Over the years, I’ve visited more than a hundred schools and libraries, speaking mostly to elementary school students but also sometimes to middle school and high school students. I usually start my presentation by asking who in the audience likes math. In Kindergarten, first, and second grade, almost every hand goes up. I lose a few hands in third and fourth grade and, by fifth grade, I’m lucky if a third of the students raise their hands. So what happened from Kindergarten to fifth grade?
That’s the next question I ask. “If you don’t like math, tell me why.” I get a range of answers, but they all fall into one of two general themes: math is hard and math is boring. I understand that math can be difficult sometimes. It’s not a subject like reading where you learn how to do it and then you know how to read. The vocabulary and context may become more advanced, but reading on the whole doesn’t change that much. Math is very different. Math is a set of building blocks. We lay the foundation with sets and simple operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). We build on this foundation with more complex operations like fractions and properties (commutative, distributive, and so on). Math becomes more abstract, moving from numerical operations to simple algebraic concepts. And on and on it goes. Our foundation becomes a house, and the house gains multiple floors, and wings are added and guest houses are built and the estate grows and grows.
But it’s hard to see this amazing structure when you are in elementary school. We’re so busy building the foundation that we can’t see the end result. They are too busy learning the how that they don’t see the why. As mathematician and author Ian Stewart once put it, “Mathematics is the closest that we humans get to true magic. How else to describe the patterns in our heads that – by some mysterious agency – capture patterns of the universe around us?” We need to show students the magic of mathematics, even if they don’t yet understand the actual math behind the magic.
For example, I was surprised to see how many high school students and teachers had never heard of the Fibonacci sequence, one of the most famous math patterns of all time. The math behind it isn’t hard – I often talk about it with elementary school students. It starts with 1 1. Each element following is the sum of the two preceeding numbers. The beginning of the Fibonacci sequence is 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 …
Okay, but where’s the magic? The magic is that the number of petals on almost all flowers is a number in the Fibonacci sequence. If I draw a picture of the sequence as a series of increasingly large squares, the squares will fit perfectly next to each other. If I then draw a line through the squares, I’ll get a spiral. This spiral is an amazing representation of an elephant’s trunk, a snail, a hurricane, or a spiral galaxy. We see the Fibonacci sequence in nature, in art, in architecture, in music. The math is all around us, amazingly represented by a simple sequence of numbers that a first grader could understand.
If we can show them the magic, they are much more likely to want to learn the foundational pieces of math that will get them to the “cool stuff”. When I ran my elementary school math camp, I focused on the magic. I wanted the students to see that there was something past the boring computational part of math. I took what I learned in these “magic” lessons and created The Math Kids series. Each book is focused on an area of math that most kids are not exposed to, and certainly not at an elementary school level – topics like the Fibonacci sequence, prime numbers, pi, knot theory, probability, proofs, Pascal’s triangle, and more. Each book is a mystery which the Math Kids – four elementary school students – use their math skills to solve. For kids who don’t like math, maybe they’ll like it a little more after reading the books. If not, they’ll still have read an interesting mystery book. For kids who love math, I think they’ll come away with an even greater appreciation of a fascinating subject.