My Coffee With Paul Lockhart: Math Education’s Anti-Hero
My music heroes are dead. Lemmy, Bowie, and Chris Cornell.
Only too recently, my cultural super-hero, Anthony Bourdain, took his own life. My reaction was a math-related article the day after.
It sure has been a tough few years, coming to grips with the fragility of life, loss of inspiring souls, and the general shrinking road ahead. And, it all got suckered punched last week with Bourdain’s departure from this planet.
But, it also made my almost improbable meeting with Paul Lockhart last year rise in value immeasurably. It was only 30 minutes. However, when you get to not only meet the math person who helped color your entire teaching career and gifted the title for your next book — Math Recess — but get to hear, freshly baked “Lockhartisms”, you realize how damn lucky you were to spend a charmed half-an-hour listening to Paul Lockhart waxing mathematics.
Lockhart is fully deserving of his mythical status in math education. He pulled zero punches and almost every one of his sentences from his first book, A Mathematician’s Lament: How Schools Cheats Us Out Of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form, hit the reader hard with unapologetic honesty and insight.
While my meeting with Paul Lockhart — who remains as anonymous as possible by never attending math conferences — seemed like a miraculous occurrence, the seeds for such an encounter were planted almost a decade earlier. Around 2009, I was in the early stages of writing a book called The X² Files: The Truth About Math Education. Without hesitation on my part, I emailed Paul back in December, 2008. He wrote in early 2009:
We continued to have a sporadic email relationship over the years. I even let him know when I quit teaching in 2013 for reasons he was only too familiar with. His email response was just the supportive tonic I needed…
I then, in 2017, had all the planets line up for a meeting that turned out to be a timely signed-book swap.
During my entire time of knowing Paul through books/emails, never did I really think I would meet him — especially having a gut-feel that his preference was to fly well below the detection of social radars. Even when I invited him to come to the kickoff of The Global Math Project in New York, he politely declined. That all underscored how fortunate I was to basically be at “The Oracle of Lockhart” on that beautiful, sunny afternoon in Brooklyn. It was mostly a listening session, affirming not only my truncated teaching career, but also the path that was to follow — passionate defiance.
Lockhart believes deeply in the artistic value of mathematics and the importance of honest relationships with students.
“Teaching is not about information. It’s about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students.”
For him — and me — these things go hand-in-hand. While some might think his wisdom is muted because of this absence from the stream of conversations found on social media/math conferences, I think they do the exact opposite. There is a purity in his voice that has not been affected by the business of education.
He spoke. Some listened. Some ignored. Some pushed back. But, nobody had a rebuttal to his points. Instead, some chose to label his voice as angry, repetitive, etc., conveniently deflecting away from taking inventory of what ailed and continues to ail math education.
He was and continues to be the most important disruptor in math education in influencing teachers like myself to go to the edge, to challenge the system…to challenge oneself.
My coffee with Paul Lockhart was more like an exclamation mark of a final checkpoint of my career choices. Lockhart maybe an invisible figure in math education — almost like a Batman figure, doing noble things in unconventional ways that an anti-hero does. As such, he rarely gets credit beyond cult status in math education. But, do not think his force is anything short of a Jedi Knight when it comes to mathematics.
In 2018, Lockhart’s Lament has been circulating in the waters of overlapping generations of math educators. He has put out two books since — Measurement and Arithmetic. Without much fanfare, Lockhart was recognized as teacher-of-the-year in 2016 by The American GO Foundation.
My roughly two thousands seconds with Paul Lockhart took a decade to materialize. A parting and unintentional gift that he gave me was the title of my next book. As we left the coffee shop, we gave an embrace that suggested that our bond was earnest, but maybe also a first and last. However, as he began turning his body to walk away, he said “I get paid to provide math recess…”.
Math Recess…hmmmph.
It only took a couple of seconds to realize I wanted to use that as the title of my next book. I formally asked permission a month later.
Obi-Wan. Willy Wonka. Pythia. Batman. Whatever. Math Education’s “Gotham” still needs a hero like Paul Lockhart…
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