Math Education’s Inflection Point is a Moral Bridge of Past Wisdom and Future Wellness(Part I)
When I say I am in love with mathematics, it has almost little to do with my ability in math — which in the grandest scheme of things, is pretty minuscule.
Sad, huh? Quite opposite really. It is liberating to know that regardless of much mathematical knowledge one might consume, it is only a teaspoon or two of the whole bounty.
And, it is actually minuscule for… everyone.
If one end of a room represents all the math knowledge in the universe and the other end represents only knowing that 1 + 1 = 2, all of us are jammed up against this wall, with the back of our heels protruding out with a variance that is probably measured in inches.
On November 5, Chris Brownell and myself have been invited to give a full day of Professional Development to teachers at The Museum of Mathematics in New York City. That is a lot of time. And, it has made me reflect as to what exactly that workshop will look like as to its own endgame. When I first started giving math workshops over 10 years ago, they had names like “Perspiration vs Inspiration: Which Mathematical Road Are We On?” and “Alternative Techniques to Develop Mathematical Thinking”…
A decade later, a well-documented exit(of relief) from the classroom, a financial and spiritual loss of a math business(The Right Angle) due to a tragic fire, authoring a couple of books and over 100 Medium articles on mathematics/education, and seeing my own two kids wilt away from school math early on has updated my lens on what my own curation of Professional Development in math education should look like.
My own personal beacon of light is the soon-to-be released book by Francis Su.
Mathematics has always been for human flourishing, mining Aristotelian ideas of virtue — beauty, truth, justice, play, and love(Su). It just hasn’t been that in the industrialized bubble of math education. In fact, with a 2018 article called The Scope of Math Anxiety citing 93% of US citizens have had some form of math anxiety at some time, you could say it mathematics has been for human floundering.
Considering we live in a time of such turmoil, discord, divide, and general human restlessness, the idea of math education embracing a vision that uplifts everyone for reasons that are both ancient and universal seems not just necessary or revolutionary, it seems critically vital to our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The rise in mental health issues among children/teenagers is well-documented. Lack of play. Feeling of lack of control of their lives. Academic pressures to perform. These are just some of the factors which have sadly led to more anxiety and depression with our young.
Mathematics, to start with, needs to stop any contribution to this stew of 21st century human malaise. Get rid of homework unconditionally. Start coordinated push back on standardized testing and testing in general. Create a math curriculum that doesn’t seem it got baked in the ovens of 20th century utility/bureaucracy.
If you want a strong gut punch as to how bloody antiquated our system of math education is, listen to this podcast with Keith Devlin.
There is a lot of wisdom that comes from mathematicians. Peter Taylor, professor at Queens University in Kingston, Canada has been working with high school teachers for 40 years. The article below is framed by this belief that high school students should be working collaboratively on complex systems.
Right now, they seem to be working individually(for performance purposes) on rather archaic systems. This is going to prove costly from not only an economic and technological perspective, but from a more humanistic perspective.
Mathematicians seem to have a lot of wisdom to impart, which is not just limited to the scope of mathematics. And, we need to not only look to the future in redesigning math education, we need to look to its sometimes forgotten past. Alfred North Whitehead is someone I studied extensively when I was at the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto in 1992. His Aims of Education book from 1929 affirmed the directions I would head in math education. One of the ideas Whitehead riffed off of was that inert knowledge was not only useless, it was harmful.
So much of the math we teach is inert, a currency overvalued, and one that rarely gets properly evaluated. That is why, without dramatic changes in the decades to come, math education and the institutions that suffocate it, will become obsolete.
You really think people are going to go to school in twenty years and do questions on long division? If so, math education is on the straight-line path to what happened to Block Buster Video…
(to be continued)
