“Math is boring.”

I always wondered why I’ve never had a very strong interest in math. After all, my dad is a mathematician, and I’ve heard that chess players are supposed to have “good math minds.” In addition, I wanted to try and enjoy math more during my junior year when I took calculus, but it didn’t help.

Well, one day during eighth period, my friend showed me a possible solution to why I thought math was boring. The answer was an article titled "A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart, a math teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, N.Y.

In the article, Lockhart criticizes the current K-12 mathematical education and explains several reasons why students don’t appreciate math.

Here are two reasons, according to Lockhart:

TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds. Truly interesting and beautiful phenomena, such as the way the sides of a triangle depend on its angles, will be given the same emphasis as irrelevant abbreviations and obsolete notational conventions, in order to prevent students from forming any clear idea as to what the subject is about. Students will learn such mnemonic devices as “SohCahToa” and “All Students Take Calculus” in lieu of developing a natural intuitive feeling for orientation and symmetry. The measurement of triangles will be discussed without mention of the transcendental nature of the trigonometric functions, or the consequent linguistic and philosophical problems inherent in making such measurements. Calculator required, so as to further blur these issues.

[…]

CALCULUS. This course will explore the mathematics of motion, and the best ways to bury it under a mountain of unnecessary formalism. Despite being an introduction to both the differential and integral calculus, the simple and profound ideas of Newton and Leibniz will be discarded in favor of the more sophisticated function-based approach developed as a response to various analytic crises which do not really apply in this.

Although I haven’t read the entire 25-page article and don’t necessarily agree with Lockhart on everything, I definitely can relate to most of the stuff he talks about.

For instance, most of the problems I have done in my middle school and high school math classes just involve applying a formula or theorem to the problem … and bingo, you get the answer. What really irritates me is that I don’t get the chance to deeply think about a problem because it isn’t challenging. Then after we move onto the next chapter, the next thing I know is that I have pretty much forgotten everything I just learned.

Despite Lockhart’s criticisms about how math is presented, I have to definitely say that I have not totally found math to be boring during my time at Uni.

For example, I enjoyed my Algebra II class in sophomore year, which was taught by Craig Russell. In that class, I really liked how Mr. Russell assigned one or two problems daily and an optional challenge problem. In addition, I liked how Mr. Russell also came up with creative math projects that made students think of many different ways to try and get to the answer. For example during my sophomore year, he had our class try to mathematically map out roller coasters.

According to Lockhart, “mathematics is an art” and students should be “exposed to situations where deductive reasoning is necessary.” Even though I don’t find math to be particularly interesting, I hope that someday I will appreciate it more when I truly understand the beauty of it.