Introduction

In this article, I will describe my context (Norwegian pre-service teacher education) and give some examples of different ways I work on history of mathematics. A major part of the paper will be spent discussing some of the materials I have used with students.

As a subtitle, I have chosen “Can you do something even if you can't do much?” In conferences in the HPM community, we get to see wonderful examples of how rich a resource the history of mathematics can be, but often I am left with the question “Will I have time to do this with my students?” A dedicated history of mathematics course would have been great for prospective mathematics teachers—but when they can't have that, what can they have?

Background

I teach a course in mathematics for prospective primary and lower secondary school teachers. The course lasts for two years, and is supposed to occupy a fourth of the students' time for that period. After doing this course, students are expected to be able to teach mathematics from grade 1 to 10 in the Norwegian school system—in itself an optimistic expectation.

There are certain important factors that have to be taken into account when planning such a course. When it comes to history of mathematics, students usually know very little in advance. The time is so limited that we can't dedicate time to an overview of the history of mathematics—everything we do on history of mathematics must be part of a broader treatment of mathematics.