Learning to See Math: Why Reading About Math Matters

Welcome to A Mother’s Thinking Love: Living Ideas, Lovingly Shared! In my ten-part series titled “On Teaching Math”, I wrote about my journey from struggling math student to math teacher. In my more recent post “Midwinter Math Blues: Refreshing Your Math Routine”, I recommended reading math biographies and math history spine books to help you through the winter homeschool months, which can be tough in the best of years. In today’s post, I am writing about how reading math biographies helped me to “see” math and how they fit into my math journey. Join me for: “Learning to See Math: Why Reading About Math Matters”!

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A Year Changes Everything

From my first days as a third grade math teacher, I approached teaching math a bit differently. I taught concepts conceptually and connected them to students’ lives. gave students opportunities to think and reason about math, too. I carried this method with me into our homeschool. Even in the years when we attempted to use a math curriculums, I reworked them to meet our needs. When we began Year Six, I wasn’t looking to do anything differently but one year with Ambleside Online further refined my thoughts about math. It was a piece of my different math approach that had been missing, and I hadn’t even realized it. I had still been viewing math through a utilitarian lens as a merely practical subject. That was about to change.

I’ve written before about how I found Ambleside Online (AO) when we first started homeschooling in Year One. Although we did not use all of the AO Year One books or schedule as prescribed, we had a lovely year. Over the next several years, I pieced together our own plan. While we still used some books recommended by AO here and there, we did not attempt any full AO years. When it came time to plan for Year Six, I somehow became aware that AO’s Year Six has a large focus on Ancient Greece and Rome. This is exactly what we were looking for, so I purchased all of the Year Six books and we jumped in!

Math Through Lives and Stories

In AO’s Year Six, the booklist includes three science biographies about: Archimedes, Galileo, and Albert Einstein. Although these books were listed under science, there was a clear overlap with math. While reading the biographies aloud in our homeschool, it dawned on me: the greatest math minds of history saw math very differently than its presented to the masses in math textbooks. In Year Seven, we read a biography about Blaise Pascal by Joyce McPherson and the Landmark biography about The Wright Brothers. We enjoyed Joyce McPherson’s Blaise Pascal biography so much that I decided to see if she had others in the same vein. Thankfully she does, so in Year Eight we are reading her biography about Isaac Newton.

We added another type of book about math this year: math history spine. We’re about halfway through “String, Straightedge, and Shadow: The Story of Geometry”. While I prefer to inhabit one single life for a bit through biography, I’m enjoying this one, too! As a student who struggled with geometry, this book has lead to a lot of “ah-ha!” moments for me. We just finished a section about Thales and will be reading about Pythagoras this week. Although these books are about many men from many times living in different places, they all have some things in common.

Some Common Threads

Although I already alluded to it, I wanted to devote a bit more space to this idea here: the greatest math minds of history saw math very differently than its presented to the masses in math textbooks.

Here are a few common threads that I’ve seen over the last nearly three years:

• They didn’t just see math as a system of rules to be mastered. Although they did learn about math from others, and some even took math as a class in a school, they viewed math as living. Some of them even had bad experiences in those math classes!
• They noticed, wondered, and were reminded of other things. I have written before about how we use John Muir Law’s “I notice.. I wonder.. It reminds me of” in all subjects, including math. The greatest math minds seem to do this naturally. This stood out to me when reading about Thales.
• Speaking of Thales, they had questions. Asking questions is too often seen as a weakness in education today, but the greatest math minds were not afraid to ask them. When Thales asked “How high is this pyramid?”, he asked a question no one had ever asked before. Then, he came up with a way to answer it.
• They had problems. Although we get concerned if our student does not understand a concept by the end of the chapter, the greatest math minds wrestled with problems for years sometimes.
• They didn’t receive a standardized education. While they didn’t receive a standardized education, there were two common threads throughout their lives. They pursued self-education and were driven by wonder, curiosity, and discovery.

Application for Home Education: Learning to See Math

If you have a naturally math-minded student, you likely see some of those common threads arising in your own home. Even for those who are not naturally math-minded, like myself, I think it’s important to have a well-ordered view of math. We have experienced math presented in such a way that we don’t see a need to contemplate it anymore. We just memorize, pass the test, and move on. We don’t even know we are supposed to notice, wonder, or be reminded of anything. We don’t know that we are supposed to ask questions or that having problems can lead to great discoveries.

How, then, can we learn to see math again? I think reading biographies and math history spines are a first step. Instead of giving students didactic lessons about wonder and curiosity, let them see wonder and curiosity in action through well-written, narrative, living books. Let them meet the greatest minds for themselves and take what they can (thank you Charlotte Mason). Not only is this enjoyable, but it’s low-stress – something most homeschools likely need more of when it comes to math.

I think it’s important to note here that I’m not recommending to use biographies and spine books to directly teach math concepts. I’m recommending to simply read and narrate like you would with any other book in a Charlotte Mason style homeschool. Just let wonder grow. Maybe you can do some “wondering” out loud with your students during the day, but that’s it. Wonder with math may not bear fruit overnight, but the roots will take hold – even if slowly.

Closing + A Recommendation for Mom

It’s not only our students who need to learn how to see math, it’s us homeschool moms too! Because of this, I wanted to recommend Joyce McPherson’s “A Piece of the Mountain: The Story of Blaise Pascal” as a read for moms. You can start with any biography, but this one was particularly impactful for me, on many levels, personally.

Thank you for reading: “Learning to See Math: Why Reading About Math Matters”! Do you have any favorite math biographies or math history spine books? Share them in the comments below!