(no subject)

[rivka]

I just read an interesting article by a mathematician, lamenting the way his subject is tortured and murdered in schools. (Article is here, in a PDF.) Here's his basic thesis:

All this fussing and primping about which "topics" should be taught in what order, or the use of this notation instead of that notation, or which make and model of calculator to use, for god’s sake— it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic! Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead.

The saddest part of all this "reform" are the attempts to “make math interesting” and "relevant to kids’ lives." You don’t need to make math interesting— it’s already more interesting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives.

He's passionate, furious, despondent, and very funny, producing gems along the lines of:

All metaphor aside, geometry class is by far the most mentally and emotionally destructive component of the entire K-12 mathematics curriculum. Other math courses may hide the beautiful bird, or put it in a cage, but in geometry class it is openly and cruelly tortured. (Apparently I am incapable of putting all metaphor aside.)

The article is long, but I found it a quick read. It's worth reading to the end, if only to get his truth-in-advertising summary of the K-12 math curriculum ("TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds.") I was one of those people who was very good at plugging numbers correctly into formulas but never felt like I had a good conceptual grasp of math. This article makes me feel sad about what I missed.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I liked the essay a lot, too, and linked to it recently. I got this comment (http://whswhs.livejournal.com/) from someone who was already interested in math learns better by being told how to do things.

I still the essay has a lot going for it, but probably underestimated how good the teachers would need to be to get the challenge level right.