March 6th, 2008
Lockhart’s Lament
Posted by hayds in Uncategorized
I found this article on the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) website. It was the most emotionally involved that I have ever been when reading anything at university. I recommend that every Mathematics educator, let alone us enrolled in the EDUC4150 course reads this article. Please feel free to post any thoughts as comment.
The article is written by Paul Lockhart who is a mathematics teacher in New York.
on March 6th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
That Lockhart’s lament is amazing. Good on you for finding it!
on March 10th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
So what did you think? Did you get anything out of reading it?
on March 11th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Yes, a lot. I left that last comment after I only read the first page, then I printed it out and read the rest of it.
I liked the way he refered to “pseudo-mathematics” in school, like a mindless manipulation of symbols, all the creative processes of real mathematics completely left out. And how if you’ve been told you’re good at maths at school, it doesn’t really mean anything except that you can use symbols. That probably means that you’d be better at languages than actual maths. Might be why I’m struggling at uni.. got no conceptual understanding.
I also liked the bit about how just because maths has practical applications doesn’t mean that’s what it’s about. It made me think of maths as those puzzle books that you just do for fun. That’s what it’s meant to be. We should do those to start off at primary school, then everyone would be writing theorems by the time they got to senior school. Dividing maths into irrelevant topics and making extra vocabulary like “improper fraction” etc.. it destroys creativity.
I especially liked the bit about relevance.. I definitely didn’t like maths at school when it was forced into “real situations” – I think word problems are important but they shouldn’t be the focus point. The probelm is with everything involved with maths in schools – how can you test creativity at such a high level? Maths has been made into a race to nowhere. Students are just trained chimps. You remember what matters to you and what makes you think… nothing that evokes that ever happens in a maths class usually. “mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself,not from being told how to solve them.” And that doesn’t mean that you get shown how to do one and then do another one yourself that is THE SAME but with different numbers.
The bit on geometry was good too – I hated geometry at school, until about year 12 when i got into it, but most people don’t wait that long to have time to get used to formal proofs, which means most people give up and don’t even try to solve problems in geometry, which is sad because it’s actually interesting.
The proof that he used as an example from the year 7 kid was really illuminating. I enjoyed that. And when he talked about the spirit of the proof being buried under formality.
Actually I thought the whole thing was a bit long and ranty (I gave it to my brother, who’s in year 10, to read after me and he said he got sick of it), but if you do erad all of it there are little gems of wisdom and made me feel a lot better about things. And a lot worse about the school curriculum.
on March 11th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Romantic to be sure. :wink I’m not sure his solutions outweighed his criticism. I think the negative portrayal of the maths classroom was slightly heavy handed, but I like his argument about the cycle of boring teaching resulting in everyone’s dislike of maths.