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a fantastic article about a writing program Niki Hayes set up in the elementary school where she was principal (pdf file)
amazing
I loved reading this because I had been wracking my brains trying to figure out whether there is a "basic skill" form of writing that underlies, or could be more or less made to underly, all other forms of writing the way arithmetic underlies all other forms of math.
(question: does arithmetic "underly" all other forms of math? no idea!)
What I came up with, pretty quickly, was the conviction that if there is it would have to be workaday journalism.
note: workaday journalism, not personal narratives
more on this anon —
how many personal narratives can dance on the head of a pin?
teaching writing through journalism in K-5 - the Niki Hayes program
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4 comments:
arithmetic underlying all of maths?
no way! what about geometry, for heck sake?
and i'll go with "knowing the alphabet"
as the basic underlying skill for literacy ...
vlorbik on math ed
Arithmetic is the foundation of math, Peano's axioms are the foundation of arithmetic, set theory is the foundation of Peano's axioms, and Goedel proved it was turtles the rest of the way down.
Synthetic geometry might be possible without arithmetic, but all of synthetic geometry can (and basically is) handled equivalently with analytic geometry which in turn is founded on arithmetic. Topology on the other hand, certainly doesn't start with arithmetic. Also, (abstract) algebra doesn't start out that way. Really everything starts out with set theory. I think analysis, the third of probably the three most central areas of mathematics these days, probably does go straight into using arithmetic once the foundations are developed. (So, it probably really does rely on arithmetic.)
I think that group theory (abstract algebra), for instance, doesn't really rely on some particular notion of arithmetic but rather looks at several different such notions. All that is required for topology is a set S called a space and a collection of subsets (which are called "open" sets) of S called the topology on S. Without really being much of an expert on the subject, I don't think you really get to do any arithmetic until you actually get a metric which is so far down the road that it might as well be called analysis by then.
Thanks!
I wonder if I'll ever get to abstract algebra.
I'm still in "algebra 2."
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