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    A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
    A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
    A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

    By Paul Lockhart and Keith Devlin

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “One of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen, written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his teaching career to K-12 education.” —Keith Devlin, NPR’s “Math Guy”

    A brilliant research mathematician reveals math to be a creative art form on par with painting, poetry, and sculpture, and rejects the standard anxiety-producing teaching methods used in most schools today. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart’s controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike, altering the way we think about math forever.

    Paul Lockhart is the author of Arithmetic, Measurement, and A Mathematician’s Lament. He has taught mathematics at Brown University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and to K-12 level students at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBellevue Literary Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2009
    ISBN9781934137338

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    • 4/5
      If you like Mathematics and if you like a Polemic Opinion this wll be your book. Lockhart's criticism is certainly exaggerated, but I knew from the beginning that in his heart he was right. The best parts of his book were not dedicated to the educational system but to his love for Mathematics. And though he only gave some examples I knew what he meant. I was sitting on the shore of the Maltese Meditaranian ocean and I needed four beers to understand his (geometrical) "proof for the fact, that the sum of all uneven numbers always give a square numer". With his L-shaped examples he convinced me, but I could not rest before I had the "arithmetical approach as well". That took some other bottels of CISK (Maltese Beer). Sorry that I am not able to convey it in English, but everyone who likes numbers will understand me anyway. (n – 1)(n + 1) + 1 = n² Das ist die Formel, mit der sich beweisen lässt, dass die Summe aller ungeraden Zahlen immer eine Quadratzahl ergibt. Der geometrische Beweis besteht aus Quadraten, deren oberstes linkes Feld ein einzelnes Quadrat ist. Darum jeweils L-förmige Gebilde, die die ungeraden Zahlen repräsentieren (aus Lockhart, aber die arithmetische Formel habe ich selbst rausgekriegt)
    • 5/5
      Someone has said it out loud...mathematics is creative. It is not a mind numbing, rote exercise in memorization. I don't know how many times I've tried to explain this to colleagues and friends who simply don't understand and who think I've lost my mind. Now I have backup. Hallelujah!
    • 5/5
      Wonderful; adapted from the essay of the same title that had previously been circulated unpublished in mathmatical circles for years. This is Paul Lockhart's brilliant 140 page arguement that maths is 'the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.' And his arguement is very persuasive, writing that the 'maths' we are presented with in school is not the real thing at all, but a frighteningly dummed down version. That which is done to maths in school is the equivalent of painting-by-numbers being presented as art's true essence. Lockhart states 'Mathematics is fundamentally an act of communication', and, as if to prove his point, it is clear that the author has communication down to an art form. As a non-mathematician I was fully able to follow and appreciate the arguements and mathematical problems presented in this book. Perhaps best summed up in Lockhart's own phrase; 'If tears aren't streaming down your face, maybe you should read it again.' Not that that would be a chore. Five stars are not enough.
    • 4/5
      Outstanding! As a father trying to help his 15 year-old daughter, I find much that he says on target. I wish there were more teachers like him in the schools.
    • 4/5
      Paul Lockhart seems like he'd be an amazing math teacher. His book The A Mathematician's Lament shows him to be an incredibly motivated teacher of the subject. The book is a prolonged critique of contemporary mathematics education and as such, Lockhart lands a number of serious blows. Math education, he argues, is currently designed to kill students' love of the subject. It is devoid of the aesthetic beauty that is the essence of math and is instead a pointless series tasks to be memorized. His goal is to elevate mathematical pursuits to the level of an art. Rid the topic of all its pseudo "usefulness" and teach as something to be appreciated on its own terms.On the whole, I found the book convincing. One point that stuck out especially for me was his call to include the history of math in math courses. He'd also like to see the philosophy of the subject discussed so that students can see the passion that mathematicians have. Doing so would certainly have given someone like me more to work with rather than the memorization and pattern recognition that dominates so much of math education today.Where he loses me is in his dismissal of all attempts to develop curriculum. He dismisses it and every attempt to do so as "bunk". Education schools are absurd. The only thing that matters to Lockhart is the individual teacher and his efforts to do what's best for students. One part of me wants to believe that this is in fact the case, but this seems misguided at best. This Randian view of the heroic individual standing up against all the world's fools sounds good (I guess), but does not conform to the reality I've encountered in my years of teaching and as an administrator.Can teachers learn from others? I don't have a sense that Lockhart feels he's learned much from anyone but himself. How is a teacher to ensure that students have some consistent and meaningful expeience over the years? Are they to wander from master to master with no direction? Is there really no responsibility to give students some semblance of a coherent experience?The heart of the problem seems, to me, at least, to be Lockhart's overweening self-confidence. From his text, Lockhart apparently has all the answers and those who don't agree with him are fools. So while I am sure he's a great teacher, I do wonder if his students come to possess what appears to be his elitist dismissal of "lesser intellects". That has nothing to do, I guess, with math, but it does have everything to do with character.
