( – promoted by undercovercalico)
(from dkos, long ago)
What if kids loved to learn?
What if at the end of class, they wanted it to be longer, and kept the teacher in the hallway answering questions?
What if they learned that coupling their imaginations to their powers of reasoning would give them a tool of awesome power for exploring the cosmos?
What if an 11 year old got so excited by his insights that he yelled out
OH WOW! I get this now!
What if all this happened in math class?
Suppose you wanted to learn to play the piano, and, at the first lesson, all you got to do was repeatedly tap middle C, and that, when you asked the teacher what was going on, she said for the first few months you would learn one note a week, then you’d spend 10 years or so playing scales, and, after that, maybe a song?
Would you go back? And, if someone MADE you go back, would you learn to love music? If, five years into this drudgery, someone told you that playing the piano gave them intense joy and satisfaction, and was a tremendous outlet for their creativity and spontaneity, would you believe them? Or would you think they were crazy?
Suppose you went to a different teacher, and, at the first class, you didn’t even get to touch a piano, but simply to watch video of the fingers of great pianists. And suppose the curriculum called for doing this for a decade or two before ever sitting down and playing. Would you learn to play?
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It’s a Tuesday evening in Boston. The five year olds are figuring out how to find the area of a circle (one of them is doing this sitting on her mother’s lap and occasionally sucking her thumb) . The 7 year olds are exploring different bases. The nine year olds are doing group theory. The big kids (11 year olds) are proving the Bolyai-Gerwien theorem (if two polygons have the same area, can one be cut up with a finite number of straight cuts and reassembled to form the other?). No one is doing any drills, no one is getting bored, and no one is getting put down for wrong answers or bad guesses. This is math class, but Bob and Ellen are teaching. And it’s not like anything I’ve seen before.
Who teaches area to kids who don’t know how to multiply?
Who thinks you can teach bases to 2d graders?
Who thinks that kids who successfully prove the Bolyai-Gerwien theorem should go on to one of the Hilbert ProblemsWho thinks 11 year olds can be guided through great theorems in math?
The same sort of people who know you can sing before you learn a scale (or even what middle C is). The sort of people who know that math isn’t multiplication and division, or even differentiation and integration, but one of the most beautiful and interesting creations of the human mind. The sort of people who know that once you turn a kid on, you had better get out of the way, because they move fast.
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A lot of people hate math; and almost no one does math just for fun. After a hard day’s work, relax by trying to prove a theorem in a new way; or play around with Goldbach’s conjecture? No. Not likely. And, if you’re one of the few people who do that sort of thing, you probably keep quiet about it, lest your friends think you mad. If you play the piano for fun, you can tell your friends…..they may envy you, or admire you, but they won’t likely think you crazy. Not even if they don’t like music. And even if they know you will never give a recital, much less play Carnegie Hall. If you play in an after-work basketball league, no one expects you to be Michael Jordan
Why this difference? And what can we do about it? Bob and Ellen Kaplan have some of the answers. And those answers are about more than math. They’re about reasoning, about learning, about joy, and, in a real sense, about being human. They call their group the Math Circle
They take any kid who comes, but not everyone who comes loves math at the start. Some come because they have a friend taking the class – and, so, Bob and Ellen get to light fires. (Talking with them, I think they’d almost prefer to take ONLY kids who think they hate math). While there is self-selection in the kids they teach in Boston, they’ve done similar classes in public schools and in other countries, and people are now using similar methods in prisons, and will soon be using them in Cameroon.
Bob and Ellen didn’t originate the idea of a math circle. Similar things have been done for a long time in Russia, and, in the United States, similar things were done by Robert Lee Moore, about 100 years ago. But Moore was a combative, competitive type, and his aggressiveness turned a lot of people off. The Kaplans marry some of Moore’s ideas to an utter lack of competitiveness and a liberal sensibility about kids. But the essential idea in the Moore method, and in the Kaplans’, is that people learn by doing, whether it’s piano or math, and that this sort of learning can bring joy to people, even if they will never play Carnegie Hall or win a Fields Medal.
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They’ve been doing this now for 13 years; this year, they have more than 100 students, and they’ve trained several others to follow their methods.
They’ve detailed how they do it, and why they do it, in a book: Out of the labyrinth: Setting mathematics free, and the Oxford University Press has its own blog, which links to the book here
Some of what they do is, of course, dependent upon their personality. But some of it, quite a bit of it, is transferable. Bob and Ellen have had success training people to do what they do; they’ve trained people who are already teachers in math, so that they know enough to teach this way, and they’ve trained graduate students in math in the ways kids think, so that they can teach this way. Many people who love math want to share that love, and spread the word that math is not a boring, dry subject – some of those people can learn to do this.
