I want to take everyone back to my eleventh grade math class.
I was advanced in school, and we took a class as juniors called "Pre-Calculus and Discrete Mathematics." PDM for short. It "got us ready" for calculus. (I should have known then, when I stared agape at the introduction of a tangent line, that I was going to bomb calc. But I digress.)
In this class, we learned a lot of discrete math. As JUNIORS IN HIGH SCHOOL. Juniors who were advanced, in a pretty affluent, successful midwestern city. These kids were going places. Like college.
The first time I was introduced to this problem (The Konigsberg Bridge problem) was in my discrete math book in high school. Junior year.
Now let's transport ourselves to the present. Guess what problem I am getting my kids to solve next week? The Konigsberg Bridge problem.
These little lovelies cannot even add fractions yet I have to spend my time, according to the Arizona department of education, teaching my children about EULER PATHS and CIRCUITS and SOLVING THIS DAMN BRIDGE PROBLEM.
I'm pretty sure there was a reason I didn't learn discrete math until high school. I was learning how to think algebraically. I was learning how to think. I wasn't bogged down in content.
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