JB

Teaching to Think?!
A Principled Approach

Summary
This text proposes eleven principles that, if implemented seriously,
would restore the reputation of mathematical education to the place it
had with the best of the ancient Greeks. This is today not always the
case. Many people have come to dread mathematics for want of
empowering teaching, and many more have learned to positively
detest anything remotely mathematical. The first three principles
love your students, love your maths, and live by principles cannot
easily be taught. Every teacher must examine himself or herself:
Without loving your students and maths proper, teaching maths
becomes a disgusting farce, and without leading a straightened life, a
teacher may even inflict damage upon those given into his care.
The next three principles strive for wholeness, teach maths as a
sport, and assume nothing focus on general approaches to make
maths classes both effectual and worthwhile. Wholeness here means
a balance between speed, intensity, concord, and depth. Maths as a
sport challenges the awful image of the teacher as a drill instructor
and advocates an approach to teaching thats usually associated with
sports. Assume nothing elaborates just that its the teachers
responsibility to ensure a sound foundation, even though students
have to build it.
The following three principles encourage collaboration, use
mnemonics, and train intuition are resting upon the higher
principles, featuring powerful methods that still play too small a part
in most classes. Collaboration is a sorely needed balancing opposite
to the mental loneliness that naturally fills large parts of mathematical
training; its practical utility is clear. Mnemonics introduces ancient
and not-so-ancient memory techniques into teaching mathematics, and
intuition sheds light on a part of ourselves that is as yet mostly
implicitly trained.
Finally, the last two principles make things transparent and focus on
problem solving are centered in the day-to-day practice of actually
teaching mathematics. Transparency is the key to an honest
relationship with your students, while problem solving is simply the
heart of mathematics this is where mathematics came from and this
is why so many of us, despite often suboptimal schooling, still love it.

1. Love Your Students

This is the fundamental principle, for everything else can be derived
from it, compensated by it, or improved through it. If youre a teacher
of mathematics, you must be keenly aware that students have been
entrusted to your care so that something of great value will be
developed the ability to think, and to do so correctly and
independently. Of course, there are other aims that need to be
pursued, ranging from dexterity in elementary reckoning to exam
preparation, but the unique value of mathematics lies in her
dependence upon pure thinking beyond applications and examples.
Pure thinking is generally taught by way of formalism, and theres
nothing wrong with that. It must only be kept in mind that the formal
approach, powerful as it is, also contains several dangers that demand
foresight and careful handling: First, prolonged and unbalanced
mental exertion is potentially destructive not only to the untrained
mind. Teachers need to be acquainted with current brain research and
balancing methods of outstanding practitioners. Second, the inherent
distance of mathematical methods and structures from everyday life
imposes a serious challenge to teachers on all levels nowhere do you
lose students as nearly as fast as in mathematics if you do only a
mediocre job. Third, caught between the narrow walls of formal
rigidity and educational demands, its very easy to lose sight of the
simple fact that mathematics can be, and indeed should be, a
pleasure. If you leave the fun out of mathematics, the whole endeavor
becomes a questionable pastime that borders on human rights
violation. Fourth, the abstract nature of mathematics cannot be an
excuse to exclude the ethical dimension of problem solving after all,
mathematics is a human pursuit in a human world.
If you love your students, youll find both motivation and ways dealing
with these dangers.
Sure, love is a grand word. Its hard to find a definition that finds
general applause (and perhaps such a one wouldnt even be the best),
but thats not what matters here. What does matter is this: The entire
point of teaching are the students. Theres a vast range of proven
ways to open ones heart to others: living in the presence, suspending
judgement on others, character cultivation, compassion and
devotion These things have been known for millennia. It doesnt
count so much where you are now a good teacher isnt something
you are but something youre becoming. If you dont love your
students, all else is eventually in vain you could as well talk to a
video camera, and in fact some are doing just that. In teaching
mathematics, youre training some of the highest faculties available to
humans, which brings with it a great responsibility. If you do love your
students, everything naturally falls into place.

