"A Mathematician's Lament" - Is Math Art? - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

"A Mathematician's Lament" - Is Math Art? - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education.

"A Mathematician's Lament" - Is Math Art?

I was blown away by this remarkable (and strangely empowering) critique about math education: how we view it as a culture, how teachers are teaching it (or not teaching it), how and why some students struggle with it, how some students who apparently "get it" don't, how parents perceive it, how testing may not be showing us what we want to know, and how we can change math education for the better. We are thankful to author Paul Lockhart who let us share this work from his book, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form. (see excerpt below)

This post begins with what we call "The Dream" (which is really a nightmare), followed by a few paragraphs of what we addressing math as art. I read the following post to my tween daughter who was spellbound by it and which opened up a HUGE conversation about math and the question, "Why hasn't anybody talked about math like this before???"

Intrigued yet? Well, enjoy. I will have to skip around the reading to her since there are parts