A few posts back I shared an article titled: “How to Fall in Love with Math.” As I’ve stated many times, I am quite passionate about the need to focus on affective learning in mathematics. I have since come across a few additional articles in the same vein and I thought I would share them here with a few brief quotes.

The first article is titled “Finding the Beauty in Math.” Here are some interesting quotes:

Cornell Math Professor and New York Times columnist Steven Strogatz, author of The Joy of x, said much of middle and high school math curriculum (which covers not basic arithmetic, but higher math) doesn’t appeal to students’ hearts, instead offering answers to questions that kids would never ask — which he calls “the definition of boredom.”

“When people want to learn about music, they’ve reacted to it, they love it and naturally want to learn more about it. They have their own questions,” Strogatz said. When introducing higher math to a group of curious young students, he suggests first “showing them math’s greatest hits” and allowing them to become fascinated; students then naturally come up with their own questions. Suri was on the right track, Strogatz said, when he suggested students learn something like the origin of numbers — because the first step is falling in love with the mathematical ideas behind the formulas and procedures.

Strogatz acknowledges that grasping the concepts of higher math can pave the way to many wonderful careers — many in the popular and highly needed STEM fields. But rationalizing to students that math improves reasoning skills or that “you’ll need it in the real world” are two strategies doomed to fail, he said, because they not-so-subtly suggest that math isn’t worth learning for its own sake, but parallels something more akin to “mental push-ups.”

“Have you ever asked why you need music?” Strogatz said. “You don’t need music. It’s nice to know about music. Why do you need to look at Picasso?” Perhaps when presented first as the story of how the universe works, math can become beautiful.

The article also states that “Grabbing students’ hearts, however, is only the first step to falling in love with math.” I’m just glad someone recognizes that grabbing hearts (as opposed to minds) is actually THE first step. Much of math education today seems to ignore this route.

A second article (which is actually referenced in the one above) is titled “How Do You Spark a Love of Math in Kids?” After discussing improving student self-efficacy the author goes on to state:

A second element critical to switching students onto math is the value they attach to the subject. Parents and teachers can foster the sense that math is an important and relevant body of knowledge by demonstrating the usefulness of math in the real world, and by making themselves positive role models for valuing math. In fact, parents’ own interest in math is another important component Martin and his coauthors identified.

I both agree and disagree with this comment. I agree that parents (and teachers of other subjects) need to be positive math role models for students. Too often I’ll have conversations with parents who want their child to do well in math class but they have no idea how to help them because they “were never very good at math” or simply they “aren’t a math person.” Comments like this to irreparable harm to the psyche of our math students. I disagree with the quote in that it outright contradicts the ideas brought up by Strogatz above. Namely that

Rationalizing to students that math improves reasoning skills or that “you’ll need it in the real world” are two strategies doomed to fail, he said, because they not-so-subtly suggest that math isn’t worth learning for its own sake, but parallels something more akin to “mental push-ups.”

To read more about how math is worth learning for its own sake, and not simply its utility I suggest my post on Mathematical Affections.

I’ve written before about the need to focus on the affective side of learning mathematics. It is a topic I am quite passionate about and it is the focus of my Ph.D. research in math education. I feel strongly enough about it that when people ask me what I teach I don’t respond with “I teach math,” or “I teach geometry,” or “I teach statistics.” Rather, I respond with “I teach math appreciation.” I think that is a much more apt description of our calling as math educators. We love math and the majority of students do not. Our goal is not to simply transfer our intellectual knowledge to the students, but to infect them with out enthusiasm.

I have been encouraged to see a recent publication come to my attention that address this matter. It was a New York Times article titled “How to Fall in Love with Math.” While I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusion of the article, that the solution to the problem is to be found in technology, it is nice to see the problem of mathematical affections being raised in the first place. I also enjoyed the opening of the article where the author clearly states what every math educator knows that nobody else does: when people say things like “do the math” they reveal that the public perception is that mathematics and arithmetic are the same thing. In reality arithmetic is an extremely small subset of mathematics. Mathematics as a discipline has something much grander than simply addition and multiplication that propels it forward. As the author states:

As a mathematician, I can attest that my field is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall.