Why Teach Math History?

Pre-reading ideas about whether, why, and how math history should or could be incorporated into math teaching. 

As one of the few non-education majors, I am not sure I can say how I would implement it into "my own" math teaching. I can, however, put myself into the shoes of a high school student and think about what I would want to learn about. That being said, I see math history playing a minimal role in high school math education. I think that the history of math can be helpful if it provides context to complicated techniques, showing how a certain type of math was discovered could create real-world applications for math in the minds of students. Other than that though, I think it would just confuse kids and overload them with information that they don't necessarily need. 

Things that made me "stop and wonder"

"History can be torturous and confusing, rather than enlightening", this is exactly what I was trying to say, this has been phrased a lot more eloquently than I could ever say it, but I 100% agree. "Lack of time", I also agree with this, highschool math already has a ton of concepts packed into it, I feel that adding the history of math would increase that "knowledge overload" that I discussed above. "The active predisposition towards mathematics", I agree that this point is interesting. Math should be seen as ever-evolving and should inspire students to question everything and maybe even discover new are better ways to approach math. A few hundred years ago math looked a lot different than it does now and in a few hundred years with will look different again.  

Conclusion

I think that some very valid points were made for both sides and I now definitely now see the benefits of teaching the history of math to students more than I did prior to reading this. However, my main doubts remain and I think some of them were even strengthened and confirmed by the article.