How 'divine' is the language of care?
'My impression was that algebra was less a subject than a practice into which one was inducted by the algebra priests after a series of mortifications. The letters and equations that the teacher drew on the board did not seem related to the numbers I had handled in other classrooms. For one thing, a problem in arithmetic was vertical, one number beneath another, and a problem in algebra, an equation, was horizontal. I felt as if in a permanent present, unable to see how the past and the future were joined. In Ulysses James Joyce writes that the present is the drain that the future goes down on its way to becoming the past.' p.12.
'The mathematician Alonzo Church, who taught Alan Turing, told another of his students, David Berlinski, "Any idiot can learn anything in mathematics. It requires only patience." I would sit with a pencil and paper trying to solve an algebra problem and sometimes go only so far before my mind would halt, because I had could used up what little I knew that might apply. It hadn't occurred to me to think of algebra as the bright boys and girls I had been among had thought of it, as a series of related procedures. They were constructing a map. I was collecting postcards from places where anxiety or incuriousness had kept me from leaving my hotel.' p.31.
(my emphasis)
Alec Wilkinson. (2022) A Divine Language. Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250168580/adivinelanguage/
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
