THANK A TEACHER FOR 1+1=2
Music, math, and the alphabet shape our worldview.
You were cared for, possibly even loved, for the first five years of life. Someone changed your countless diapers and fed you. Without their love or caring, you’d be a dumb and dirty ape.
Then they pushed you out the door at Grade 1 and into the hands of (often unthanked) primary teachers, where you learned the Alphabet jingle and how to print 1+1=2. And to sing.
Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti… "Doe, a deer, a female dear..."
Mathematics is the music of reason.
— James Joseph Sylvester, English mathematician
From there, letters became words and sentences while 1+1=2 grew into x (y+4) = 64, and then came the essays, calculus, assignments, and final exams. And at some point, based on your education and your command of the language, someone hires you; someone falls in love with you.
Perhaps you have the nuclear family plan. You are proud of yourself. Why? You are successful, “you” are. Because you can develop great ideas, write them out well and express yourself sophisticatedly, and then do the math if there is any.
Music comes at an early age, often with a radio or being born into a family that sings. Music often comforts us, especially when we age with music that takes us back to happier times. Speech doesn’t do that. A teacher’s voice, even if melodic, isn’t as memorable as the lyrics from a song.
Can you see the road of your life behind you, back near the beginning? Without the Alphabet song and 1+1=2, you’d be a baby ape. You probably never thanked your teachers for advancing you in life. To further you from the baby ape scenario.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
— Albert Einstein
The rudimentary math is already known; children know taking an apple from your friend gives you two apples. And they know you are at a deficit when your friend takes both apples.
Had you missed the alphabet and the math, you are lost – the world will never be the exact same as that of your classmates.
1+1=2 isn’t just apples; it’s electrons, it’s cars, it’s birds, it’s imperative education. And mastering the alphabet in a few years has made you literate - once a gift from the gods, it still is in areas of the world.
You held the crayon and scrawled out what the teacher had written on the board:
1
+1
—
2
For a moment, the world slows down. You just made an accurate physical representation of the apple deficit problem. You just added your two thumbs, and you took off your two shoes. What a ground-breaking concept; that we can transpose the material world into numbers with a Lemon-Lime Green crayon on brown cardboard! This can only get better!
The universe speaks mathematics. Each thing you’re being taught took thousands of years before it could be worked out. Equations, theories, constructs, abstract connections, this discipline has been around for a long time in the building. (Currently, the end of math sits in String Theory, for 50 years, it has been our best guess for what the fundamental particles of the universe must be – except it doesn’t give the answers we want.) God speaks mathematics.
And the world speaks vocally, writes silently, reads aloud, whispers, shouts, or uses its language in some way to convey information. So, while you can read books and write stories or blog posts, you have exceptional luck expressing yourself with your words… because that is all you can do to convince the world you’re as smart as you think. Language is the edge of expressing what you know.
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
— Dean Schlicter
On the quantum level, energy is information. The secret we are all here on earth is to exchange and process information. We are observers, and strangely ( a word that defines Quantum Theory); observers play a part in calculating the experiment. If we watch, one thing happens; if we don’t, another happens. This mystifies us. Einstein said, “I am to believe the moon is not there when I am not looking at it?” Yeah, it’s bizarre.
Noteworthy, this amazing news was released today, May 25th, 2022:
Scientists are inching closer to a “quantum internet.”
"A team of physicists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands published a paper showing a step toward such a network, using a technique called quantum teleportation to send data across three physical locations.
The technology moves data from place to place by taking advantage of a quantum property called “entanglement,” a change in the state of one quantum system that instantaneously affects the state of another, distant one."
The exchange of information is paramount on the quantum level and the macro level. And that’s why it gets so complicated and confusing. It’s damn good you went to Grade 1, so you can understand the words written on this page! "Whew," said many people of the past.
People like to mention the last education they had, not the first. And those first – math, alphabet, and music – are by far the most profound.
Thank a primary teacher when you get the chance.
