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Now for the reason why you should not waste any time reading this web site:
As it stands, I am completely unqualified to write a work on the history of mathematics or on basic education. Not only do I lack a degree in mathematics, I have the ignoble distinction of having flunked out of the Education Department of the University of Utah.
A second reason to ignore me is that the work is dated. Most of the work is based on research done in the 1980s. Being excluded from mathematical circles, the work lacks the peer review and input that is necessary for quality work.
I admit, the primary reason why I feel compelled to write this web is because I recently realized that I was rapidly forgetting all of the work I had done in College. I want to write it down before I forget it all.
I admit, I've also been inspired by the writings of David Horowitz who has been active in promoting academic freedom. Horowitz's is that a politically motivated professoriat has been been working in a concerted fashion to drive classical liberal thinking from the curriculum. In which case, there is value for people who've been cut out of the system to write down their experience.
During my elementary and high school education I developed a strange ability to see mathematical space. When going to bed at night, I would simply think about lines, numbers and imagine abstract spaces.
Because I loved to play with numbers, I was very good at taking tests. Knowing math opened opportunities. A good example of such opportunities is that the Federal Government, on my graduation from High School, handed me a full scholarship to the school of my choice. This scholarship exposed me to the best and worst of University education.
Upon graduating from high school, I was given a full scholarship to the school of my choice. Being greedy, I chose an expensive school, and went to Santa Clara University which rated one of the top schools in mathematics.
I call this the best of schools because I felt that the teachers were focused on their subjects and the needs of the students. It is a place where quality learning can take place.
In my freshman year, I happened to take a drawing course in the same quarter as Calculus. The drawing course presented a drawing technique called visual perspective. It dawned on me that the logical structure of visual perspective was similar to Caclulus. I had the epiphany that it would be possible to create a curriculum that began by creating a model of visual perspective then extended the model with Calculus. Liberal Arts students would find the course compelling.
This method would skip all of the logical complications associated with limits, infinitesmals, fluxions or other oddities used to develop Calculus in the past.
To make my life more hectic, I would do all of my Calculus homework the way the teachers wanted. After which I would secret away and do the same proof without limits.
The professors were sympathetic to my cause. They tried teaching me transfinite theory which is currently considered the foundation of mathematics.
These professors, who I admire to no end, ended up giving me contradictory explanations of how transfinite theory worked.
Unfortunately, two other things trumped the quality education.
In my Sophomore year, President Reagan cancelled the scholarship program. Well, to be fair, he didn't completely cancel it. He made the scholarship needs based.
The second thing that happened was that my father's employer went bankrupt. This happened at the end of December. In the settlement, the companied paid off their pension in a lump sum. (As I recall, the settlement was less than the face value of the pension as is typical in bankruptcy.).
The combined pension and a full year's salary disqualified me for the needs based financial aid.
Notice the irony: I lost my needs based financial aid because of a downturn in my family's financial situation.
I was now at an expensive school without the means to pay for it. I took out all the loans I could and started working full time as a janitor with the hope of completing college. I collapsed in my senior year. The last thing I really can remember from Santa Clara is sleeping in class so I would be able, and working things out so I could get 20 hours of overtime during midterms.
There is a small chance that I could have made it through my senior year if I just slept outdoors. I panicked after the local police threatened to arrest me.
Having gone to one of the best schools in the nation, the second half of my academic career took me to a backwater hole called the University of Utah. In fairness, massive state universities really have schools within schools. I hear the U is great for pharmacy, medicine, engineering and other hard sciences.
I was worn out. I just wanted a liberal arts degree so that I could recoup financially before making any major decisions.
I call this the worst of schools because I encountered a number of professors who I believe were misusing their authority for political indoctrination and who were grading students for political beliefs and not academic performance.
The school had the resources to be a great school. Unfortunately, at the time I attended The U, the professors were involved in an absurd culture war. Everywhere I looked, left leaning professors were slamming daggers into the backs of peers and even the students.
I guess I appeared to be a progressive as I actually had absurd conversations with far left leaning professor who told me about how they were trying to establish a new leftwing hegemony in the school. I also had discussions with older classical liberal professors who opened up about negative politics they saw taking place.
I was in a terrible financial situation and had no intention of engaging in the culture wars. Unfortunately, my active imagination still churned on ways to fund the writing of a Calculus book.
