My first stop was at where the reading depicted the character of a stereotypical math person. I laughed. Apparently, the people I meet in the mathematics department during my undergrads, instructors or peers, they don't really fall into that stereotypical description, while they express their love to mathematics.
Then, I read the next bullet point, which says there are a lot of positive social valuation in claiming incapable of doing math. I laughed again. And then I thought that indeed, there could be a "safer space" vs "braver space" when it comes to expressing one's affection toward math. The math department in universities, are probably the "safest space", whereas it will be more difficult for people to share their enthusiasm about math in a place that we would expect the majority is feeling relatable to each other by sharing their math phobia.
The third stop I had was at where The New Math was recounted. Bourbaki group's rejection of teaching geometry was quite shocking to me. And the term "abstract" in that passage confused and bothered me. I am not sure if we are saying "abstract" to refers to a property of being "alike" to the field of abstract mathematics? Does less visual just means more abstract? According my general understanding to the term "abstract", although I think it's true that a lot of people find geometry more "intuitive" or easy to understand, but I don't think geometry is anything less abstract than algebra in nature. Therefore Bourbaki group's advocate kind of sounded like an "algebra-elitism" to me, which some people who are better at algebra (over geometry) view themselves as elite in the field simply because they are the minority. I think I just couldn't see the reason why they thought algebra would better prepare students to become future rocket scientists.
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