Klarinet Archive - Posting 000019.txt from 2004/11

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] "Methods"
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 16:10:00 -0500

Tony Pay wrote:

> Why do people want, 'an approach', or 'a method', isolated from
> understanding?

There's a moment in one of Feynman's talks or interviews (it's published
in the collection "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out") where he talks
about his cousin receiving extra maths tuition at home, and he says
something along the following lines (I'm quoting from memory here):

-----------------------
"What are you doing?" says I [i.e., child Feynman].

"Algebra," he says. "You have 2x + 7 = 15 and you have to find out
what x is."

"You mean 4," says I.

"Yes," he says, "but you did it with arithmetic, and you're
supposed to do it with algebra." And that's why my cousin was never
able to learn algebra, because he never understood that it didn't matter
how you did it, it mattered that you got the right answer.
-----------------------

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