Dive Brief:
- Citing math teacher Paul Lockhart's essay "A Mathematician’s Lament," Business Insider's Andy Kiersz writes that the focus on rote memorization is undermining math teaching.
- Kiersz argues that students believe they are bad at math or push it aside because they are incorrectly being fed challenging formulas without context.
- Understanding structures and thinking about shapes should be the focus, says Kiersz, especially since all of the difficult computing can be found with the swipe of a calculator app.
Dive Insight:
Kiersz brings up a good point with the calculator. While schools are very focused on students coming up with answers on their own, the reality is that the Internet and smartphones have now made it easy to find Web-based tools or apps that easily provide all of the answers. Want to find how many cups are in a quart? Use a converter online. The need for rote memorization is less important than the need to truly understand why there are 4 cups in a quart. As Kiersz writes, "Pedagogy needs to move away from finding the answer, and toward understanding why this is the answer and why we care about the answer."