
Lockhart's Lament: On Mathematics at School - hhm
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html
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phaedrus
My high school algebra/trig teacher was a real drone; every problem had to be
done by rote and she cared more about your handwriting and placing the numbers
the same way she did than whether you actually knew what you were doing. She
had the imagination of a four-function calculator; to her it "math" meant
"mechanical". I made C's and D's in her classes, because I'd see shortcuts
that got the right answers faster but she'd mark right answers wrong if we
didn't use her methods to get them.

Meanwhile I was writing my own 3-d graphics engine at home, working all the
math out from observation of the real world with yardsticks and using graph
paper, because I didn't have internet at home to look up the answers or the
math education to know . Every time I'd try to ask her if anything from
algebra or trig connected in some way to what I was doing, or if she knew of
some math tools that would help me, she'd shut my questioning down and
belittle me. I actually worked out sine/cosine and rotation matrices out on my
own before we covered them in class, because she wouldn't point anything out
to me.

To this day I still don't know if she was such an unimaginative rock that she
really didn't make any cognitive connection between math and real world
applications, or if she just hated me for being a nonconformist.

~~~
palish
What are you working on now? Just curious.

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sah
The bit about finding the area of a triangle was great -- a quick, simple
example of what math is and why anyone would enjoy it.

K-12 public school math education burned me so bad that I didn't realize how
much I love math until my mid-20s. (These days I'm reading about abstract
algebra for fun!)

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manny
As a mathematics major and having gone through some seriously crappy math
courses in highschool (and even freshman college courses) including AP
Calculus classes, I just want to say that I truely recommend reading this
article.

It really cannot be stated any better than this, folks. Even as a math major,
reading this reinspires me and refuels my passion for mathematics.

Simply lovely. :)

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technoguyrob
I'm a graduate student in mathematics.

This article made me cry. Really powerful.

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hhm
Yes, it's a very very nice article. Actually, you put it better: very, very
powerful.

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crystalarchives
I wish I could upmod this so many times... Amazing article, everyone should
read the entire thing.

I hated math throughout school, although I was told I was "good at it", even
though I had no clue what was going on. Now I know why!

What can we do about this?!

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kalid
Great article! I've always thought that having math education focusing on
formulas is having poetry and literature focus on grammar and spelling -- the
painting and music analogies are dead-on.

But that's exactly what happens: Formulas and equations (grammar) are one way
to express a beautiful idea. Unfortunately we end up focusing on the syntax
and not the semantics, the underlying meaning.

Shameless plug, but I try to do my part to make math intuitive at
betterexplained.com.

What a great essay.

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mariorz
It always struck me how my math classess seemed to focus on the mechanical
exercises and never let us glimpse at the true genius of what we were
brainlasly repeating with them.

However, I think I could say the same for many of my classes. As an
Engineering student, I'm sure most of my physics classes are way beyond what I
will ever use when I leave university (trig btw, heavily used for most of this
classes). I think the same reasoning could be applied here, instead of
repeating painful exercises consisting basically of memorizing and rearranging
formulas, let the student wonder at the context and history behind each of the
subjects and the problems that were solved with them.

This is a problem affecting education systems in a deeper level than the math
curriculum, it comes down, I think, to something the author points at, which
is this widespread notion that education is supposed to be something that
"prepares tomorrow's workforce" instead of it being a source for inspiration
and enlightenment.

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Spyckie
This is a beautiful article. I hated math during high school, but was very
good at it. I even skipped a grade of math so I could free up my schedule to
do more interesting classes! It's such a shame - I love math puzzles but
really hate math class.

Even the introductory math courses in college are terrible.

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comatose_kid
Man, what a great article. Thanks.

I love Lockhart's definition of Trigonometry: "Two weeks of content are
stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds".

Reading this article makes me understand why people home-school their
children.

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optimal
Did anybody read _King of Infinite Space_, the biography of Donald Coxeter?

I noticed the article used lots of drawings, and I believe this and the
general discussion fits into Coxeter's thinking on mathematics, versus the
Bourbaki school's more rigid and less intuitive approach.

"GEOMETRY. Isolated from the rest of the curriculum, this course will raise
the hopes of students who wish to engage in meaningful mathematical activity,
and then dash them."

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wisernow
The PDF was painful so here is a converted HTML link
<http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/xdLbwd>

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musiciangames
It struck me while reading this that we should rename the subject we teach as
maths to puzzles.

Just about everybody likes having a go at puzzles, and people are pretty good
at selecting puzzles with the right amount of challenge. I'm sure as a student
I'd have a more positive expectation going into a puzzles class than the
current experience.

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hhm
I don't know. I think maths can be fun and can be very interesting without
having to hide it as puzzles. I'd prefer to call the things by their name, but
to show them as they truly are: interesting, fun, and even quite addicting.

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huherto
Very interesting. Does any one have any suggestions to interest an 11 year old
about Math?

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Erf
Let them find a way to use it.

When I was in high school, I played Robot Battle, a game in which you scripted
behaviors for automated tanks. This gave me immediate reason to use and learn
much of what I learned in math at school. The day we were taught basic
trigonometry, I was on the edge of my seat, because I knew that what I was
learning would be useful several hours later when I got back to coding my
robots.

Of course, you can't force an interest on a child, but you can certainly
introduce them to new ones.

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optimal
Is this specific to math, or is all standardized (bastardized?) education this
way?

I can't remember doing any creative writing in elementary school, but I do
remember diagramming sentences, much like the musician's nightmare in the
article.

