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Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out Of Our Most Fascinating And Imaginative Art Form (2009)

by Paul Lockhart(Favorite Author)

4.27 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1282883232 (ISBN13: 9781282883239)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Bellevue Literary Press

review 1: Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and definitely agreed with the problems and concerns he pointed out about the modern-day math curriculum. His apprehensiveness was based on how the modern-day system relays mathematics as RIGID formula usage and "monkey" repetition, which demolishes the beauty of logic and problem-solving. I am total in accord with Lockhart on how simply dictating formulas and steps, along with exercises to repeat the said steps over and over, causes students to find math boring and automatically reject the subject. Due to the "rigidity" in the way math is taught, students are not given the chance to improve their creativity and problem/puzzle solving skills. What I did not agree with was the author's emphasis on history, theory, and derivation of form... moreulas/concepts in the classroom. What I got from the book is that Lockhart feels history and theory should be heavily emphasized in the classroom. Contrary to Lockhart's belief, I feel that because there is only an allotted amount of time in each school year, and every class is on a strict time-table, history and motivation should be *briefly* included in each lesson, but not strictly embedded into the curriculum. It gets rather bland to have a list of formulas and rules thrown at students, thus it would be a good change to motivate where/how the mathematical concepts came about. "Why is area of a circle A=pi*r^2?", "Where did pi come from?", "[Roughly] How did the Pythagorean Theorem come about?", are stimulating precursory questions. I feel if the modern-day curriculum renounced the "stiff" step-by-step, formula-memorizing, monotonous process, and delivered mathematics as a problem-solving, logic-using topic, the sentence "I am not a math person" would be said a lot less.
review 2: This book is definitely written more for a student/teacher. It was based on that the way math is currently taught is cheating us out of the most fascinating and imaginative art form (taken from front cover) It had valid points and it's pretty concise with chapters such as mathematics and culture, and High School Geometry: Instrument of the Devil (I totally agreed with EVERYTHING in this section :) The book was also broken down in two main sections: Lamentation and Exultation. While reading the later I couldn't help but thinking of a the math professor from 'mirror has two faces'-"It's like you're having a party up there and the only one you invited was yourself". hahah less

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