2. Love Your Maths

An often-repeated piece of conversation insists that you need to be
only a little step ahead of your students to be able to teach. A minute
of reflection should tell anyone that this is nonsense. How come that
training of novice apprentices in the traditional crafts has usually not
been left to older apprentices or even journeymen, but to the masters?
How come that childcare, aside from very short periods or grave
circumstances, is not generally handed over to older siblings? How
come that even the most basic religious teaching, across most faiths,
isnt performed by instructed laypersons but by laboriously educated
experts? The answer, or one large part of it, is simple: In order to be
capable of consistent instruction under fluctuating circumstances and
in order to see things in perspective both across time and meaning, a
teacher needs to be not merely a little bit cleverer than his students
he or she must be on an altogether different level of knowledge and
experience.
But thats not all. Many are thought fit to teach merely based upon
their scientific merits, that is, upon their reputation as researchers.
Most of these have never thought deeply about teaching proper, let
alone having been trained. But, strange as it may seem, plain devotion
to their science gives them a charismatic stamina that carries both
them and their students through a lot of otherwise bothersome
periods. Much worse is the case if the teachers training has been
completed by official standards, but a critical ingredient is missing.
Stop for a few seconds and ask yourself: How can you teach
something thats profoundly disliked? How can you teach something
well even in face of various impediments? How can you find
excitement in explaining a thing in a variety of ways, again and again?
How can you come to enjoy deviating questions and novel
approaches?
Aside from loving your students and, trivially, enjoying teaching itself,
you need to love maths. If you find yourself as a teacher of maths
without this prerequisite, youve evidently chosen the wrong
profession.

3. Live by Principles
As a teacher, you impart much more than just knowledge. Knowledge
is forgotten, skills fade into oblivion unless continually practiced,
grades and credits are meaningless outside a narrow timeframe and
highly artificial cultural contexts. As a teacher, you teach at least as
much by example as by method, and the radiation of your personality
is much more impressive than the semantic content of that which you
say or write to the blackboard. Simply think back to your favorite
teachers and to the other ones.

If you want to teach how to think, youve got to learn it first and excel
in it. But in order to teach well, you must become aware that the lives
of hundreds or even thousands of young people will be influenced by
who you are. No matter how much you read, no matter how much you
try, in the end everything that happens around you is a natural
consequence of who you are. In fact, teaching is a great privilege that
comes with a great responsibility, and its important to recognize both.
Youll not be able to elicit genuine interest if youre yourself propelled
only by monetary motivations or sheer habit. Students wont be
influenced beneficially if they expect drill or boredom or inappropriate
distraction in the classroom. As a teacher, you must get your own life
straight, beginning with your bodily fitness and emotional equilibrium
and ending with personal inviolable principles that you will need to
seek, find, and maintain alone.

4. Strive for Wholeness

Teaching can be improved. While the first three principles cannot be
taught or enforced in any ordinary way they have to arise from your
own depths a lot can be done when these principles are in place.
Every expert in every field appears to follow the same way to reach
maximum performance. With a few simple rules, achievers keep
themselves out of the dangerous fogs of automatic mediocrity they
set themselves challenging goals, watchfully monitor their technique,
and get feedback about their performance. In general, there are four
main aspects that can and should be subject to frequently renewed
goals, self-observation, and feedback: These aspects are speed,
intensity, concord, and depth. Every teacher, by nature, seems to be
very good in one of these and very bad in one of the others. To strive
for wholeness means to strive for balance of these four aspects.
Speed is an issue not only in teaching maths. If youre too fast, as
often happens with digitally enhanced presentations and teachers
either actively researching or newly graduated, youre quickly losing
your students, beginning with the slowest thinkers, and in the end no
one benefits. If youre too slow, you dont lose a student because
youve never won anyone. A certain freshness and agility is
indispensable.
Intensity roughly means the measure of vitality that you as a teacher
pour into the classroom. I dont believe that abstract issues should be
transported with a Trojan horse of emotional wrapping. Instead, a
certain degree of human intensity is needed to allow a contact with
these strangely unhuman concepts. If your intensity is too meager,
youll have a hard time waking the students from their continuous
slumber shaped by sense impressions and feelings. If, on the other
hand, your intensity is too great, youll leave your students
overwhelmed and yourself soon exhausted.
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Concord, if looked at with a literal eye, says just with heart. In a

way, the classroom situation in all its formality is still a part of larger
life, a little though sometimes significant chunk of many individual
biographies. Youth and adolescence is a time of training, yes, but its
also a time of growth, of forming lasting friendships, of emotional
adventures and many small experiments that show us who we are and
where we might be going. Granted, if concord is given a place too
prominent, valuable time is given away. But if concord is not
sufficiently regarded, students wont participate with their hearts, and
then you might as well teach a bunch of robots.
Depth simply means the subject matters level of precision that is
being discussed in the classroom. Mathematical concepts can be
presented in a great variety of ways, ranging from hazily explained
colorful pictures all the way to axiomatically derived and rigorously
proven theorems. Many teachers find that the depth of their
presentation is prescribed by outer circumstances, but close scrutiny
usually reveals that this is not so. Theres an interval of possible
precision, and this interval can often be expanded simply by talking
with the right people. In the end, a depth too great leaves no one
smarter, not merely because its individual effort that breeds true
understanding. An account too shallow, of course, unnecessarily
belittles both power and possibilities of mathematics.
It should be clear that speed and depth are somewhat antagonistic, as
are intensity and concord.