Some of you may be saying that the idea of playing scales for ten years is a straw man. Of course no one insists that a musician practice scales for ten years! That’s precisely the point. We DO insist on that, or its equivalent in math. What do musicians do? They play music. What do composers do? They write music. What do mathematicians do? They prove theorems. They play math. But many students of math don’t get to do any of this until college. They may see a proof, especially in geometry. That’s like watching Vladimir Horowitz play piano. It’s not bad, but no one ever learned to play the piano by watching. You learn to play the piano by playing – and, at first, you play badly. When a 5 year old guesses (as one did while I was watching) that 9 x 9 is 25, because 25 is ‘big’, he is doing what a first year piano student does when he butchers a basic piece. Both will get better by practicing, especially if that practicing is guided by a teacher.
How can we change math education?
Well, when that 9 x 9 problem came up in class, one of the five year olds said
LET’S FIGURE IT OUT!
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tips… comments…. recommends
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so I know at least two people read this 🙂
is no longer about education.
It is about indoctrination.
Charolette documented the deliberate dumbing down of America, the manipulation of the entire educational system.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdo…
My two older kids were literally saved via an expat assignment in Berlin Germany. During that year they unlearned the US prescribed educational paradigms and learned how to really learn stuff.
I see things on my global company intranet about “lowly” third world country clerical type people speaking four languages. They are twenty-somethings out of college and are working for what minimum wage was twenty years ago in the US and they are happily doing it. This is globalization. This is “free” trade.
That being said it is statistically impossible to attribute suck a galactic goat fuck to the mere chance occurance of a random seqence of “incompetent” policy decisions concerning education in America.
US 300 million
World 6 Billion
You are CEO of the world. Whose easily exploitable people potential profit margin would you choose?
Two things.
(1) I took several courses at Auburn in the Moore or Texas method, and it did me a lot of good. I continue to attempt to integrate that approach into my teaching.
(2) Active participation of some sort is a big help. Few subjects, math least of all, are spectator sports. Pads and full contact is required. Active experiments (which can integrate physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, or economics) help students “get” the point. Discuss a concept, work an example or two, and then have the students work an example or two. Doing the latter, you’ll realize just how little students get out of lecture.
…week actually, when I’ve read like one blog article, this was the title that seemed best to click on. Very glad I did, what a lovely peice. Also something to share w/my dad, who taught kids math for 30 years…
I know exactly enough math to do drug calculations at work. It is not something I am proud of either.
I always struggled with math and now it was cemented by a bad experience in high school at the hands of a nasty teacher. I did not help matters at all by being defiant. I was always asked to do the hardest problem at the board and everybody knew I could never do it. I got kicked out of class one day by refusing to participate after being rebuffed seeking out remedial help. I regret both our attitudes. It always made me feel stupid and I also avoided any sciences that required formulas and calculations. if i could get a do over in my youth it would be to find out if I really had no talent for it or just needed another approach.
Enjoyed your essay very much.
Well done.
challenged person here. I flunked Algebra twice the third term I was told by an exasperated teacher to take the Math for Dummies class. In art school I finally had a teacher who made me make the connection between these digits and the physical world I was depicting.
The class was perspective and it consisted of nothing but him plotting using math and lines. Why I asked are you making me fill notebooks with gibberish. I was told that it would all go to a part of my brain and be stored and when I needed it for drawing my mind would use it. He was right I have never plotted a drawing out but somewhere I know these mathematical constructs.
I married a mathematical/musician who entertains himself by doing stats always has, now makes a good living doing math. Loves the abstract numbers. I think the reason classroom math is so deadly is that it isolates numbers from their natural habitat which I have learned is just another means to describe everything. Music itself is math according to him.
I barely passed with a D. That was right after the worst math class I ever took, in which I got straight A’s.
The first math class, the one in which I (supposedly) did so well, was pre-algebra. We had a teacher who couldn’t teach. (Nice guy, though.) I didn’t understand a single thing from that class, and trying to get the teacher to explain anything only made it worse. But pre-algebra was basically regular math, so I managed to fake my way through.
The second math class was algebra. Being that pre-algebra was supposed to provide the grounding necessary for algebra, and being that my pre-algebra class didn’t, I naturally did poorly in algebra. But what’s really interesting is that in algebra, I learned. I didn’t know I had learned anything until the next year, though. I retook algebra because I thought I needed to. Turned out, I didn’t need it. The grades I received from the previous year did not indicate how much I had learned. They weren’t even close. I aced algebra the second time around.
Of course, I didn’t really understand algebra until I took calculus. Talk about frustration, though! Now there’s some math that I could see in my head, but getting it to come out right on paper seemed almost impossible. Wanted to tear my hair out at times, but god I loved it! 😀
I do math/logic problems for fun. I had some fantastic math teachers in junior and senior high school.
My concerns – in addition to the issues presented in this diary – about math education is how girls who love math in elementary school lose their enthusiasm in middle/high school. I have seen this with two of my daughters. It broke my heart.
My youngest daughter currently loves math. She begins middle school next year. I am doing all I can to encourage her and keep the flame burning.