SAMPLE WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Type: Personal essay.
Length: 1 - 2 pages.
Required references: none.
Due Date: Friday, 17 January
(NOTE TO THE INSTRUCTOR: For background to this assignment, see the Coping With Math Anxiety Mini-Text.)
This assignment is simply a personal essay, one to two pages, in which you will address the following:
Children are natural mathematicians. They enjoy counting and are fond of showing off their ability with numbers, and they also enjoy building blocks, tinker toys, and other spatially challenging activities. Abstractions such as infinity can occasion serious and meaningful discussion with an eight-year-old. And yet, somehow, by the time most children grow up, their taste for mathematics has been replaced with indifference, at best, and too often with downright revulsion. Ignorance of and distaste for mathematics has attained the status of a social grace. No one would dream of introducing into dinner conversation the light-hearted observation that he or she is illiterate, yet bring up even commonplace mathematical ideas and most people will confess their ignorance of math quite cheerfully, expecting -- and usually getting -- reinforcement from the other people present.
Discuss frankly your own attitude towards mathematics. If your attitude is negative, can you identify at what point in your life you became unhappy with mathematics, and why? What might have been done differently in your educational upbringing to enhance your appreciation of mathematics, or at least to make less likely the growth of a negative attitude towards it? Given that you are probably enrolled in [this course] to fulfill a requirement, and might just as happily give it a miss, what could this class do for your relationship to mathematics that might make you feel glad you took the course?
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