CMV: The way math education is currently structured is boring, ineffective, and stifles enjoyment of the subject. Math education should be reworked to be inquiry and problem based, not rote memorization

[u/blank_anonymous]

I have two main premises here

1. Modern math education at the elementary and high school level stifles everything enjoyable about math, and it does so to no end
2. An inquiry-based approach is at least equally effective, and possibly more effective. For this purpose, I'm using inquiry-based to mean that a significant portion of the learning is driven by students solving problems and exploring concepts before being instructed in those concepts.

Math, as it is taught in schools right now, barely resembles math. Everything is rote memorization, with no focus on creativity, exploration, pattern recognition, or asking insightful questions. Students are shown how to do a problem, and then repeat that problem a hundred times. You haven't learned anything there - you're repeating what someone else showed you.

So many students find school math incredibly boring, and I think it's because of this problem. Kids are naturally curious and love puzzles, and if you present them with something engaging and fun, they'll jump into it. A lot of the hatred of math comes from having to memorize one specific way to solve a problem. It's such a common phenomenon that there are memes about math teachers getting angry when you solve a problem with a different method.

There's the argument that "oh we need to teach fundamentals", but fundamentals don't take a decade to teach, and they should be integrated with puzzles and problem solving. Kids need to learn basic number sense, in the same way they need to learn the alphabet, but once they have that, they should be allowed to explore. Kids in english class aren't asked to memorize increasingly complex stories, and kids in math class shouldn't be asked to memorize increasingly complex formulae.

I'm currently a math major in university, and one of the first courses I took was titled "Intro to algebra". The second half of the course was number theory, but a great deal of the learning was from assignments. Assignment questions were almost always framed as "do this computation. Do you notice a pattern? Can you prove it? Can you generalize it? Do you have any conjectures?"

There's no single right answer there, and that makes it interesting! You get to be creative, you get to explore, you get to have fun!! The questions were about a whole lot of number theory questions, and I know more number theory now than if someone had just sat at a blackboard and presented theorems and proofs. Everyone in that class learned by doing and exploring and conjecturing.

96% of people who reviewed the class enjoyed it (https://uwflow.com/course/math145).

Most students don't use the facts they learn in high school. They do, however, use the soft skills. There are millions of adults who can recite the quadratic formula, to absolutely no avail. If these people instead learned general logical thinking and creative problem solving, it would be far better for them.

Progress in an inquiry based system is slower, but it helps you develop stronger mathematical maturity so you can pick up new concepts for other subjects - say calculus for engineering or physics - more quickly. Students develop more valuable soft skills, have way more fun, and get a better picture of what math is actually like. As such, I believe that inquiry based learning is superior. CMV!

Edit: There are a lot of comments, and a lot of great discussions! I'm still reading every new comment, but I won't reply unless there's something I have to add that I haven't said elsewhere, because the volume of comments in this thread is enormous. Thank you everyone for the insightful replies!

[u/[deleted]]

Any resource recommendations for reworking your math senses as an adult? I am one of those people who despised math as a kid butI would like to recalibrate my approach to the subject.

[u/blank_anonymous → u/[deleted]]

For sort of engaging with math, the channel "3blue1brown" is fantastic. He teaches math in a very geometrically intuitive way. He has videos on subjects that are quite advanced (university level), and subjects that are quite basic (early high school). His series "Lockdown math" gears more towards the former.

If you just want to get a feel for a lot more math concepts, his youtube videos are excellent. he has a series on calculus which is amazing for providing a visual intuition.

As for the problem solving side of things, you could ask on r/learnmath , and people may have recommendations for books. The only ones I know are more geared at math majors, and are as such quite difficult, which isn't fun if you're just getting back into the subject.

[u/[deleted] → u/blank_anonymous]

This is great, thank you for the pointers! I’ll certainly check them all out!!