Mathematician's Lament

When it comes to teaching mathematics it is so difficult to encourage students to want to discover math on their own. With standards and the curriculum enforced the way it is in modern times it is hard to allow them to be creative and explore math. I plan to allow students to explore math in small ways, and possibly with time they will learn how to explore math in their other classrooms and maybe even teach their future teachers and children how to do this. To do this students will be given the opportunity to explore the ideas of math through problems. The best class for this to occur in, at least until it has become a mainstream method in classrooms, would be geometry because I find it easier to visualize the mathematics, especially when it comes to deriving things such as formulas.

I worry that students won’t be receptive to the ideas of discovering math on their own. I think so many students have already developed a hatred for math and it will be extremely hard to convince them to not hate exploring within it. To so many students just knowing that they are in a math class makes them unwilling to learn and so it becomes very hard to convince them they to want to explore mathematics. To quote a story told by Maja Wilson in my class, “I think I could be good at this, but it’s too late for me now” (about a high school geometry class). This is how so many students view math once they get into high school and I worry that I won’t be able to convince students that this is not true. Lockhart, P. (2009). A Mathematician’s Lament. Bellevue Literary Press: New York, NY ISBN 978-1-934137-17-8