What I’m Reading: ‘A Mathematician’s Lament’

Sometimes you open a book when you should. I read The Bhagavad-Gita one sweaty summer in Tamil Nadu, and Fear and Trembling after September 11 in New York City. In August, I read A Mathematician’s Lament in a park in Colorado Springs while seated at a picnic table that was half-submerged in a creek. What correspondences I found!

The author, Paul Lockhart, begins with an analogy. Imagine if music education were mandatory, he writes, but taught without ever having students play or listen to music. Great emphasis was placed instead on, say, filling in quarter notes. How sad. Math is an art form, he argues — a happily useless and imaginary one. Schools destroy children’s “natural curiosity and love of pattern-making” and forget that play is learning.

I read this as my nephew and two daughters (5, 3, and 5) got muddy and less dressed, made a canoe, dug for clay, built a house, marveled at a caterpillar, and posted the youngest as guard. Four hours passed, happily. They were dissolved in their work and did not want to leave.

I’ve been thinking about what happens between this age, in a creek, and the 18-year-olds whom I teach, in a classroom. What injured their sense of wonder? Might Mr. Lockhart know? Dispense with arguments for use, to start, and hunt delight instead.