Response to the Article from Tzanakis and Arcavi

    I do believe history should be incorporated into math teaching. Nothing comes from nowhere. It is natural for students to be curious about the history of math and it is teachers’ responsibility to satisfy their curiosity. Personally, I did not learn the history of math from school. My father, a book lover and also a math lover, told me some as bedtime stories. His stories inspired me and fostered my interest in math. Before reading the article, all I could think about integrating history into a mathematics class was to introduce the mathematicians who invented the theories. Also, oral presentation from teachers was the only form in my mind.

    There are two ideas in the article that I love the most. The first one is the worksheet. I always thought worksheets for math is just a “collection of exercises.” The new approach of using worksheets to introduce history in math encourages students to engage more in class and provides them with an opportunity to review and explore related knowledge in the future. The second idea is the historical package. The package is more systematic and I feel strongly connected to the given example - the Pythagorean theorem, or Gougu theorem in Chinese. (It was a big part of my bedtime stories.) I was surprisingly found that there are seven ways of proving it in different cultures. I tried to search for the historical package mentioned in the article but did not find it. Instead, I found a worksheet on the same topic focusing on the ancient Chinese approach and here is the link if you are also interested in it: https://cd1.edb.hkedcity.net/cd/maths/en/ref_res/material/MSS_e/Exemp21.pdf.

    This article truly broadened my horizon. Although it was published in 2000, the ideas and examples it presents are never out of date. However, I have to admit that nowadays it is rare to call the internet the WWW and some conjectures (e.g. Catalan's conjecture and Poincaré conjecture) had already been proved. As the development of mathematics, I believe more stories can be told in class with more creative teaching approaches. I am looking forwards to what I will learn in this course and how inspiring it will be.