I’m with you on the disappointment front – whilst I’ve not seen Proof, many television documentaries that supposedly address science (or even rare excursions that include mathematics) are often content-free when it comes to the real subject matter!

I read Paul Lockhart’s article (thank you for the length warning!) with a degree of sympathy – I recognised many of the points that he raised from my own, and my children’s school experiences. I did like the Gauss quote about it being better to have notions rather than notations.

I seem to recall Lancelot Hogben in ‘Mathematics for the million’ providing some alternatives to the ‘formal logic proofs’ – maybe we should ask Alan Bennett to write a mathematical version of ‘The history boys’ based on some of Lockhart and Hogben’s material. It’s more likely to rescue mathematics in schools then generations of politicians and ‘educators’.

Cheers, and thank you for this thought provoking item.

I thought the BBC production of “Copenhagen” was brilliant ! But I suspect that not many people grasped the concepts of Heisenberg/Bohr discussion and it’s implications during the war (WW2).

Fermats Brother

I loved the Paul Lockhart essay and started a thread about it in the Galaxy Zoo Forum. For me, it summed up entirely why I’d never done well at maths or been interested. It also summed up what is wrong with education – that lessons start at the wrong end. Rather than being encouraged to deduce or invent anything for themselves (apart from the recent fad of letting 15-year-olds draw pictures or substitute play-dough for writing, the nonsense they call “personalised learning”), the children are expected to start by memorising and applying definitions. It’s like starting with the final chapter of a book and memorising somebody else’s summary of events or something, rather than reading it and thinking about it.

I never had the least idea what maths actually *is* until I’d read that essay. Deep down, I knew it was the result of a series of inventions; but I’d never questioned the assumption they’d fed us that you have to get to post-PhD level to think anything out for yourself – and I couldn’t do GCSE Maths because it was so tedious that I couldn’t care less. As soon as I’d seen a few shapes and questions by Paul Lockhart, I spent two weeks obsessively drawing circles and triangles, and speculating wildly about how much of a cube a three-dimensional pyramid takes up whilst refusing to Google the formula.

A quantum physicst at Brighton University blames the culture of “quick results”, fuelled by television. Lessons must start with two “learning objectives” which all children must achieve by the end of the lesson. Whereas the deepest learning takes months or years to sink in. You can’t test an honest intellectual relationship, it doesn’t come with box-ticking, and therefore it fails inspections.

I hope that we are doing something like Paul Lockhart’s teaching at the Galaxy Zoo Forum – sharing, speculating, inventing things (like Waveney’s merger and irregular websites, and the peas projects), having the opportunity to be wrong, to find our own interests, and occasionally to set each other quizzes and problems.

I don’t know enough about maths to say for sure that it is in that situation, though I believe it is. And I’m terribly sad that I don’t know, and I wish I could find out, but current textbooks only confuse me and I know I can’t learn from them.

(Apologies for long post.)