The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities - powerful new tools like African fractals - and then just get out of the way.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.
We need students to understand how the world has changed and be prepared to make contributions in a new way.
Forget about teaching the children about numbers and colors and the like, and just play with them.
We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.
I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
I realized if you can change a classroom, you can change a community, and if you change enough communities you can change the world.
I make fractals. They're like mathematical pictures. My stepdad is actually a rocket scientist, so in his free time, he gave me a fractal program for fun. He showed me how to use it when I was about nine or 10, and I made thousands of fractals.
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
Mathematicians didn't invent infinity until 1877. So they thought it was impossible that Africans could be using fractal geometry.
I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.