Teaching Philosophy

Christopher Klerkx
Mathematics requires an unusual use of the human brain. We typically use our brains to
think about situations involving people, places, and other concrete things. In mathematics we
deal with abstractions. I have seen many pairs of items in my lifetwo shoes or two eyeballs
but I have never seen the number two. As such, mathematics is an activity that requires a great
deal of practice to master. It is therefore unfortunate that mathematics education often involves
students simply watching mathematics done by a teacher at a chalkboard. There is a saying that
mathematics is not a spectator sport. We would not learn to play football by sitting on the
sideline, and the same is true of mathematics. Hence, it is a principal component of my approach
to mathematics teaching that students should as often as possible be engaged in actually doing
mathematics. This does not mean that there is no instruction at the board. Rather, there is a
steady back and forth between time for individual practice and full-group discussion.
Next, a note on what it means to do mathematics. Computers are excellent at
manipulating symbols according to programmed procedures to produce answers to mathematical
questions. But that is not doing mathematics. If that is all our students are trained to do in
mathematics classrooms, then we are preparing them to be replaced by machines. For students to
be able to truly understand mathematics, they must be able to speak about it and explain it.
Unfortunately, mathematics classrooms often deny students this opportunity for making
meaning. Students need the most practice talking in school, but teachers get the most.1 Group
work or strategies like think-pair-share can help facilitate productive peer-to-peer conversations.

John Holt writes in How Children Learn, Who needs the most practice talking in school? Who gets the most?
Exactly. The children need it, the teacher gets it.

So far I have focused on how to teach mathematics. Now I will shift to why we should
teach mathematics. Of course, applications of mathematics are ubiquitous in our modern
industrial world. But lets be honest: most of our students will never need to factor a polynomial.
Nonetheless, students can benefit from learning even apparently useless mathematics. The reason
is that by doing mathematics students learn how to think clearly, to express themselves precisely,
and to reason logically. These skills are indispensable to a functioning democracy where the
public is routinely misled by politicians and the media. Because all mathematical words have
exact definitions, we do not need to settle for sloppy speech. We should be able to communicate
so we know exactly what each other means. And in mathematics we do not simply accept a claim
on the basis of authority. We look for a proof, a chain of logical deductions that leads us from
statements we already accept to the claim in question. Hence, the recipient of a good
mathematics education will be a skeptical thinker who will not be swindled by shoddy
arguments.
Another reason to learn apparently useless mathematics is the same reason we study
poetry in an English classit is beautiful. In geometry we can behold this beauty visually, as in
the case of the proof of the Pythagorean theorem shown below2. Even in algebra where we are
sometimes repulsed by ugly computations, there is
beauty in the connections between the underlying
ideas. Mathematics is, at its core, a creative
discipline where we are free to invent new ideas and
explore patterns in an abstract world of pure structure. This realm can be frightening in its
vastness and strangeness, so I hope to serve as a tour guide for my students and give them the
courage to occasionally wander off the beaten path. Who knows what they might find!
2

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/math/Pythagorus/Pythagorean-1.gif