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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Could you explain how you use math the wrong way in high school?
Below is a blog post from a teacher about "What if we taught art the way we taught math?"
This is a summary of the book "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart (I have not read the whole thing, so if these people are full of brainworms I wouldn't know). An excerpt from his book:
If you graduated high school before 2010, you were taught math completely wrong. Only in 2022 were the first students graduating high school that were taught using common core, a half-cocked remedy that fixes a lot of problems, but still leaves a bunch in place. Basically, you were taught things like multiplication tables, told to memorize formulas, etc. etc. Never were you taught the proofs mathematicians used to come up with this stuff. For example, multiplication and division are shorthand methods for addition and subtraction. So when kids are taught only to memorize, when they encounter numbers they have not memorized, they don't know what to do.
That's not how mathematicians do things. Instead, they're focus is on finding proofs for unsolved problems. Knowledge of formulas and how numbers interact are simply tools to go in your toolbox. It's like arguing a court case where you cite precedents. We already have the proof for the Pythagorean Theorem so there's no reason for you to prove it. Yet that's what we have kids do. They practice problems using the Pythagorean Theorem while groaning about "When are we ever going to use this?" This method of teaching is great for creating a workforce that can count change or take measurements. It's not great at creating the people that will discover a unified theory of gravity. In order to make new discoveries, it would help if children were introduced to algebra and calculus a lot sooner than 8th. and 12th. grade (respectively). More importantly, it would help if they were taught how algebra and calculus solved problems that weren't understood (like the exact volume of a water bottle shaped like a bear).
Probably the worst culprit is homework, which is used to get children to accept being available to their employers at all times. When you're off the clock, they want you to perform unpaid labor. Even when that unpaid labor is bullshit other people figured out 2,000 years ago.