Touchstone Exercise

Each week make an update to a wordpress post in which you use the ideas and tools of the week's activity to address how to analyze and depict inequalities—of how different components of any aggregate (e.g., society, population, the economy) fare differently.

• Specify "Touchstone exercise" as the Category for the post.
• Update the date each time (so that the updated post appears near the top of the stream of posts)

• Preamble: The course does not impose a definition of "mathematical thinking," so we fill in a definition(s) through our activities and CEs. That said, the touchstone exercise and many of the activities correspond to an overall notion of critical thinking about mathematical thinking in the course, namely, that the traditionally emphasized tools and skills of mathematics (ranging from addition to calculus and beyond) need to be considered in tension with an alternative: Developing ways to address systematically the real-world complexities of the social context in which mathematics is applied, people learn mathematics, and people develop and apply views about themselves and others as mathematical thinkers.

• Preparation before the first session for the touchstone exercise: Peruse http://www.gapminder.org/, which helps us visualize inequalities within and between societies. Make notes in a blog post about ways that advances in technology have made this possible.

Suggestions for subsequent weeks, in development