Davies’ Dailies - Mister Math Skills

Thank you Flimsy Sanity for introducing me to Dolly Freed’s 1978 Possum living: How to live well without a job and with almost no money!

Although I’m new to Flimsy’s blog and must confess I haven’t read Dolly’s book, I happen to be one of those 70’s schoolboys who still does remember the pain of having to abandon arithmetic (and math skills grooming!) for “… new math, where you learn all about “sets” and graduate not knowing how to balance a checkbook”. That alone might make it worth putting this book on your “must read” list. But believe me, if you have a few spare moments left, just go and read Flimsy’s novelized life story at Bee Dancer of Nokota, with more on her background at Schizophrenia Sourcebook.

Amazing how such gifted people may go unnoticed sometimes…

We still have a few minutes left, which leaves me ample time to share one of Charles Davies’ views on math skills development with you:

“The mere practical man regards with favor only the results of science, deeming the reasonings through which these results are arrived at, quite superfluous. Such should remember that the mind requires instruments as well as the hands, and that it should be equally trained in their combinations and uses. Such is, indeed, now the complication of human affairs, that to do one thing well, it is necessary to know the properties and relations of many things. Every thing, whether existing in the abstract or in the material world; whether an element of knowledge or a rule of art, has its connections and its law: to understand these connections and that law, is to know the thing. When the principle is clearly apprehended, the practice is easy.”

Charles Davies, in The Logic and Utility of Mathematics
pp. 16-17, A.S Barnes & Burr Ed., New York, 1860