A Modest Proposal

Alan H. Schoenfeld

Alan H. Schoenfeld is the Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education and
affiliated professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His email
address is [email protected].

Final Draft (August 28, 2011) for the Doceamus column of the Notices of the American
Mathematical Society.

A Modest Proposali
Alan Schoenfeld
This essay is about mathematical sense-making. From kindergarten through college,
precious little of it is found in our mathematics classrooms. We by which I mean the
community of professional mathematicians, and society at large would all benefit from
dramatic change.
I begin with some horror stories. These are documented in the literature, and Im sure
Notices readers have their own to match. The stories confirm that we are teaching our
students not to think or analyze, and that we are in fact encouraging them to forego
common sense. At a recent conferenceii, for example, Lieven Verschaffel reported that
upper elementary school students, trained by their years of school experience, ignore the
real world constraints in the following problem:
How many two-foot boards can be cut from two five-foot boards?
Failing to note that one of the resulting two-foot boards actually consists of two onefoot pieces, they simply divide 10 (the combined length of the two boards) by two. We
might laugh at the silliness here, but the example is hardly unique and it points to more
serious issues. For example, Reusser (1988) asked ninety-seven first and second grade
students the following question:
There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship.
How old is the captain?
More than 3/4 of the students solved the problem, obtaining their answers by
combining the integers 26 and 10. Reusser taped students working on the following
problem:
There are 125 sheep and 5 dogs in a flock.
How old is the shepherd?
A typical solution was,
125 + 5 = 130, this is too big... and
125 - 5 = 120, this is still too big... while
125/5 = 25.
That works.
I think the shepherd is 25 years old.
He also gave 101 fourth and fifth graders the following nonsense problem:
Yesterday 33 boats sailed into port and 54 boats left it. Yesterday at noon there were
40 boats still in the port. How many boats were still in the port yesterday evening?

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A MODEST PROPOSAL

100 of the 101 students produced a numerical answer to the problem, and only five of the
students indicated they thought the task statement was in any way unusual or
problematic.
Kilpatrick (1987) reports similar phenomena:
Recently, some [German] children from kindergarten to grade 6 were confronted
with "problems" in which no question was posed:
Mr. Lorenz and 3 colleagues started at Bielefeld at 9 AM and drove the 360 km to
Frankfurt, with a rest stop of 30 minutes.
These stories were inserted into a set of ordinary word problems. The higher the
grade level, the more likely the children were to attempt a calculation to solve the
problems. (Kilpatrick, 1987, p. 140).
Plainly, students are learning to tolerate nonsensical problems as they go through school!
(I assume youve heard the ritual chant, Ours is not to reason why; just invert and
multiply!)
This trend needs to be undone, and we have the tools and experience to fix the problem.
The above stories contrast dramatically, for example, with my own experiences a
mathematician and, occasionally, as a student. The wonderful thing about mathematics is
that it coheres: when you understand a mathematical idea, everything fits in place
beautifully. That beauty is a large part of my attraction to mathematics.
An experience I had as an undergraduate crystallized this understanding for me. In a
probability course, the professor was about to write the statement of the binomial theorem
up on the board. She paused and said,
You can get confused if you try to write the statement of the theorem from memory.
But you dont have to memorize it, because the theorem is so easy to derive. Let the
statement come at the end.

Consider the product of n terms of the form (x + y). It will, ultimately, be a collection
of terms of the form xkyn-k, since each term in the product contains either an x or a y
from each of the n (x + y) terms. So, how many xkyn-k terms are there? Its the number
n
of ways you can choose k xs out of the n (x + y)s, or . Thus,
k
k= n
n
n
( x + y ) = x k y nk .
k
k= 0

Having derived the result, she wrote the statement of the theorem in its proper place at
the beginning of the theorem.

