Math with Leonardo

"If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiousity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done-- I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education."-- Paul Lockhart, "The Mathematician's Lament"
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

I love this essay. It certainly describes my experience with math in school-- a bunch of random facts that inspired boredom, anxiety, and in the end the conviction that, however well I did in other subjects, I was not really smart, because I was bad at math.

My experience isn't unusual, so it's not surprising that math is intimidating to homeschoolers. Even unschooly types seem more likely to resort to a packaged curriculm for math. That's what we did last year-- the only workbook we had was the 4th grade Singapore Math. Dagfari worked his way through it because we insisted. I think I hated it as much as he did. I couldn't pretend that this math was anything but boring, and I didn't know how to connect it to anything D was actually interested in.

So when I ran across Paul Lockhart's essay this summer, I decided that we had to make a change. There was not much point in Dagfari learning to hate math as much as I had. But how to make math an interesting, creative endeavor for a boy whose obsessive interest at the moment was Renaissance art?

The answer came as I was browsing the shelves at the library and came across a book called Math and the Mona Lisa. This sounded somewhat promising. After I listened to an interview with the author on NPR, I decided to use it as our math textbook for the fall.

And so far, it's working. I'm reading it aloud to Dagfari, and we're both having the novel experience of finding mathematical principles that are relevant to things we're actually interested in. We not only understand the Fibonacci sequence (more or less), we also understand why we should care about it, why mathematicians find it fascinating. And Dagfari even got out his old math workbook to investigate the geometry section further.

So for now, we've shelved the long division and pre-algebra and "math facts". We have, for the first time, a fully integrated homeschool curriculm. And more importantly, Dagfari doesn't hate math.