I was deep into Lockhart's work when I found this. I'd already read Arithmetic and Measurement and was tracking down the books Lockhart himself cites. This essay was the starting point for all of it.
"A Mathematician's Lament" is a 2002 essay by Paul Lockhart, a K-12 math teacher who previously worked in research mathematics at Brown and UC Santa Cruz. The essay argues that math education has been reduced to rote procedures and has lost all contact with the creative, exploratory nature of actual mathematics. Lockhart compares it to teaching music by having students fill out sheet music notation worksheets without ever hearing a song. Keith Devlin helped popularize it by sharing it on his MAA column in 2008.
I was deep into Lockhart's work when I found this. I'd already read Arithmetic and Measurement and was tracking down the books Lockhart himself cites. This essay was the starting point for all of it.
"A Mathematician's Lament" is a 2002 essay by Paul Lockhart, a K-12 math teacher who previously worked in research mathematics at Brown and UC Santa Cruz. The essay argues that math education has been reduced to rote procedures and has lost all contact with the creative, exploratory nature of actual mathematics. Lockhart compares it to teaching music by having students fill out sheet music notation worksheets without ever hearing a song. Keith Devlin helped popularize it by sharing it on his MAA column in 2008.