I completely disagree with this article, which says we need more rote learning and we should "make girls practise math". If someone doesn't enjoy math then what if rote learning and "practice" makes them utterly hate it? nytimes.com/2018/08/07/opi
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She thinks math skills are best acquired through "length, in-depth practice", that "routine practice" plays an important role, and that "the foundational patterns must be ingrained before you can begin to be creative". I completely disagree.
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She dismisses the importance of "conceptual understanding"; is it because she's an engineer and thinks math is just a tool for engineers? I got good at math by *only* conceptual understanding, no practice and no rote learning at all. It can't just be me.
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I'm an engineer and I loved maths before I was one, for it's a language like no other (except maybe music, which I know very little about). I've always been captivated by abstractions and concepts in maths, especially when they didn't have any practical use.
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"It tells me a story" is what I say when I try to convey my love of maths to maths-phobics. Those stories are absract in maths or music or modern art. But I'm quite sure the best way to get kids to learn those fields is to give them the intuition that there is a story to hear...
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I like talking about building worlds! Kind of fits in with the storytelling aspect - as with writing novels, you do world-building, and see how the characters interact in that world under different situations.