourished under this sort of care was the kind of person who loved puzzles, codes, and algorithms completely unconnected to the world of emotions, relationships, history, and culture in general—the sort of person who preferred to take something out of the context that gave it meaning, the sort of person who was good at making atom bombs, or is now good at engineering plants and animals, but not so good at asking about the unimagined side effects on people, birds, bees, and butterflies. The only time that math made any sense to me was when, after flunking geometry three times, I ended up in a summer high school makeup class with an amateur teacher, an engineer who had not been trained in “education.” He brought into class an overhead projector, and rather than demanding—as all my other teachers had—that we memorize theorems and axioms in a kind of Euclidean Baltimore Catechism, he asked that we think visually in a new culture of relations in which the rote material receded to become a ground against which a new figure emerged. It was as if this teacher had plucked on the chords of my corpus callosum and lit up the whole right hemisphere of my brain. For the first time in my life, math began to make sense as it became part of new kind of visual thinking. Not only did I pass the course, but I got my first B+ in math! Now, mind you, at the time that I was this summer school dunce, I was studying Latin, Spanish, French, and Russian—all at the same time—and 158 | William Irwin Thompson getting As in all of these courses. I was also reading Melville, Thomas Wolfe, and the Tao Te Ching on my own outside of classes, so it is fair to say that I was not stupid, but math was meaningless to me because it had never been invested with any meaning or culture at any time during my entire primary and secondary education. Math was something you needed in order to make atom bombs, and since at that time—in the 1940s and ’50s—we were taught to jump under our desks and cover our heads in dread of a Russian atomic attack, the only relationship math had with anything in my life was with the mysteries of physics and the construction of atom bombs. But I didn’t want to grow up to be an atomic scientist; I wanted to grow up to be a poet. In fact, my first experience of an epiphany of the muse came as an auditory experience of “channeling” a daimonic realm of poetry that came right in the middle of a high school geometry class taught by one of the worst teachers I have ever had. Math instruction should be more mystical and shamanic, and certainly Ralph Abraham with his Visual Math Institute has worked hard his whole life to climb the shaman’s ladder to the realm of the gods and celestial intelligences to bring back a healing balm to the afflicted. After a career in university teaching, he now sees that students are too damaged by the time they reach university level, so he has shifted his attention to curricular design for primary and secondary levels of instruction. As one might expect, the teachers who have been trained in professional schools of education do not like his approach and fear that students will not be able to perform well on the machine-scored tests that determine their schools’ standing and their merit increases in salary. “Teaching to the test” has now become a social imperative so reinforced by politicians that it is not likely that the United States will improve in the near future. But even if one accepts the validity of testing, results show that American students...

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