Catching up on items in my Instapaper queue we find a writer who says we should stop trying to sell math for it’s usefulness.1

One of the fall outs of children not understanding mathematics and the associated failure which often follows at some point in their 500 hour tour of the salt mines of mathematics?—?aka math education?—?is that teachers, through no fault of their own, start to sell/hawk mathematics like its some discontinued K-Tel kitchen product at a Saturday Flea Market.

Kids struggle with the number and symbolic manipulation we present as math for a variety of reasons, but the lack of context that necessitates that selling process is probably right up there. They are not dumb. Students understand that adults sometimes do use some math in their lives. But they also realize that there is likely an app for that.

Dozens of calculators to do the basic work, laser pointers that measure more accurately than a simple ruler, even software to produce each step of a process just as the teacher asked for. There may be a lot of trig involved with kite flying but learning from the mistakes of throwing it into the wind is more fun.

However, marketing math based on “its sometimes messy and intricate fun” and the intrinsic mystery of “symmetrical curvature” is also a dead end. And it won’t be especially beneficial to students in the long run.

Certainly playing with math can be both entertaining and lead to interesting discoveries. But even traveling that path, we will still arrive at the inevitable question: “when are we ever going use this?”, not to mention “is this going to be on the test?”.

I think there’s a middle ground between trying to sell kids on the need for our current formal mathematics program, most of which they will never use, and encouraging students to embrace the beauty and poetry of math.

How about using math to solve actual problems, other than those in books with mathematical titles? Like validating a survey in social studies. Gathering and analyzing data in science. Applying Geometric patterns to make art.

Maybe it’s time to eliminate the subject area silo called “mathematics” altogether in K12 (except for those few students in high school interested in that field), and instead incorporate those tools into the overall problem solving process. It would be a wonderful first step to tearing down all the artificial walls between subject areas.

I’m pretty sure someone can tell me why this is idea is impractical, unrealistic, or just plain looney. But there’s got to be something between “useful” math that really isn’t and “beautiful” math that few can appreciate (or even want to).