"Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. ...so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who's interested in history's being bored by the abstract mathematics... the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history—if you can do it so you don't bore them all, all the time, perhaps you're better off. ...I don't know how to answer the question of different kinds of minds with different interests... after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all kinds of different methods, I really don't know how to do it."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Richard Feynman, "Bored by the History," The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics_education
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Mathematics education
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