A few days ago I wrote about reacquainting myself with mathematics. What started out as a mild recollection of past educational experience ended up raising negative feelings that flapped around my consciousness like angry ghosts. A buddy pointed this out, and after some reflection I laid them back to rest; there’s no sense in remaining angry about the past.

While Math had been a source of frustration for me, it wasn’t due to the math itself; it was the clouds of confusion surrounding the practice of Mathematics that so confounded me. This was exacerbated by my insistence on understanding something before doing it. Now that I know that there’s something good to be said for “learning to recognize and reproduce patterns” before understanding something, I am a lot more interested to tackling mathematics once again.

So here is how I’m seeing the challenge:

1. I like the mysterious qualities of Math, and want to be more fluent with the ideas and concepts behind that.
2. To do that, I’ll need to reconstruct the knowledge for myself, so I can have a clear picture of the relevant facts, principles, and standards of practice.
3. However, there are barriers to reconstruction inherent in the presentation of the material: spotty instruction, missing/misunderstood key insights, ambiguous writing in textbooks, and misleading illustrations and diagrams. I groused about this at some length in my earlier post.

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