Many students who excel at other subjects say, “I’m bad at math,” or, “I’m not a math person.” Others do well in math classes but find themselves bored. It needn’t be that way. The goal of mathematics in the program is to make the beauty of mathematics available to all students. Our approach is inspired by Paul Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament” and the mathematics curriculum of St. John’s College. We begin with Euclid and work forward.
Paul Lockhart puts it well: “Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student’s mathematical life. Painful and creatively frustrating as it may be, students and their teachers should at all times be engaged in the process—having ideas, not having ideas, discovering patterns, making conjectures, constructing examples and counterexamples, devising arguments, and critiquing each other’s work. Specific techniques and methods will arise naturally out of this process, as they did historically: not isolated from, but organically connected to, and as an outgrowth of, their problem-background… There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.”
Second-year mathematics is designed based on the strengths and interests students discover and develop in the first year and may include Archimedes, classical and modern physics, or calculus.
“Mathematics is about problems, and problems must be made the focus of a student’s mathematical life.”
Paul Lockhart