A few days ago, we pulled on a historical thread and wound up browsing the early volumes of The Mathematical Gazette. Doing so, we stumbled across a “mathematical note” from 1896 by Alfred Lodge, the first president of the Mathematical Association. Lodge’s note provides a simple derivation for the volume of a cone. Such arguments don’t vary all that much but, however we missed it, we’d never seen the derivation in the very elegant form presented by Lodge. Here is Lodge’s argument, slightly reworded.
It is ironic that a solution with an entire column of “Think” instructions exhibits so little thought. Who, for example, thinks to “redraw” a diagram by leaving out a critical line, and by making an angle x/2 appear larger than the original x? And it’s downhill from there.
The solution is painfully long, the consequence of an ill-chosen triangle, requiring the preliminary calculation of a non-obvious distance. As Damo indicates, the angle x is easily determined, as in the following diagram: we have tan(x/2) = 1/12, and we’re all but done.
(It is not completely obvious that the line through the circle centres makes an angle x/2 with the horizontal, though this follows easily enough from our diagram. The textbook solution, however, contains nothing explicit or implicit to indicate why the angle should be so.)
But there is something more seriously wrong here than the poor illustration of a poorly chosen solution. Consider, for example, Step 5 (!) where, finally, we have a suitable SOHCAHTOA triangle to calculate x/2, and thus x. This simple computation is written out in six tedious lines.
The whole painful six-step solution is written in this unreadable we-think-you’re-an-idiot style. Who does this? Who expects anybody to do this? Who thinks writing out a solution in such excruciating micro-detail helps anyone? Who ever reads it? There is probably no better way to make students hate (what they think is) mathematics than to present it as unforgiving, soulless bookkeeping.
And, finally, as Damo notes, there’s the gratuitous decimals. This poison is endemic in school mathematics, but here it has an extra special anti-charm. When teaching ratios don’t you “think”, maybe, it’s preferable to use ratios?
