A Mathematician's Lament Blog Post

One thing that Lockhart mentioned that really resonated with me was that we are teaching our students to be “trained chimpanzees” (Lockhart, 2009), we are pumping our students full of algorithms and training them to study just for tests. Our students do not understand why math works the way it does or the reasoning behind why we study mathematics in the first place. This is like what Skemp said about the difference between relational vs instrumental mathematics. Our school system focuses on instrumental learning more than relational learning when we need a balance of both.

One thing I disagreed with was the idea that our curriculum is completely wrong and should be abolished. While our students are more likely to learn algorithms from the curriculum that we are presenting to them, it does not mean that they cannot learn critical thinking and problem-solving skills from the curriculum. There are aspects to our curriculum that are vital to teach to students wish to pursue STEM in university, we need to provide students with a basic understanding of mathematics before they can start approaching more theoretical aspects of mathematics such as a proofs and real analysis. A potential solution to this problem could be to introduce more theoretical aspects of mathematics in high school by moving some of the “basic” content down to the middle school level.

 

Works Cited

Lockhart, P. (2009). A Mathematician’s Lament. New York; Bellevue Literary Press.