My plan was to get a degree in education, then snag a lucrative job teaching math in junior high or high school. Teaching jobs tend to pay more than comparable professions. Above all, they offer nice breaks for individual research. Schools are generally sympathetic to people who are engaged in expanding their knowledge.
So, I had enrolled in the education department and was taking three entry level education classes.
In these classes we read Plato, Rousseau, Marx and praised the revolutionary work of Paulo Friere. Friere wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The professors praised the ideal of an activist teacher who used their position to raise the social concious of the students.
In one class we had an exercise where we were suppose to stand up make pithy negative comments about school choice, vouchers, and private schools. The exercise was clearly being used as a litmus test.
It is here that my active imagination did me in.
Remember, I was trying to figure out how to fund the writing of a Calculus book. I had big plans that involved editors and field studies that studied every aspect of the book.
When it was my turn to stand up, I started by insulting Conservatives. I praised local public schools for building community, and mentioned that driving students to private schools leads to global cooling (which was the great fear of the day). To complete my insults of conservatives who want to privatize schools, I said somethink like the following: "and if we really wanted to improved education, we wouldn't focus the power of the free market on the school. We would focus it on the classroom. Rather than privatizing the school, we should privatize the classroom. We could allow teachers to form private companies. These teaching companies would develope their own curriculum and contract with the school. This would provide the financing for a better curriculum and would make the teachers the owners of the means of production."
When I spoke the words, I thought I was insulting conservatives. I thought I was saying "conservatives are stupid for wanting to privatize the schools, they should privatize the classroom."
The litmus test was for me to say that private ownership is wrong. My professor's jaw nearly dropped of on hearing my diatribe.
A few days later, the professors from my three classes cornered me. They told me that they were the gatekeepers of the public school system, and that I if I did not immediately leave their department that I would flunk all three classes. They informed me that they had contacts with all of the venues for getting a teaching certification and they would see to it that I would never teach in a public school.
As Utah does not have a viable system of private schools, all chances of becoming a teacher vanished.
I tried other departments at the U. I was not up to engineering at the time. I tried linguistics and art. In every case, I felt the professors were more interested in administering political litmus tests than in teaching the subject. My thoughts on teaching Calculus put me at odds with the Math department. I finally ended up in the language department. I believe that everyone should learn a foreign language; So, I had taken a large number of French classes. The language department essentially told me that if I took two years of Spanish and an additional year of French classes, I could get a French degree.
Kafka could not have conceived a more absurd academic career. I lost my needs based scholarship when my father lost his job. I bounced off a number of politically motivated litmus tests. The experience ended when I discovered that, by taking two years of Spanish, I could get a French degree.
I feel bad that the education system prevented me from reaching my career goals. In my opinion, I was good at teaching math. Upon getting my French Degree, I was able to work as a substitute teacher. They kept putting me in language classes. I occasionally got a math class and loved it.
I got be a sub in one math class for a whole week. One the last day, a group of students came in after school just to talk math. I asked them why. They said that I really knew math and loved the subject, and they weren't going to pass a chance to learn math from a person who knew the subject.
In a remedial class high school class, I was helping a frustrated student with fractions. I finally sat down and gave the student my description of what fractions are. The student's eyes lit up. He grabbed his books, solved all the fraction problems that alluded him for years.
It is amazing, with a simple candid conversation about the nature of math, the student mastered subjects he had failed to grasp for years.
After learning fractions, the student actually went out and grabbed one of his friends to learn how fractions actually work.
Subbing does not pay the bills. I eventually taught myself to program computers and work as a system analyst.
My definition of a great school is one where the teachers focus on the needs of the students. My definition of a bad school is one where the professors of the schools have a political agenda that they believe trumps the needs of the student. The worst school is one where the professors go as far as to indoctrinate gullible students while punishing those reject the professor's ideology.
Unfortunately, the very work I am writing at the moment falls into the bad category. The process of explaining why the current politically motivated curriculum is off track is itself a political act. That means that is possible for the left to project everything that they are doing with litmus tests and classes geared toward political indoctrination onto me.
By their very nature, reactionary movements carry the imprint of the things reactionaries react against.
In this work, I support what I consider to be the Classical Liberal position. Leftist professors can claim that I am every bit as political as themselves; thus justifying the very indoctrination techniques I abhor.
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