Musings: School Math vs. Real Math

I was asked to do an interview for a new podcast called Learning is Disruptable, and that got me thinking…

Is Math Education Ripe for Disruption?

Math education is not working. Too many people come out of school with math avoidance, math anxiety or even phobia, a profound conviction that math is not for them.

Generally, humans enjoy success, the feeling that things make sense, that they are capable of understanding big ideas. People like subjects that give them this type of success, where they are meeting and making sense of new ideas, growing in mastery.

But they hate subjects that make them feel like a failure, where things don’t make sense and there seems to be no real chance of success.

Therefore, understanding our students’ attitude toward math gives us a solid indication of how well they are learning.

Most young children enjoy counting, playing with shapes, manipulating patterns, thinking about large numbers, wondering about infinity.

But a majority of adults avoid math, feel nervous when they’re forced to perform it, dismiss its relevance to their lives, and don’t feel embarrassed to say, “I’m not good at math.”

As educational outcomes go, this is a disaster.

Our current system of math education has failed our students.

How to Disrupt Math Education

I’m not sure what it will take to change the school system itself, though many people wiser than I are making a valiant effort. But speaking as a veteran homeschooling parent, I do know one thing that has the potential to transform our children’s experience of math.

We need to radically change our idea of what it means to learn math.

Our biggest failure, both in classroom and home school settings, is that we give our children a totally wrong idea of what math is all about.

We give an assignment. Our students work the problems. We grade their answers. The experience of school math teaches one thing very clearly: Right answers are the goal.

Students who can produce right answers quickly and efficiently are considered “good at math.”

But right answers are NOT what real math is about.

In real math, right answers are not the goal.

Right answers are not even terribly important. They are merely a side-effect that happens naturally when we achieve our true goal.

Real math is all about thinking, reasoning, making sense, building a web of interconnected concepts that let us see how numbers, shapes, and patterns relate to each other and why they behave the way they do.

No matter what curriculum we use (or whether we use a math curriculum at all) we need to make changes that de-emphasize right answers and instead put our focus on student thinking.

School Math vs. Real Math

Traditional schooling (the kind most of us experienced as children) views math as a performance subject, something we do on paper for other people to judge: Learn the rules. Follow the rules. Do it fast. Get the right answer.

And the way to improve at any performance subject (like sports or playing an instrument) is to practice until the task becomes nearly automatic, until we don’t have to think about it but just do it.

Perhaps this notion of learning math made sense once upon a time, before electronic calculators became commonplace and phones became powerful computers.

The modern world has made math as a performance subject obsolete.

If math is to have any value as a human endeavor, we need to see it as a knowledge subject, like literature or science, something we do in our minds, putting ideas together and making new connections, with the goal of building a web of concepts that interact with each other.

And the way to improve at any knowledge subject is to play with it, to explore, to experiment, to share it with others and see how their point of view compares to your own, to seek new ideas and new experiences and then consolidate the new and the old, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

To disrupt math education in our home schools, we must stop viewing it as a performance subject and start treating it as a knowledge subject.

Only then will our children truly learn real math.

Want to Hear More?

Check out Learning Is Disruptable on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:

Go to the podcast ❱