Do we need to formally teach the Greek Alphabet? [closed]

Solution 1:

I teach physics. When a Greek letter comes up for the first time in my course, I try to make sure that it's explicitly described for them, either in lecture or in the text. They need to know that it's a Greek letter, what it's called, how to write it, and what sound it makes in Greek. They don't know these things without being told. In particular, they often see a letter like $\rho$ and just assume it's some kind of stylized letter "p." Likewise for $\gamma$ as "y," $\nu$ as "v." Teaching the whole alphabet all at once wouldn't work; they wouldn't retain it because they wouldn't be using it. It's unfortunate that the LaTeX $\gamma$ looks a lot like a "y," and someone looking at it can't tell that there's supposed to be a loop at the bottom.

You could say that students should just look these things up if they don't know them. There are two problems with this approach: (1) if they think $\rho$ is just a stylized "p," then they don't know that it's Greek and they need to look it up; (2) if you expect them to look it up, they won't, and then you'll have to grit your teeth every time you grade their paper and seem then writing $\gamma$ as "y."

Solution 2:

Many successful (ex-)students seem to assume "this was no problem for me, so I assume it will be no problem for other students." (For examples of this attitude, see some of the early comments on the question, some of the now-low-voted answers, and even one of the comments on this answer.) This is not just a bad assumption; from a teaching perspective, it's possibly the worst assumption one can make. (Full disclosure: I didn't find this a problem either, but I've always been fairly good at math. However, I know a lot of people who have been turned off to math precisely for reasons like this that seem trivial to those (like myself) who don't happen to find them off-putting.)

Personally, I think there's legitimate reason for concern here, but "formally teaching" the entire alphabet probably isn't going to solve the root problem, or at least, it isn't going to be the most efficient or effective way to solve it. If you teach the alphabet all in one go as an alphabet, you're just giving students a whole bunch of random symbols to memorize all at once instead of giving them a couple of random symbols at a time with no context.

So I would suggest instead that for the first couple times each non-Latin symbol is used, the teacher should (1) mention what alphabet it's from, (2) say the symbol's name and, if there's a Latin equivalent, what the equivalent is, (3) state whether the symbol is an arbitrary choice for the example at hand (such as using epsilon rather than x as the argument of a trig function) or a standard convention that the students should memorize (such as using capital pi for a product), and (4) if applicable, whether the choice of characters has anything to do with their usage (as in the case of Pi for product, with the aforementioned "p is for product" connection).

EDIT: Even for students who (1) don't find unexplained mysterious symbols off-putting and (2) are good at looking things up outside of class, teachers can unintentionally conceal some genuine and important subtleties. For instance, it wasn't until my third or fourth year of taking classes involving calculus that I realized there's a distinction between the d symbol used for single-dimension derivation and the partial symbol used in multiple dimensions.

EDIT 2: removed reference to "most of the answers so far," which is now fortunately long-obsolete.

Solution 3:

As a below average mathematician I was grateful for the teachers who explained symbols to us. The Greek alphabet might be a special case - but I think not. As a student, you don't know what the "funny symbols" are, what their name and spelling is and so you have difficulty to put a name on a concept. Suppose somebody teaches you a simple concept, draws a unknown symbol next to it and goes to the next concept - because there is no familiar name for the symbol, you will probably forget it and have trouble when you need it. I failed quite miserably at math at one time and was quite afraid of Greek symbols until a teacher sat down and explained to me their drawing, their spelling and what concept is behind each symbol.

As an analogy: Many programming languages have dictionaries, where you can access some value by a key. But you are out of luck when you don't know the key. The Greek alphabet is similar: Sure, the concepts are more important, but it helps when the name / spelling of each Greek letter is readily available in the student's memory.

Solution 4:

I think we should. The reason is that there is a correspondence between Greek letters and Roman letters, which is often kept too implicit to those that do not know the actual alphabet. $\Pi$ doesn't represent the product because "pi" begins with a "p". $\Pi$ represents the product because $\Pi$ is a "P", in Greek.

Therefore, I think every mathematics or physics student should know the whole Greek alphabet, what sounds the letters make, and what Roman letters they correspond to (there is not an exact 1-1 mapping here: for example the vowels E and H are both roughly "E", and the letter $\Psi$ has no direct Roman equivalent). Just knowing the very basics of the alphabet is very illuminating. For example, why do we use $\alpha$, $\beta$, and $\gamma$ for angles? (Answer: because they are the first three letters of the Greek alphabet)

It's also important to know both uppercase and lowercase letters. That way, we are not so confused when $\Sigma$ and $\sigma$ correspond to roughly the same thing, and we know how to make the same correspondence with any letter, just as we should not be confused about why either is used in place of $S$ or $s$.

Solution 5:

Yes you should, frequently even professors mix them up. I had a professor calling eta, "nu." It was one of those drink from the fire-hose courses. I made up a flashcard with the entire Greek alphabet on it, based on the Wikipedia table on all the letter entries. It was quite helpful in keeping me straight.

    Greek alphabet
Αα  Alpha       Νν  Nu
Ββ  Beta        Ξξ  Xi
Γγ  Gamma       Οο  Omicron
Δδ  Delta       Ππ  Pi
Εε  Epsilon     Ρρ  Rho
Ζζ  Zeta        Σσς Sigma
Ηη  Eta         Ττ  Tau
Θθ  Theta       Υυ  Upsilon
Ιι  Iota        Φφ  Phi
Κκ  Kappa       Χχ  Chi
Λλ  Lambda      Ψψ  Psi
Μμ  Mu          Ωω  Omega

It's important to make sure students and professors are speaking the same language. For any course that seems to run out of greek letters for symbols, you all need to know all of them.