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Bringing Math Back to Math Class By Peyton Chui

Illustration courtesy of iStockPhotos

I could imagine the circle drawn out by the line intersecting the triangle and then suddenly it was obvious — the two lines had to be the same length! I nudged the student I was tutoring in the right direction and his face lit up when he finally saw it. But we were frustrated because we couldn’t translate our geometric reasoning into the standard proof format his teacher wanted. Giving up, we looked at the answer key together: “true by the HL theorem.”

“Oh, well that was stupid,” he said.

And he was right. His curriculum had managed to turn a fun puzzle into the boring recitation of a theorem. And that’s what most math classes are: boring.

Being exposed to such drudgery for years takes a toll on students, and inevitably, most eventually decide that they hate math. But can you blame them? Far from being a rarity, the type of lifeless problem assigned to my student is the norm in math classes. Let’s take a look at what a typical math class might look like.

“Hello class, here’s what we’ll be learning today. Here’s how you solve this type of problem. Make sure you’re taking good notes so you remember how to do this! 7-25 odds are for homework. Yes, Billy, this will be on the test.”

Do you see the problem? No thinking is being done. In a brilliant display of irony, mathematics is removed from math classes! Students are turned into nothing more than glorified computers, trained math monkeys, following a series of steps to get to the answer. Never do students get to think about how to do something — their questions are answered before they are even asked.

“Unfortunately,” boards of education say, “ if students are allowed to figure too much out by themselves, they’ll never get through the curriculum!”

But this begs the question: why do we need to get through the curriculum? What is the curriculum filled with but equations and jargon, irrelevant to all but those going directly into STEM? And even for those people, what is more important: critical thinking or vague memories of the equation for a hyperbola?

I’m not arguing that mathematics should be removed from school curricula because that’s already happened. What I am saying is that we should actually be teaching math, not this cruel mockery of it. Math is not about following a path but finding one, searching for how ideas are connected, playing with lines and circles until finally, you see that the lines are the same length!

Now this isn’t a problem that any one school or teacher can be expected to fix. It’s a systemic one, rooted in a deep misunderstanding of what math truly is. Math is an art, valuable even removed from practicality; artists do not pursue art to paint walls nor do musicians pursue music to write ringtones. So, it’s no wonder students think they hate math — they aren’t even learning math in the first place.