Why Mathematics Is Dying In Education
Today a podcast I recorded with Debate Math Podcast dropped.
And, inasmuch as I believe I covered a lot of ground, the podcast could have gone one for another hour. So, this blog is about adding ideas that were either just touched upon or never brought up.
Why do flowers in nature die? It’s because the soil and climate conditions could have turned hostile for their survival — inability to flourish, show their color, symmetry, and wonder.
Mathematics is no different. The environment — education — has become hostile to mathematics. The efficiency engine/beast alone has stripped away so much of the fertile conditions needed.
Efficiency is also hostile to the emotions/reactions below.
These are ALL the emotions that one must go through to truly experience mathematics — because everyone in history went through them. It’s the fuckin thematic development of the fuckin’ subject!(I swore on the podcast. I can swear here).
So to prioritize efficiency means there is no time for heavy pausing, starting again — again and again — exploring problem solving paths that could invariably be dead ends and locked doors.
The removal of that is the removal of mathematics. Whatever is left, whatever is being done, is only a shell of mathematics. It’s all procedural. It’s all mechanical. It’s all inert. It’s all figuroutable apparently.
I was at The Number Lab in Austin in the middle of June for their annual [co]Lab.
I asked the teachers who likes cooking. Of course, almost all the hands that went up. I asked those teachers who here has found a new recipe in the last 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, last week?
Most of them enthusiastically had answers that leaned towards their search and curiosity for new recipes be quite recent.
Recipes are content. How you cook it is pedagogy.
Nobody ever asks how are you going to cook this, at what temperature, or what the quality of your appliances. If you’ve seen any of Anthony Bourdain’s shows, some of his best meals were cooked in the most dilapidated conditions and environments.
It’s about what you are eating and who you are eating with. This blog I wrote 7 years ago seems sadly important.
Math education has sold out to the Science of Bullshit movements(pun maybe intended).
Mathematics is dying(if not dead) because curiosity for content is dead or the conditions that math education has currently installed have made that curiosity impossible to exist.
Curiosity has been replaced by compliance. Curiosity was never a luxury item. It’s an intellectual necessity for life. It’s removal now means that any recovery of it becomes an intellectual and moral necessity…
