Abstract
In this article, I present the eighteenth century’s polemic of Bernoulli and d’Alembert concerning the smallpox epidemic and a prevention method called inoculation. Through an analysis of the polemic and the related resources, I show that this historical debate has various interests for mathematics education; and more specifically it can help teachers to confront dilemmas emerging with the COVID-19 pandemic (for example if a teacher should talk about it in class or not, how to help students to interpret the statistical data and the mathematical models connected to the pandemic and more generally, how to deal with the confusions and concerns emerging in connection to the pandemic). I describe the documents related to the historical polemic as transitional objects, having a potential to reveal the teachers’ own professional or personal experiences, reflections and questions, and to stimulate dialogue with them on these issues. I illustrate this proposition by the presentation of an online reading seminar realized with a French group of teachers in April 2020.
Highlights
During the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic exploded and was spread around the world, teachers and students had to face various difficulties related to the pandemic, including fear from the illness itself, an overwhelming quantity of information raising Gosztonyi K.problems of interpretation, questions of reliability, and which were sometimes contradictory, the quickly changing and radical public measures based on that information, isolation and practical problems due to the lockdown, and the closing of schools and adaptation to online teaching.In this situation, many teachers were confronted with the dilemma: should they talk about the pandemic in their classes or not? The question might be raised slightly differently in different countries
Two of them claimed to work substantially on the mathematical aspects of the pandemic; and several of them raised a similar problem as French teachers, namely that students were so overwhelmed by information about COVID-19 that it did not appear desirable to come back to this subject in mathematics classes
In a lecture presented at the Academy in 1754, La Condamine insisted that inoculation should be publicly promoted and suggested that the question should be seen as a mathematical problem: the decision about inoculation should be based on the comparison of risks (Colombo & Diamanti, 2015; Rohrbasser, 2011; Seth, 2014)
Summary
During the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic exploded and was spread around the world, teachers and students had to face various difficulties related to the pandemic, including fear from the illness itself, an overwhelming quantity of information raising. Problems of interpretation, questions of reliability, and which were sometimes contradictory, the quickly changing and radical public measures based on that information, isolation and practical problems due to the lockdown, and the closing of schools and adaptation to online teaching In this situation, many teachers were confronted with the dilemma: should they talk about the pandemic in their classes or not? Two of them claimed to work substantially on the mathematical aspects of the pandemic; and several of them raised a similar problem as French teachers, namely that students were so overwhelmed by information about COVID-19 that it did not appear desirable to come back to this subject in mathematics classes In both cases, a possible approach to deal with this dilemma might be to address the question indirectly, via the history of mathematics: via the discussion of historical epidemics and their management by past societies with the help of mathematical tools. I illustrate this proposition by presenting elements from the discussion of the reading session of the IREM group
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