5. Treat Maths as a Sport

More than any other theoretical class in our schools, maths is about
skill in contrast to mere knowledge. Its not about what a student
knows but rather what he or she is able to do. Skills are otherwise
taught in arts, crafts, and sports and its sport that most closely
matches the experience of mathematical practice. In mathematics,
however, the enemy is not another, nor is it the clock. In mathematics,
the enemy is our own uncertainty. Theres always a statement we
assume to be true or, put differently, a structure we believe having a
certain property. But is that really so? I want to be certain. Let the
game begin!
Why do so many people enjoy outwardly purposeless riddles? And why
do some people devote their lives to research wholly impractical
problems that cannot even be communicated outside a sworn circle of
professionals? Its again very simple: Finding a way through initial
befuddlement to the solution of a problem, whether trivial or waiting
for long centuries, is a thrilling experience that matches nothing else
and that can only be appreciated by those who have experienced it. I
believe that this experience is a birthright of all thinking men and
women.

Maths, its been said before, is not a spectator sport. No matter how
important instruction is, training weighs more. As in any sports team,
a maths class can acquire surprising poise if a few simple steps be
taken: You as a teacher-trainer forge a contract with the class this
concept, that competition, this exam is our common goal. Do you
agree? Now, Ill train you, giving myself a lot that our goal can be
reached. On the other hand, you have to let yourselves be trained. Ill
inform you about your progress, but your feedback enables me to get
better. Ive helped many others before to get where youre going, so
you can trust me. Still, I make mistakes. I can be off track. I can screw
the schedule. Trust me, but never switch off your own thinking!
Questions make us all smarter, and curious byways have time and
again led to new ways of seeing a problem, to new applications of
existing knowledge, even to new discoveries. But theres the goal,
heres the training, and were going through this together. Its going
to be tough, but Ive been there before.

6. Assume Nothing
You live in yourself. You cannot know whats precisely going on in the
students minds and hearts. If you begin a new class, a new course, or
just a new week, dont ever assume that everyone is on a certain level.
Theyre not. Every teenager has already years of a more or less
complicated biography in his or her bones; there are so many
distractions, events, and impeding circumstances.
Experience in any field produces an excellent memory for that field,
but experience is precisely what students are lacking. Maths is so
strange, so removed from ordinary affairs that the outlines of the
whole corpus must always be at the teachers disposal gaps will turn
up at all places. In fact, its a practice as smart as its rare to quickly
recapitulate everything thats needed whenever starting a fresh
course.
Again, this should be done in a balanced fashion with a distinct focus
on individual exertion. A raw lecture must always be digested by deep
involvement with the material. Just like the entirety of mathematical
objects is nowadays produced from the empty set, any maths course
should quickly run through the needed preliminaries again. If these
preliminaries have been sufficiently trained at an earlier stage,
recapitulation will take very little time and then enables students to
grapple confidently with a new load of concepts.
If you assume something, on the other hand, youll almost certainly
outcast a fraction of the students. This is neither necessary nor
desirable. Be realistic, pay a little more at the beginning, and reap the
rewards later.

7. Encourage Collaboration
Yes, thinking is something thats done alone. If you havent learned
the skills of a certain field, you cannot truly appreciate assistance, let
alone assist others. Hence, individual training must always play a
great part in any maths class. But we must not lose sight of the fact
that in the greater world the artificial isolation of the class is simply
not there. To effectually link our capabilities with others, we have to
learn how to work with others.
Outside our schools, theres only a small number of circumstances
where theres a premium on provably individual work. In most areas,
from working in a family to working in a global business, people
constantly work together to tackle problems that no one can easily
solve alone. Even if the structure of a specific job demands solitary
work, its daily practice to consult colleagues, experts, or documents if
troubles arise. Then, why is collaboration actively discouraged or even
punished in so many schools? Why should it be so difficult to
encourage and reward those who help others? Why arent there team
exams?
Collaboration in maths is a delicate thing. If brought in
inappropriately or too early in a course, it might spoil the slower
students, seducing them to do nothing. If brought in too late or just
briefly, students simply dont know how to do it, ending up with
individual work disguised as team effort or, worse, with no
accomplishment at all. Here as elsewhere, balance is the key.

