Do the Math

John Mighton takes an open-minded approach with his Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies (jump) teaching method. Mighton once struggled with math, then did a Ph.D. in it. He is currently a fellow at the The Fields Institute, a mathematical think tank in Toronto, and his book, The Myth of Ability, is attracting international recognition. jump fosters a can-do attitude by breaking down difficult material into manageable bites, and often tutors roam the classroom providing one-on-one attention and good old Pavlovian positive feedback: Be nice, never put an X on a page, and kids will beg for more. I was a jump tutor for a year and, while Mighton’s prescriptions remain controversial in some quarters, I witnessed students experiencing unparalleled personal mathematical successes. They were lapping it up, their hands shooting into the air to answer questions as if they were requesting an urgent bathroom visit.

Oxford’s Anne Watson holds that math is difficult but that it need not be fear-inducing. Says Watson, “I believe that every mind (except those which have specific damage of some kind) is capable of doing the kind of thinking that enables them to create mathematical ideas by making sense for themselves of a range of experiences, and I start from there. Thus good learning of mathematics includes arguments, discussions, creating ideas, testing things out, conjecturing what might or might not be true—in other words thinking hard about abstract concepts.”

Going a step further, John Conway, the widely respected John Von Neumann professor of mathematics at Princeton University, offers an irresistible and fun-inducing approach to mathematics. He’s part of a species of mathematicians more aptly characterized as “mathemagicians,” and one of his sleight-of-hand tricks involves spinning a penny on the tip of a coat hanger (whirling it over his head like a helicopter rotor) and bringing it to a graceful swooping stop—a trick he performs at kids’ math camps every summer. “It’s a mistake to assume that what mathematicians do is esoteric, deep, and difficult,” he told me, sitting in his “office,” the math department’s common room at Princeton. “All the great discoveries are very simple. Like Coxeter’s and Einstein’s.” Albert Einstein, another Princetonian, once stated in a lecture: “Describing the physical laws without reference to geometry is similar to describing our thoughts without words.”

Shortly after Conway set me straight on the beauty and simplicity of sleightof- hand mathematics, he was off to a reception of high-school-cum-university students who were keenly anticipating settling into classrooms this fall with math as their chosen path of higher learning.