I've been collecting titles for several years now and people frequently ask me what they can read to help them on their own math journey, so I'm going to be adding to this series, or maybe created a page with the master list or something like that -- I don't really have a plan in mind beyond sharing resources in one place that's easier to find than searching through old Facebook posts.
First up is the essay that radically changed my perspective on math. I used to say, when asked what my favorite subject was, that I loved everything except math. I said this because by the time I was in 6th grade I'd decided that I simply couldn't do math, that I wasn't a Math Person, that I was a lost cause. My goal in math class from that point on was not to get an F and have to repeat the class.
Reading this essay infuriated me. I remember how much I loved playing with numbers and patterns as a child and how easy 1st through 3rd grade math was for me, but 4th grade math was the first time I encountered things I didn't understand and when I asked for an explanation, there was NONE. By the time I was in 6th grade . . . honestly, looking back on it I feel like I was brainwashed into believing that math was memorizing and working formulas, which I was no good at.
This is a lot like my school experience of history, which I was good at, but didn't particularly love, because school history was memorizing names and treaties and nations and so forth. I could do that. It honestly wasn't until I was in my second semester of college that I connected all the biographies and memoirs and accounts of life long ago that I loved so much to HISTORY. I kind of feel like an idiot admitting that, but really what happened inside of school was for the most part disconnected with me reading books I loved and learning all the things I loved learning about.
So.
Start here.
A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart
That link will download a PDF. Lockhart later wrote a book of the same title that incorporates this essay. I've read it, and don't really think it adds anything of substance to this free essay.
