Sunday, April 5, 2009

For anyone who has ever struggled with mathematics

Everybody knows how important mathematics are in real life, but until now most people have assumed that math is a skill that requires a fairly sophisticated brain. The way it is generally taught in modern schools certainly requires the student to exert him or herself in order to internalize the concepts. It appears, however, that there may be a simpler way to teach math using objects placed near us at birth. As these experiments have shown, chicks can do simple arithmetic with objects they have had with them since birth. They invariably flock toward the larger concentration of such objects even when the number of them is disguised behind a screen. I guess it all proves that our math instruction is wrong. Either that, or that chicks have x-ray vision.

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