Prior to reading the article about integrating math history into the classroom, my thoughts were that math history should be integrated into the teaching of math, as I believed that it provides us with a deeper understanding of the concepts we are learning and the origins of where they come from. Not only that, by incorporating it into my own teaching, it also gives students the opportunity to learn about the historical aspects which can potentially make learning more interesting. As for how we can incorporate math history into our own teaching, one way I can do this is by allowing students to acknowledge the historical context of math. Beyond that, I believe the rest will come along as I start teaching.
While reading, the one thing that struck me was where the article mentioned how there had been different arguments made on incorporating history while teaching math. Based on some of the arguments, we knew that reasons include how there was a lack of time and history and math are not connected to each other. However, it made me wonder if there are ways to incorporate into math classes somehow, such as shortening lecture time and spend ten to fifteen minutes each class discussing interesting facts about the history of math. On the other hand, the part mentioning historical snippets and how textbooks have incorporated them also interested me, especially when discussing about the style and design of the snippet. While integrating history into math is beneficial, we have to look at how the contents are portrayed to students, to which I agree with the article. A lot of the time, the portrait can often decide if the materials are worth learning, an easily appealing context can easily catch students' attention when reading the textbook, which in turn makes them more interested in learning.
After reading the article, I now believe that incorporating historical content into math is crucial, as understanding the origin of some of the theories and equations are important for learning. At the same time, revisiting old concepts also allow students to discover the mistakes from the concepts and discuss why they were wrong. These are beneficial as students would become encouraged in analyzing and problem-solving at the same time.
I liked your point about looking at mistakes in old mathematical ideas. It connects to the article’s idea that mistakes can actually help students think about why something works or doesn’t work, instead of just learning the correct answer.
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