What I've learned:/How my ideas have developed:
I found this course extremely valuable to me. I learned about several different civilizations and their contributions to math. Additionally, my idea of where math came from has been altered and I have a better idea of how certain mathematical concepts changed over the years - I definitely have a greater appreciation for our modern-day format of algebra!
At the beginning of the course, I was opposed to giving error questions to students. As I have progressed, I am beginning to see the value in them. Often, even if there is no answer or the question doesn't make any sense, it is important for students to be able to identify this and have enough confidence to state that in class. This is a part of real life as well because these things happen and we can link error questions to examples in history where prominent mathematicians were either wrong or spent a long time trying to prove something, only to realize there question wasn't clearly defined or had a flaw in it. This shows students that the path in problem solving isn't always a straightforward one and can help them develop connections with mathematicians instead of viewing mathematicians as these untouchable geniuses that don't speak to modern-day students and their own struggles.
Additionally, this course has also been an integral part to my own personal learning journey in the sense that it is a point of convergence of many of my interests. I have learned how I could make use of my own hobbies/interests in my future classroom in a way that will help my students' learning.
Ways to improve the course:
I know we were meant to cover more than we were able to in this course but I honestly felt that focusing on a few areas of math history and briefly talking about others was a beneficial way to take in that information. I think if we had tried to cover more, we may not have had a strong understanding of any civilization's math, whereas now I feel that I have enough information about Egyptian and Babylonian math so that if I was to read more about them, I would know what was happening. The places where we received good previews/overviews of the other types of math and important people in mathematics that we didn't talk about in class came about in the assignments, which I think were really useful. It was always great to hear about a topic from classmates who we spent the term building connections with through class discussions; if they were really passionate about their topic, the rest of us then naturally became interested in that topic and were effectively given a gateway option to dive deeper into that topic if we wish to.
Overall I am very thankful to have been taken this course with such wonderful instructors and classmates as well!
Karishma, thank you for these very thoughtful comments, and your great contributions throughout all three of our courses this semester! I'm so glad that you enjoyed the course, and that you felt we had covered things in a reasonable way. It's always hard teaching a course like 'history of math' because it's impossible to teach the whole of math history in one semester, so I'm glad that the choices we made were helpful to you. All the best!
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