Appetizers and Lessons for Mathematics and Reason (www.whyslopes.com)
||Définition d'une variable || Algèbre || Arithmetique || Logique ||La raison basée sur les règles et modelés||

Online Volumes (Book Orders)
1,  Elements of Reason.
1A. Pattern Based Reason 
1B. Math Curriculum Notes
2. Three Skills for Algebra
3. Why Slopes & More Math

Mathematics Course Designers: LAMP offers food for thought.
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YOU are better than YOU think. Show yourself  how:  

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Read  logic chapters 1 to 5  in online volume Three Skills for Algebra  for greater skills & confidence in  work 
and study.

Learn to read notes and textbooks like a lawyer, so that no nuance, no subtlety and no clause escapes your attention.

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 Logic chapters 1 to 5  re- appear not in sequence, as is or longer,  in  Volume 1A,  Pattern Based Reason, Bon Appetite.

Logic Mastery
 Amazing, Amusing, Amorous,  Delicious, Delightful, Edifying, Strengthening Elixir. 
It eases work & learning difficulties Makes the hard easier. Opens eyes. Leads to greater precision.
in reading and
writing

Logic mastery makes the hard, easier. Logic mastery  leads to better, stronger and richer comprehension.  Logic mastery  improves reading and writing.  Logic mastery ease learning difficulties.  Logic mastery gives a headstart.  In sum, logic mastery  will develops critical thinking, improve reading and writing, and give a firmer base for work and studies at many levels. Good luck.


After logic  (a) continue reading Three Skills for Algebra, chapters 8 to 14  and do so alongside site area on solving liinear Equations ; or (b) see this calculus starter lesson and Volume 3, Why Slopes  & More Math, chapters 2 to 6;

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Caution: Site advice is approximately correct, for some circumstances, not all. That leaves room for thought

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What may be learnt and when depends on how skills and concepts are developed. Making the hard easier and clearer will allow earlier & richer development of skills and concepts.


Try the Twiddla Whiteboard. In principle, it  allows to people to draw and chat together online on a copy of this webpage or a clean sheet. The chat may be via text or audio.  Visit www.twiddla.com to set up whiteboards to work with the webpage of your choice.

For online automated help in senior high school maths & calculus, visit  quickmath.com  For Automatic Calculus and Algebra Help with derivatives, integrals, graphs, linear equations, matrix algebra, visit calc101.com  With  overlap, each site quickmath & calc101offers a different range of services, some free, some not, all based on webmathematica. Good luck.

Previous: Start of Chapter 2, Communication of Skills

Principles for Instruction

For learning and teaching in all disciplines, the following overlapping principles appear self-evident, at least once stated.

  • Each discipline needs to be taught or presented, so that students understand what they are learning and why. Without a knowledge or an opinion of why, students may lose interest and not go further. The why could be approximate — a little uncertainty leaves room for thought.
  • Pathways through easily described and repeated ideas may extend knowledge of any discipline, area of thought or belief. One or more paths through easily described and easily repeated topics may allow those who travel further to tell others willing to listen, what to expect and possibly why. Of course, differences of opinion exist on which disciplines should be taught or what pathways in them should be followed.
  • Awkwardness with an idea or skill often signals difficulty with previous ones. It may indicate at least one earlier skill has been missed or forgotten. When an awkwardness is felt or seen, learners should go or be taken back to practice the missing skills, and possibly the ones just before them. This retreat aims to restore confidence and build skills, so that the learner can go further. This requires a diagnostic skill and a knowledge of or opinion on how the topics in question can be organized and taught. Here again, opinions may differ.
  • Each collection of mental and physical skills could be organized into a ladder-like sequences of steps with the basic ones first and the more advanced ones second. Learning in any subject stumbles when a first or succeeding step is not easily reachable from those before them. [1] To climb a ladder, the initial steps must be reachable, and each further step must be reachable from the one or ones before it. Explanations should follow chains of reason or persuasion which begin at the level of the student before advancing further.
[1] The latter summarizes an educational analogof the principle of mathematical induction. See the chapter Longer Chains of Reason.

Remark 1. An alternative to ladder-like structure is a tree-like structure. Here skills and ideas are represented by the branches of a tree or bush. The tree can be climbed when those branches closest to the ground are accessible while the higher ones are accessible from branches below. For ease of exposition and comprehension, the organization of ideas into a flat tree-like structures where each branch can be reached via a few lower branches or directly from the ground is to be preferred to the case in which most branches are high and can be reached only from the one just below it. This is to simply observe that short chains of reasoning are better for explanation and comprehension than longer ones.

Remark 2. These words or thoughts on communication of skills echo a course on how to be a cross-country ski instructor. The course was taught one weekend early in 1981, by an instructor-trainer from CANSKI, the CANadian association for Nordic, that is cross-country, SKIing. The course gave a piece by piece approach to instruction. The objective was to build both the confidence and ability of students. The course emphasized that difficulty with a skill signaled the need for a retreat to, or even before, previously mastered skills. The detailed structure provided turned cross-country ski instruction into an art. Arts of this kind are required in other areas of instruction.


Next: Chapter 3, Elements of Reason - Seeing the difference between one- and two way implications, a way to improve reading, writing and thinking

 


www.whyslopes.com
Volume 1A, Pattern Based Reason

 Chapters 1 to 24

FOREWORD
Three Remarks

1 Introduction
2 Communication
3. Elements of Reason
4 Implication Rules
5. Deception
6 Chains of Reason
7 Longer Chains
For & From Consistency
8. Language Change
9 Next Chapters
10 Responsibility
11 Accidental Patterns
12 Knowledge Islands
13 Euclidean Logic
14 Deductive & Empirical Views of Mathematics
15 Objectivity
16 Origin of Rules
and Patterns
17 Objective Ways

18. Waking up
19. Symbols  & Logic
20. Pronouns or Symbols
21. Truth Tables I.
22. Truth Tables II
22. Biconditional
22. Contrapositive
23. IF-THEN table
24. Indirect Reason Again

To reason often means to persuade someone of the need for an idea or action. That someone could be yourself. So be careful.

1A Logic Postscripts
- online only

+Proof by Absurdity alias proof by contradiction
+How the demand for consistency supports the law of the excluded middle
+Reality versus or with the aid of Imagination
+Links for reason, logic and crtical thinking
+Three Remarks
+History Lost or Missing

There is a difference between
knowing how to spend money,
and having money to spend.

There is likewise a difference
between mastering a skill
and having meeting a situation in which it applies.

 



 


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a 1983 McGill. Ph. D. in mathematics
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