8. Use Mnemonics
The human mind has evolved in the course of millions of years when,
for the most part, things quite different from square roots and
differential equations had been important. We might be good at
pattern recognition when it comes to visual images, sounds, and
smells, but abstract things that dont come wrapped up in an image
are hard to remember and even harder to process. Mathematics uses
a strict formal language that has been perfected only in the early
twentieth century. This language, to the uninitiated, is a secret cypher
so threateningly elusive that mathematicians and their likes are often
regarded with superstitious awe if theyre not met with contempt.
Its an insult to the grace of the human mind to teach mathematical
formalism by drill. On the other hand, only eager students of pure
mathematics can be expected to train so much on their own that they
get to know the formalism by heart. In almost all other cases, a genial
middle way should be taken.
Mnemonics, or memory techniques, have a proud history reaching
back to Roman orators, scholastic friars, and Renaissance occultists.
Not quite unexpectedly, mnemonics faded away and was forgotten in

the age of ubiquitous external memory in the shape of printed books

following Gutenbergs invention. Much later, the field of mnemonics
has been revived in the late twentieth century by ardent practitioners
who compete at national and international championships. Theres a
lot of different approaches, ranging from little tricks to elaborate
memory palaces, but it all boils down to one simple principle:
Transform dry, strange, or cryptic things into things so full of life and
meaning that you simply wont forget them.
Memorizing, its often pronounced by mnemonists, is not so much
about memory as about creativity. You should not only have a store of
practical mnemonics, rather you must be able to invent them on the
fly and, most importantly, youll make your students a lasting gift if
you teach them how to do it.

9. Train Intuition
Experienced mathematicians, to the surprise of others, experience
mathematical problems in a peculiar way. They often tend to see at
once a way through a problem theyve never met before. They appear
to have a sense that tells them which problems are hard and which
are easy to solve, and they appreciate certain proofs for their beauty
(and disdain others for their ugliness), which often puzzles nonmathematicians. In fact, this faculty is not often taught in our schools.
In the case of professionals, this sense, their intuition, is of course
acquired over many years of training. Aside from what it exactly is and
how magical it appears, you can think of intuition as a very sublime
example of pattern recognition. The interesting thing is that intuition
can also be trained explicitly.
Implicitly trained, intuition takes many years to mature, for
mathematicians usually put a lot of research and formal
experimenting in between their initial guess and the feedback. For
intuition to be trained, however, its only the guess and the feedback
that are needed! This is a virgin field which owes what little we know
to a few industrious individuals and research from quite distinct areas.
Its probably the high esteem of conscious mental work that has
diverted the use of intuition into an inappropriately inferior position,
though every professional makes use of it.
Intuition may not in itself solve a problem, but it should be evident
that youre better off if you have some idea about where youre going
before you actually start.

10.

Make Things Transparent

Transparent communication is a key principle if youre actually

working together with your students. Yet, before you fall into the trap

of endless monologs, recognize your students as unique humans.

Communication is a two-way thing. Dont begin to talk without having
at first tried to feel into the general mood. Look at your students; try
to remember their names. Listen to your students every seemingly
trivial question sheds light onto a spot where youve been too quick,
too superficial, or too enigmatic. Bad scores in an exam are always
also bad scores for you as a teacher. Failing to get individual feedback
may leave you living with the illusion that everything is alright while,
in fact, it isnt.
Transparency should be created on all levels: Transparency of
formalism, transparency of the underlying concepts, transparency of
the historical contexts, transparency of the training plan you follow,
transparency of your estimate of the training progress, and
transparency of your own situation amidst it all. Ultimately, your own
personality is inescapably imposing an upper limit on what students
can achieve even while youre struggling to ensure a lower one!
Assuredly, not everything needs to be told, and in general minor
remarks are sufficient to ensure that students are enabled to see the
current situation well enough. Sometimes, the main emphasis lies
upon formalism, at other times, history is being discussed the focus
naturally shifts with time and demand. At the same time, you must
keep in mind that even a simple offhand remark, especially at the
beginning of a course and during the hot phase before the exams, can
leave a distinct impression. Hence, select your words carefully.
And: Students always and everywhere have a hard time getting better
than you think of them, so think of them as highly as you possibly can.

11.

Focus on Problem Solving

Reckoning is important. Still, although reckoning makes a little use

of abstract reasoning, to think well means to be able to solve new
problems. Solving problems is the fun part of mathematics, reckoning
is a means to an end.
There are times when certain reckoning skills are deemed necessary
to be trained. There exist a great many ways to do that, but as soon as
the basic techniques have been introduced, the most elegant way to
further train these techniques is usually to pose interesting problems
that involve reckoning for their solution. One method not often applied
to hone the skills of advanced students and to renew the interest of
lesser students is this: Let the students invent problems to be solved.
If theyre not able to do this, something has gone terribly wrong, but if
it works, teaching gets a completely new quality and sometimes a
precious jewel comes into existence.
Were here at the heart of mathematics. Many mathematical problems
cannot be tackled without proper formalization. Understanding the

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precise structure of a problem enables us to formalize it, and

sometimes thats all which is needed. Using intuition, hints, and a
good deal of heuristics, students can be enabled to solve problems
themselves, which is the fundamental goal of any good maths class
and a great joy for students and teachers alike.

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