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A MODEST PROPOSAL

That example has stayed with me for more than 40 years, because it captures what I
believe about the nature of mathematics. Things may, when one first encounters them,
n
seen strange when you first look at the formula, its not immediately apparent why
k
k n-k
is there at all, or why it should be the coefficient of x y . But, ultimately, there is a good
reason and once one sees it, then what may have seemed arbitrary now seems natural
and inevitable. That is, all of elementary mathematics really does make sense. The rules

for adding fractions, solving equations, or any other topic our students are likely
to
encounter in school are, once one understands them, natural and inevitable. But if they
are not understood as such, then they appear as arbitrary rules to be memorized and
applied mechanically. The results of exposure to such mathematics are the stories that
started this essay.
From my perspective, then, the first moral imperative of mathematics instruction is that
mathematics must be seen, and taught, as an act of sense-making. Students must be led to
see that mathematics is not arbitrary but natural and inevitable and that they can, with
the right experiences, come to grips with it in ways that provide powerful tools for
thinking. Whether it is in pure mathematics, where one is rewarded with elegance such as
that of the binomial theorem, or in applications and modeling, where the real world
phenomena that one models can and should be reflected in the symbols used to represent
them, mathematics is and should be experienced in ways that cohere naturally.
Heres a case in point. Many years ago, when I first took a position at the University of
Rochester, I had the standard what are you going to teach conversation with my
department chair. He was happy to have me teach my problem-solving course, but he said
Id have to pay for the privilege: since I got to teach a course of my own design and
choosing, Id have to teach another course that he picked. The course he chose was precalculus, because it was universally despised nobody (including TAs!) wanted to teach
such a low-level course, to students whod obviously had problematic mathematical
histories.
The following story is typical of how things went during the course. It was time for us to
study the arc length formula, s = r. I asked the students to read the text overnight, and to
try to do the homework. The next day I asked how many of them had read the text. All
the hands went up. I asked how many had understood it. All the hands went down. So, I
said, lets look at some examples. Suppose I had a circle of radius 1. Whats the length of
the part of the circumference cut off (a.k.a. subtended) by a central angle of 90? No
problem, they said: thats 1/4 the way around the circle, or 1/4 of 2 . How about an
angle of 180? Easy. 60? No problem, its 1/6 of the way around. What if we measured
in radians? Same thing, youre just saying [( /3)/(2 )] of the way around, instead of
(60/360) of the way around. What if the angle was radians? Again, no problem: its
(/2 ) of the way around the circle.
So, I said, we can do circles of radius 1. What if the radius of the circle was 7? Once
again, what about a right angle? Same thing, they said: its 1/4 of the circumference,
which is 14 . A subset of the same sequence of examples led to (/2 )(14 ) for a
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A MODEST PROPOSAL

central angle of radians. After that it was a small step to go from radii of 1 and 7 to a
radius of r, and the formula s = r. What had been mystical now made sense. And, my
students began to believe that math can (and should) make sense, and that they were
capable of doing that kind of sense-making. My problem solving courses are an advanced
version of the same principle.
I truly believe that all of the mathematics in the K-16 curriculum or at least all of the
mathematics that should be in the K-16 curriculum! can be seen as a set of sensible
answers to a set of reasonable questions. My immodest proposal is that we revise the
entire curriculum so that all students experience it as such, so that they come to see
mathematics as a domain that not only makes sense, but as one that they can make sense
of. On a more truly modest scale, I propose that we all, each time we teach, stop to think
about how and why the mathematics fits together the way it does, and how we can help
our students to see it that way. We owe our students no less. Approaching instruction this
way will make mathematics easier to learn and will make more accessible to students
some of the pleasures of the discipline that we find so appealing. Indeed, if we emphasize
sense-making, I predict that more students will take to mathematics and that the rest will
have a much better appreciation of its power and uses.
References
Kilpatrick, J. (1987). Problem formulating: Where do good problems come from? In A.
Schoenfeld (Ed.), Cognitive science and mathematics education (pp. 123-148). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Reusser, K. (1988). Problem solving beyond the logic of things. Instructional Science 17,
309-338.
i

I have borrowed my title from Jonathan Swift, whose Modest Proposal (for
Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents
or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to The Public), written in 1729, was that the
Irish poor should sell their 1-year-old children to the wealthy for use as food. The full
text of his proposal can be found at http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html. Were Swift alive
today, he might say that he is gratified to observe (given data on attrition rates,
demographics, etc.) that mathematicians have taken his advice we are eating our young.
But the title is the only tongue-in-cheek part of this note. Im dead serious about the rest.
ii
The Future of Mathematics Education in Europe, sponsored by the Acadaemia
Europaea, Lisbon, Portugal, December 16-18, 2007.

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