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Zach Haney
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In teaching a course on geometry to sophomore's in the previous year, I definitely included as much history as possible. There are numerous ways to do this.

  1. The first thing is that -- like @Cameron Williams said -- you have to know this material yourself before you can teach it. There are many resources out there in terms of texts and online videos. Norman Wildberger's History of Math lectures can be found on youtube at that link. They are quite good and would be great for any high school math teacher to incorporate parts of this into class. They are based on John Stillwell's Math and Its History. Journey Through Genius has already been mentioned.

  2. I started class each day with a Historical Date in Mathematics [I might change that to 3 days a week or 2 depending on time]. I used the Math Timeline as a base to help me organize myself and also provide other context for the students that they might be familiar with (e.g. pyramids were built around the same time kind of thing). They students were required to have their own timeline for the dates we talked about in class. I didn't give an assessment of their recall of the dates, but they were required to do a few research projects. In the future, I am considering having them do independent MATH research based on some historical problem. These do not have to be problems just from ancient Greece. Students can handle investigations into number theoretic problems too. Symmetry study? Sure! Methods for solving systems of linear (and non-linear, oh my) equations? Definitely.

  3. When I introduce a topic, I try very hard to motivate it and this includes talking about why anyone considered it in the past. The reason for (more advanced example) the current state of knowledge around unique factorization domains is due to Gauss's interest in seeing systems similar to but different from the integers. This alone begins to demonstrate to students how math even happens. What is math research? -- Start with something you already know and tweak!

  4. (really 3a) The historical motivation is sometimes the best one in my opinion. This was particularly true for logarithms. They are usually taught as inverses of exponentials and then properties are listed, some calculations and graphing are done... moving on. That's doable (and how I first learned) but often this leaves one with a feeling of... why did I just learn that... or even more so, what are logarithms REALLY? However, if one talks about their original purpose and how to arrive at them naturally, it's rather wonderful. Then suddenly their uses for things like linear regression make since -- it's their original purpose - LINEARIZE!

I have some history modules that teach concepts via historical routes that are rather good (admittedly, I change them some) if anyone is interested. Some material goes from middle school up through first year college.

Zach Haney
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