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Lockhart's Lament: On Mathematics at School

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Re: Lockhart's Lament: On Mathematics at School

#21

Post by kalid »

Great article! I've always thought that having math education focusing on formulas is having poetry and literature focus on grammar and spelling -- the painting and music analogies are dead-on.

But that's exactly what happens: Formulas and equations (grammar) are one way to express a beautiful idea. Unfortunately we end up focusing on the syntax and not the semantics, the underlying meaning.

Shameless plug, but I try to do my part to make math intuitive at betterexplained.com.

What a great essay.

Re: Lockhart's Lament: On Mathematics at School

#22

Post by mariorz »

It always struck me how my math classess seemed to focus on the mechanical exercises and never let us glimpse at the true genius of what we were brainlasly repeating with them.

However, I think I could say the same for many of my classes. As an Engineering student, I'm sure most of my physics classes are way beyond what I will ever use when I leave university (trig btw, heavily used for most of this classes). I think the same reasoning could be applied here, instead of repeating painful exercises consisting basically of memorizing and rearranging formulas, let the student wonder at the context and history behind each of the subjects and the problems that were solved with them.

This is a problem affecting education systems in a deeper level than the math curriculum, it comes down, I think, to something the author points at, which is this widespread notion that education is supposed to be something that "prepares tomorrow's workforce" instead of it being a source for inspiration and enlightenment.

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