Lesson On Quadratic Equations
equations. All the students who were introduced to it thought equations could be solved by the balance. Nonsense, nonsense! You don’t get the reversal of operations you don’t need to take something from one side and put it on the other. This is true in the model of the balance, but if I think of a number and I make an operation and I give you the result, you will think of the reversal. When I was at the Institute, I had to fight with all Nunn’s disciples. I couldn’t make a dent, because I was considered the odd one out. I didn’t mind, because I had other things to do. But what was interesting is how prejudice enters the mind. I don’t want this to happen to me. I don’t want it to happen to the children. I don’t see why they should be with the prejudice of someone they have never met, why they should be conditioned by people they have never encountered - people who don’t know how to give them a chance repeatedly every day to prove that they can use their minds. These children used their minds so well when they were one or two years old, when they learned to speak. Then they come to do futile small things in the classroom, and they fail. These same giants are dwarfed - and more and more dwarfed everyday - by our approach to these things. But we wouldn’t have an alternative if we didn’t have awareness at our disposal. This is the other thing I have said to you for so long, awareness of the awareness exists. It is what you all have, what they all have. Let’s use it. I had the job of recasting mathematics in terms of awareness, and I did this - it’s in my books. The history of mathematics is another such exercise.
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