Musings: A Philosophy of Education

I’ve tried a few times over the years to express my philosophy of teaching math. Back when I first started doing workshops for homeschooling parents, I told them:

“Instead of drudgery, mathematics should be a game of discovery. It should give children the same ‘Eureka!’ thrill that sent Archimedes running through town in his birthday suit. I call this the ‘Aha!’ factor, the delight in solving a challenging puzzle.”

Years later, as the internet developed and much of life moved online, I started a blog about playing with math. And since all good blogs need an “About Me” page, I had another chance to sum up my thoughts:

“Math is like ice cream, with more flavors than you can imagine — and if all your children ever see is textbook math, that’s like feeding them broccoli-flavored ice cream.”

But over the years, some people got the impression that my goal was all about playing games. They asked, “How can we make math fun for our kids?” — as if gamification adds a candy coating to make the disgusting medicine more palatable.

And of course, I do write a lot of books about games. I think games serve much better than worksheets for practicing basic math skills.

Still, I wanted people to see that the ideas of math themselves are tasty tidbits worth playing with.

Math as a nature walk

More recently, as I started trying to explain the value of math journaling, I came up with a new analogy. Here’s how I said it in a podcast discussion with Pam Barnhill:

“I want you to think of math as a nature walk. There’s this whole world of interesting things. More things, more concepts, more ideas than you and your children would ever have time to explore. And everywhere you look, there’s something cool to discover.

“If you explore this world with your children, you’re not behind. Wherever you are, you’re not behind because there is no behind. There’s only, ‘We’re going this direction.’ Or, ‘Let’s move that way.’ Or, ‘Hey, look what I found over here!’

“And as long as your children are thinking and wondering, and making sense of the math they find, they’re going to learn. They’re going to grow.”

Focus on thinking

This year, I’m working on moving my publisher’s online store to a new platform that can handle paperbacks and hardcovers as well as digital books. It’s a huge job for a one-person business, with more than 70 products so far. (Grand Opening Sale this week — use the discount code GRAND_20 at checkout to save 20%!)

For the store’s homepage, I tried once more to pin down my thoughts about math education. Here’s the current version:

“Textbooks make math feel like a ladder to climb, rung by rung, working systematically from one topic to the next. But that’s an illusion. Learning math is more like taking a meandering nature walk. Kids need to wander around the concepts, notice things, wonder about them, and enjoy the journey.

“Most people believe the goal of math is to get right answers. So we give our children a page of math problems to work, then we check their answers and tell them what they got wrong. When we focus on right answers, we can make our children feel like a failure at math.

“Instead, we need to focus our math lessons on thinking, playing with ideas, reasoning and figuring things out. And when we make mathematical thinking our goal, the right answers will come along as a side-effect, a natural result of making sense of the math.”

What do you think?

Does it make sense? Have I managed to communicate the essence of a playful approach to math?

We all — every parent, every teacher — have a philosophy of education, even if we never take the time to write it down. We have beliefs about how children learn and how we can help them on the journey.

Making those thoughts visible, getting them down on paper, helps to clarify our perspective. It lets us see what is working in our current practice and where we have room for improvement.

How would you put into words the adventure of learning math? (Or any other subject that interests you.)