Today I came across Alexandre Borovik's Mathematics Under the Microscope blog, set up to support Borovik's book of the same title, available for free download under a Creative Commons licence. The blog has plenty of interesting, funny, and challenging observations and insights, about mathematics, about learning and teaching, and about the politics of education. I particularly enjoyed these two.
- What is missing from the social constructivist theories of mathematics? which likens developing as a mathematician to being a dog trainer - "Mathematician is a dog trainer; his subconscious is his 'inner dog', a wordless creature with fantastic abilities, for example, for image processing, or for parsing of symbolic input. Mathematician has to train his 'inner dog'."
- Psychophysiology of blackboard teaching, from which the lovely image above from Samira Makhmalbaf's film "Blackboards" is shamelessly stolen.
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