Author Topic: The Role of Psychology in the Quest for Mathematical Maturity  (Read 4740 times)

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Obsession with Old Math Books as a Midlife Crisis
« Reply #45 on: April 23, 2017, 12:23:24 am »
Of course, it goes without saying that what I refer to as "an experiment in self-education" the gorts would categorically dismiss as "a midlife crisis".

Maybe it is my destiny to approach pure mathematics as a novice, and all my studying might prepare me to one day be qualified to help adults also approach this subject in a rigorous manner.   I can daydream about preparing my own specialized booklets made from scratch, where I make use of the old Dolciani series from the 1960's to 1980's, originally intended for "honors" high school students.   Perhaps this rigorous approach was abandoned in favor of the more user-friendly methods used in this twenty first century.

My humble mission would be to transform this curriculum to be geared not so much for "gifted" youth. but aimed at adults who only discover their interest in pure mathematics after they already went through the whole computational applied mathematics education only to find they would prefer to also approach the subject with more mathematical rigor and formality, something the educators were experimenting with in the 1960' into the 1980's with high school students.

Those days are gone, and quite frankly, as one who experienced that kind of exposure at an early age, it might have been too ambitious on the educators' part to expect more than a small handful of youth to be ready for such formality at that age.  i certainly was not one of the gifted ones.  Besides not being gifted, I was overwhelmed with the existential despair of being a teenager, the pressure of having to register with the selective service, the divorce of my parents, and my inclinations to escape with alcohol - as well as showing up to school after smoking herbs.  [HIGH school]

I lacked the discipline and was, to be honest, an emotional basket case.

Just maybe my obsession with retraining my mind with these old texts, allowing myself to study the solutions in the precious solution manuals, expanding the explanations, etc, might make me particularly qualified to one day assist adults who catch the bug for studying mathematics later in life, long after the pressures to "get into college" or "join the Army" have passed.

And even if these potential students do not exist, and it turns out that I am the sole recipient of the intellectual stimulation inspired by such a belated embrace of rigor and formality, then so be it.   It is quite possible that there is no "unified self" and that, as contradictory as this sounds, I am at once both Teacher and Student.

« Last Edit: April 23, 2017, 12:22:01 pm by Raskolnikov »
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