    • 5/5
      Easy, fun, devastatingly on target in terms of the math curriculum. My only criticism: what to do next if you're a parent and want to know how to engage your child in the art of math?
    • 4/5
      I teach statistics for decision-making to business students. Paul Lockhart's brilliant little book, "A Mathematcians's Lament", has had a profound effect on my whole approach to teaching. But the travesty of modern mathematics education is just the tip of the iceberg of Lockhart's indictment of intellectual modernity.After more than a half-century of observation, this little book finally showed me why educated people tend to be liberals - and, more importantly, why liberals prefer to remember the thoughts of others instead of thinking for themselves. It's as simple as this: Learning the thoughts of others - however wise and important these thoughts may be - is not the same as learning to think.Goethe said: "That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst truly possess it." (Faust)Bravo, Mr. Lockhart - schoolteacher and practicing mathematician. Thank you.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting indictment of our current system of mathematics education, a subject that I almost always enjoy reading about (I very nearly became a mathematics teacher myself not long ago). Lockhart makes his point clearly, eloquently, and succintly--this is a very quick read at only 140 pages of fairly large type.I agree with much of what he says, though I do think that his claims sometimes go a bit too far: he doesn't seem to see much point in learning to add in an age of calculators, for example.The main problem I had with this book is that, as far as I'm concerned, Lockhart doesn't offer up a viable alternative to the status quo. It's always easy to criticize, but it's a lot harder to come up with a better way of doing things. Lockhart does offer some ideas about how the ideal mathematics education should function: a mathematics teacher should be a practicing mathematician himself, and should be so engaged in the subject that he has no need for lesson plans or curricula, but can rely solely on his passion for mathematics. Teacher training should be abolished, since someone either is a good teacher or isn't, and nothing can change that. While this sounds nice in theory, it just doesn't seem feasible. I'm not convinced that all these perfect mathematics teachers will suddenly appear, and if they don't, we're left with nothing (which I suppose Lockhart would say is better than the current state of affairs). To me, this doesn't seem like a solution. After reading about how terrible the current system is, I'd like to have seen some real suggestions for how it could be reformed.Still, this is a worthwhile read, and one that should generate a lot of interesting discussion; despite the fact that I wasn't entirely satisfied with it, I plan to encourage my family to read it so that I can see what they think. And there were parts of it that I loved, particularly the initial description of a musician's nightmare that provided a powerful insight into how ridiculous mathematics education can be. So, even with its shortcomings, this is a book that I would recommend.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant and put my view of mathematics on its head! And as a homeschooling parent, will change how I introduce the rich world of mathematics to my child.
    • 5/5
      Great book that makes You think about the status quo of the educational system and how it mutilated Mathematics from our "modern" society.
    • 5/5
      This is the kind of math I love, and would have done a lot more of if I had been exposed to it at an earlier age. (I have far too many things I like to do to spend time getting up to speed on mathematical logic at this point.)

    Book preview

    A Mathematician's Lament - Paul Lockhart

    PART I

    Lamentation

    002

    A MUSICIAN WAKES FROM A TERRIBLE NIGHTMARE. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world. Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made—all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

    Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the language of music. It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

    As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language—to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.

    In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.

    In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in scales and modes, meter, harmony, and counterpoint. It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school. Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one. To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable—every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.

    Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. Of course, he reassures himself, no society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!

    Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare . . .

    . . . I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom—no easels, no tubes of paint. Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school, I was told by the students. In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators. They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. I like painting, one of the students remarked. They tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!

    After class I spoke with the teacher. So your students don’t actually do any painting? I asked. Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers, the teacher replied. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations—dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters—the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards—they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.

    Um, these high school classes you mentioned . . .

    You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.

    Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?

    Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.

    I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?

    You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.

    003

    Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply

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