Lockhart’s Lament

Albeit an interesting read, I do disagree with Lockhart here on the “cutesyness” of math. As a teacher, I love using examples of “Mr. C (hey, that’s gonna be me!) driving around Mrs. A and telling her that her pies are square.” I think that is a perfectly valid way to teach math, and I feel like that students will learn more effectively through silly methods like those. Though I agree that math has plenty of history and philosophy attached, and that it is important for students to relationally understand math, not everybody is on the same page. By offering memorization techniques like those, and by using word problems that are more fun and relatable, it helps students understand the materials just as well. It’s always fun to see someone buying 300 watermelons, or calculating at what angle a lumberjack has to chop down a tree to avoid his pet squirrel. Those questions are fun ways for the students to assess their own learning, and it is as pivotal as understanding the history of math topics.

However, I do agree that math is an art, yet it has been reduced to data transmission. Especially in university, math has boiled down to our professors showering us with information, and us copying them down word to word. Then, we do a painful amount of exercises, followed by standardized tests that our graduation status depends on. Math shouldn’t be a rigid structure, it should be taught like an art, with creative expressions and integrating actual creative art in the process. We can solve all kinds of modern problems with math, just like how we can draw anything we want with paint brushes.

And to relate back to Skemp, relational learning is one of the key points that both authors pointed out. Being able to see math problems as different theories, rather than just plugging in an equation, is how we should educate our students. Just like Skemp’s hometown map analogy, if we have a rough mental map, we can find the way even if we get lost. Similar to Lockhart’s point, if we treated math like how we learned music, we can reproduce similar problem solving skills on paper, just like how we are able to navigate our mental map. It is reassuring to see that fundamentally, teaching math is really about understanding the root of the topics, rather than the arithmetics of everything.