We’re doing a lot with mathematics this May. We are running the Gauss contest for interested grade 7 students as usual. A few years ago, another contest aimed for grade 6 students was introduced and named in recognition of Maryam Mirzakhani. This year we are organising a festival of math activities with our new Mirzakhani event at the centre.
Maryam Mirzakhani was particularly open to considering unconventional problem solving paths. She said, “I find it fascinating that you can look at the same problem from different perspectives and approach it using different methods.” She described herself as a slow mathematician and was interested in the beauty to be found in mathematics. She was constantly doodling as part of her practice, so much so that her daughter described her mother’s work as painting. Mirzakhani’s outlook is good medicine for our math students. Too many students encounter a difficult problem or see someone else get an answer quickly and jump to the mistaken conclusion that they just aren’t good at math. We’re looking to inspire students to see their work in math as something to do together, something that may require time for ideas to soak, and something where there can be many valuable ways to get to the goal and where the goal isn’t to find THE answer but to understand and even perhaps find beauty.
Our halls are literalliy lined with mathematics puzzles for students of all grades to ponder. (Some of the first solutions submitted to our chess puzzles came from students in our primary classes!) As usual, We’ll be putting the reasoning we use in mathematics to the test in the games we play and creations we come up with in our purposeful play activities. And our showcase event will be when our intermediate students gather together in the gym to put their thinking skills together to take on the Mirzakhani math challeng problems. Students will work in small collaborative groups from their house teams to find, show & explain different solution paths to the challenges set before them.
Welcome to the Douglas Road Mirzakhanin MathFest!
