Mathematics teachers who don't like mathematics

It would explain a lot

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We have all written stupid questions. I remember that I wrote a question once about a rectangular hyperbola not having an inverse function and then, when the students were sitting in class and having a go at the question, I realised it obviously did.

Then there are those questions I am less guilty of writing. These are the ones that attempt to shoehorn real-world contexts into questions that don’t need it. And when it comes to standardised exams, Marty at Bad Mathematics has a good line in criticising questions from a mathematician’s perspective.

Nevertheless, I usually quite like doing maths questions, even though I am a physicist by training. One of the best parts of my week is sitting down and quietly working through the examples I am going to model and the questions I am going to set for students in my upcoming classes. As deputy principal, I don’t teach all that much any more and spend most of my time dealing with other issues. So, lesson preparation is something a bit different for me. I realise this is a privilege. I remember what it was like to have a full teaching load — back then, preparation was not something I particularly enjoyed due to the sheer volume of it.

Yet, I still gained satisfaction from answering questions — and more from writing them.

I think it is essential to have some connection to the subject to be a maths teacher. And I worry whether this is part of the problem.

When I look at some of the stuff that it coming out of America, such as the California Mathematics Framework, I have to wonder whether the people involved like mathematics. All the really cool stuff, like algebra and calculus, is played down. All the vaguely maths adjacent stuff, like ‘data science’ is emphasised.

For example, the Framework suggests:

“Besides linking numerous mathematics understandings into a coherent whole, the big ideas of mathematics provide a focus for student investigations—the authentic activities, or projects that are the backbone of teaching the big ideas… For example, students can be asked to design wheelchair ramps, plan a new school garden, or survey peers to find out how they have been impacted by distance learning.”

The dosage of maths problems in such projects is low and bordering on the homeopathic. If you want students to develop a thorough understanding of trigonometry, for example, designing one ramp is probably not the way to go. And that is if the students even use trigonometry at all. Note that the Framework endorses ‘low floor and a high ceiling’ tasks which is euphemism for giving students activities that will keep them busy even if they they don’t know any, or very much, mathematics.

Has it never occurred to advocates of these tasks to ditch them and instead teach students the maths they don’t know?

I have previously described this approach as ‘activity-based’ teaching in which well-defined learning objectives are shunned in favour of giving kids vaguely maths-related tasks to do and hoping for the best. Well, now I am beginning to wonder if these people just don’t like maths. Perhaps it bores them and that is why they try to turn it into something else.

To someone who loves mathematics, it is not a subject that only becomes valuable when it can be used to make a leaden social justice argument about the minimum wage or about including people with disabilities, it has intrinsic value and, dare I suggest it, beauty.

Mathematics is one of the big ways humans have developed for finding truth in the world and it has a distinctive perspective. In contrast to the induction of science, mathematics offers deduction. It’s rare glimpses of objectivity complement the humanism of the arts.

How have we come to a point where people who don’t like mathematics are charged with teaching it? The obvious answer is that mathematics graduates are in demand in other professions — ones where they are less likely to be sworn at and can go to the bathroom or make a coffee whenever they like. The mathematics teaching community tends not to comprise those who chose to step forward, but those who didn’t step back quickly enough.

I do not think this fully explains it. There are many committed maths teachers out there and plenty who started down the path of projects about wheelchair ramps before seeing the light and turning towards it — I know because they often contact me.

Instead, there is a kind of mind virus that infects people with this weird attitude. If we keep telling teachers they need to make their lessons more ‘engaging’ by dressing the maths up in a clown costume — because they don’t have, and should not have, any positional authority, so this is the only way to get the little critters to pay attention — we heavily imply that mathematics is intrinsically boring and we imply this to teachers and students alike.

As a community, we need to tell the math-hating educators that their time is up, we are now in charge and we love mathematics.

Planning the school garden can wait.

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