Task: Interview someone working in mathematics or mathematics education from outside CDU’s College of Indigenous Futures, Education and the Arts whose work connects with your topic area - covering their work, my topic and applications for mathematics pedagogy. `
In this post, I will be going through the interview I did with a Police Officer in a remote town of Australia. He is working in the Law enforcement field for the last 5 years and has been working with mathematics on an everyday basis knowingly and unknowingly. He loves Mathematics and enjoyed learning mathematics during his schooling and University degrees. He holds a Masters degree in Engineering and is interested in solving cyber crimes. He worked as an Engineer for 7 years before becoming a Police Officer.
Some important parts of conversation from the interview is as outlined below:
Did you love Mathematics as a subject while you were in school?
I always did. One of my favourite subjects were Mathematics and I always related my learning to my real life situations such as measuring recipes before baking, or looking at how much air is needed for my bikes and more. It really helped me when I was in Uni and even while at work.
Do you think you were able to relate maths to work and real life situations because you practiced learning maths that way, or is it because of the teacher who taught you maths?
I would say that it's because of the teachers I had in school, and the way they taught me or introduced me to maths. I did my schooling overseas in India before moving to Australia and one thing that I felt that's different in the way teaching is carried out there is, we had a chance to explore out in the yard, had more hands on activities in mathematics and it helped us become very passionate learners. We saw ourselves using maths in our work or higher education even when we were little kids, and we were ready to take charge of mathematics and apply those in work at a very young age.
That is interesting to hear! Can you please explain how mathematics is used in your work?
We use maths everyday in our work, from counting and checking our equipments before the start of our shift to checking patterns in crashes. I am a Patrol officer, and therefore I use maths in issuing tickets to people who are speeding or cutting traffic signals. Even though calculating the speed of vehicles is done automatically by the Lidar system, we still have to calculate in our mind a rough estimate of their speeds. Using Km per hour calculations is an everyday thing. When we have drug involved issues, we have to calculate the drugs seized in grams or pounds, or convert it between the units! I am not a crash scene investigator, but crash scene investigators check skid marks, the patterns behind it to guess how the crash has occurred. Mostly during homicides or other serious crimes, it is very regular that we check the size of shoe prints to analyse the situation and the crime.
How do you think Ethnomathematics is used in your work?
If I am right, it is the section of maths that involves culture and mathematics, and it is how real world problems are solved by people around the world. As mentioned above we look at patterns and skid marks to solve a crash investigation, which was used by people many decades ago, where they carved patterns or followed foot prints to find missing persons. We unknowingly use Ethnomathematics in everyday life, work and more. When I work with Indigenous Australians, they have amazing art works and each art work follows a pattern, whether it's dot painting or rock or bark carving, there is mathematics, symmetry and geometry in it. We use drawings to solve homicides, trace around bodies and mark important spots to investigate further. Forensic officers and Fingerprint investigators looks at fingerprints which are patterns. Those are techniques used by people decades ago.
Critical reflections
From this interview, I found the techniques used by Police officers which relates to Mathematics. I always imagined that mathematics is used by Accountants, Bank managers, retail staff, and so on, and never imagined that every person uses Mathematics in one way or another. The last job that came to my mind that uses mathematics was law enforcement officers and this interview has changed my view about it.
There is art, measurement, geometry and pattern in everything that we see. Ethnomathematics is an area of mathematics that helps us look deep into those and understand how it relates to mathematical ideas. Kolam drawing is also a pattern which uses shapes, geometry, arcs and more, and when we look at Police officer's working on patterns, it is a new knowledge for me,
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