{"id":2844,"date":"2008-08-20T09:36:18","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T09:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/20\/the-relevance-of-relevance\/"},"modified":"2008-08-20T09:36:18","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T09:36:18","slug":"the-relevance-of-relevance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/20\/the-relevance-of-relevance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Relevance of Relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Swans On Tea<\/a>, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools – How To Repair Our Education System<\/a>, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart’s “Mathematician’s Lament”<\/a> (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I’m fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart, in particular, strikes me as being an excellent example of the dangers of being too attached to a subject.<\/p>\n

He writes with great passion and at great length about the fun and creativity involved in math, which is all very nice. Unfortunately, it also leads to paragraphs like this:<\/p>\n

\n

The saddest part of all this “reform” are the attempts to “make math interesting” and
\n“relevant to kids’ lives.” You don’t need to make math interesting– it’s already more
\ninteresting than we can handle! And the glory of it is its complete irrelevance to our lives.
\nThat’s why it’s so fun! <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

See, right there, we part company. I’m just not that fired up about pure math– and I make my living working in a highly mathematical science. Math is a tool for me, that’s it. I have enough appreciation of it to be faintly impressed by some of the cute tricks he describes, but they’re interesting in the same way that odd bits of historical trivia are interesting.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I don’t really object to his proposed reforms (which basically amount to shifting the emphasis in math classes from rigid and formal definitions to problem-solving skills)– after all, they’re roughly comparable to the reformist introductory physics curricula that I like. I think his argument isn’t terribly convincing to anyone who isn’t already a mathematician, though. Really, the main thing I like about it is that some of the examples he gives look faintly similar to physics problems, and I think it would be lovely if somebody else were teaching students that approach as well.<\/p>\n

This is a problem that I find myself grappling with all the time, as a scientist, educator, and blogger. Obviously, I<\/strong> think physics is intrinsically fascinating, because it’s what I choose to do for a living. I don’t feel I should need to explain the relevance of quantum mechanics, because it’s just so darn cool<\/strong> that everyone should want to know more about it.<\/p>\n

That’s not the way the world works, though. Not everybody feels the way I do about physics problems, or finds magic in the quantum statistical behavior of very cold collections of atoms. I think it would be a better world if more people did, but I don’t get to dictate that, and just assuming that everybody else will be fascinated by the same things I am doesn’t bring in the grant funding.<\/p>\n

The fact is, lots of people only care about things that they find relevant. I have classmates and colleagues who only read non-fiction, because they don’t see any point in novels. I send grant proposals to program officers who want to know how my work will advance technology. I teach large numbers of students who care about physics only as a hurdle to cross on their way to an engineering degree, or medical school.<\/p>\n

One of the best pieces of advice I got as a new-ish faculty member was “Don’t assume that your students are like you were.” People who end up as college faculty are a tiny minority of students, and most of them have always looked at the world in a different way than their classmates who go on to other occupations. I’m probably somewhat closer to the mark than many of my colleagues, at least as regards socialization as a student, but I still fall into the trap of assuming that things I find incredibly fascinating will also captivate my classes, and I get snotty comments to that effect on the end-of-term evaluations.<\/p>\n

Lockhart seems to me to be falling into this trap. He assumes that everybody will be enthralled by math in the same way that he was enthralled by math, and that’s just not true. I’m totally with him on high-school geometry, which was excruciating, but a more free-form approach isn’t going to make me care about the angles of a triangle inscribed within a circle. Unless it turns out to have some relevance to a problem in physics.<\/p>\n

His proposed reforms sound ok to me, because, let’s face it, it would be hard to come up with anything worse than what we’ve got now. But reveling in irrelevance doesn’t strike me as a good general approach– there are lots of people out there who really do<\/strong> want math to be relevant. I’m one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools – How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart’s “Mathematician’s Lament” (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I’m fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart,… Continue reading The Relevance of Relevance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,9,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-math","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}