A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart

Ryan recommended this book to me. Actually, I discovered the title at last year's NCTE conference when one of the speakers mentioned in an off-hand kind of way during the last panel I went to. It's about math education and sounded interesting so I ordered it off Amazon for Ryan's Christmas present. I was expecting some sort of weighty tome, what came was a slim little white book of about 140 pages. 

Ryan, being Ryan, was enthusiastic about it and read it over a couple of days. He loved it, and immediately handed back to me as a recommendation. 

I picked it up as a break from fiction. I really only expected to skim the first few pages and then put it aside to read later, but what happened was that I found myself a few hours later still curled into a corner of the couch and turning the last page. It is very readable.

Essentially, this is a polemic. Lockhart states a problem: that the current organization of math education saps the creativity out of mathematics. He defines the problem well and even describes what his ideal of math education is. However, he doesn't really have a solution. Lockhart readily recognizes the limitations of the individual teacher in the current educational climate. 

So, as an English instructor, it may come as a shock that I got as enthralled in a math text as I did. I'm pretty mathy, actually. However, my interest in the text has more to do with the sort of universal issue with today's education. As long as we are, as educators, beholden to these bizarre standardized tests, education is only ever going to cater to the tests. We've all become SAT tutors instead of doing what educators are supposed to be about: guiding and honing the native curiosity of our students. 

The issues that Lockhart mentions are issues in every subject. The problem is that education shouldn't be about memorizing facts (that only helps in team trivia), it should be about teaching students to approach problems with logic and discernment. Anyone can memorize facts at any point of their life. Learning to think, though, is about a pattern of responses that can help a person throughout the entire course of their lives and that is what Lockhart is actually talking about. Stop making it about the subject and start making it about the problems we encounter as part of our everyday lives.

I can't give an overall opinion about this little tome, however I can say that it has me reevaluating how I teach. Maybe that is conclusion enough.