Re: History of Babylonian Word Problems

I really enjoyed reading the chapter! When I finished reading the first two pages of all the word questions. I made some notes aside, I saw there was a pattern to them! Every word question has a subject (you, I, she, he, and they) and a verb (doing something), and there's always a time and a place for the word problem. While reading the problems, I begin to have a picture of in my head, illustrating the event/problem is being described. That's so interesting because I would not have the same "picture" of the problems if they are simply a theory/concept like greek math was mainly about! Here we see the importance of having word problems that are familiar in our life as it's easy to read our own experiences rather than thinking in someone else's shoes.

I would think Babylonian math would be the "first-class math" if I didn't keep reading since it's relatively real-life related and in order to have the ability to solve those problems, they will have to know the reasoning behind it, right? However, after finishing reading the whole chapter, I then realized that in order to come up with some sort of theory/theorem like how greek did, it's unquestionable that they will have to know the ins and outs of it first. On the other hand, knowing how to solve problems doesn't necessarily require any deeper understanding of the concept. In another word, solving word problems is like training yourself to imitate Claude Monet's paintings, you can have your tweaks here and there but it's not your creation. However, the authentic meaning of education is to deeply understand the fundamentals behind all the "whys", or at least the encouragement to achieve that! 

In my own experience, it's very challenging for both students and teachers to translate mathematical theories/theorems into a language that most students can understand without doing any word problems, or we can say without imitating a sample solution. Relating back to the article, I don't think there is such thing as the first/second class of math. Pure, applied or practical math are related, it's like building a skyscraper, every piece of concrete counts. As educators, we should encourage students to understand math in their own ways. There is a right/wrong answer but not in terms of how we learn.