SUCCEED WITH MATH:
Every Student's Guide to Conquering Math Anxiety
Chapter 4. The Wonders of Pi
I can still remember how bothered I was the first time a teacher told me about pi. I was in the seventh grade and until then, had trusted mathematics. I wasn't told where pi came from or why it always worked. I was simply instructed to use pi (either the approximate fraction 22/7 or the longer decimal, 3.14159...) whenever I had a circumference or an area of a circle to compute.
In this chapter, we did something different. We started with a seventh grader's reluctance to accept the notion of pi, and went from there to look a little more closely at geometry (the evolution of the circle from multisided polygons); at set theory (rational versus irrational numbers, different infinities); at some of the fundamental ideas of differential calculus (finding slopes); and at integral calculus (finding the area under a curve) as well.
Students who like mathematics find they don't have to memorize
facts. They can figure things out as they go along. One idea
in mathematics seems to nest comfortably inside another, as this
chapter demonstrates. So, my theory is that if you start somewhere, just about anywhere...
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