Math and Creativity Are NOT Mutually Exclusive

I heard something on the radio this morning that really bothered me.  The DJ was talking about how a certain level of noise promotes creative thinking.  The conclusion: You should have this radio station on while doing stuff because it'll help you be creative.  But then, she tacked on the phrase, "Unless you're doing math or bills.  Don't want to be too creative there."

Um...WHAT?!?

It's funny because one of the problems most of my students have when it comes to math (and thinking back, the problem I had and still struggle with) is CREATIVITY.

Math has the misfortune of being a discipline in which there are many postulates, algorithms, and procedural skills that must be mastered to fully grasp a lot of the more abstract concepts.  Because of this, students (and many adults) have come to see it as a subject that's all about "plugging-and-chugging."  But at the core of the subject, math is NOT about mindlessly using a set of rules to figure out what x is.  It IS about CREATIVE problem solving (including the creative thought that led us to understand why a lot of the rules we use work).  How many of you would tell a kid they don't need creativity in problem solving?  If that's what we're telling our kids, we're in trouble.  

Now you may think, "Sure people doing really abstract math and making new mathematical/engineering discoveries may be using some creative problem solving, but for the most part, all the math my kids are learning is old stuff.  You don't need creativity for that."  And that is precisely the mentality my students have.  This is why some of my students, know all the rules, but then when I present them with a novel problem that uses those rules, they freeze up and inevitably whine, "But Ms. J, you never showed us how to do that!!!"  Even if I've just modified a problem slightly so that it has one more or one less step, students often can't apply the skills they used in one problem to this slightly different problem.  They lack the creativity to face new situations.

Additionally, by the time students get to high school level math, there are almost ALWAYS different ways of doing the same problem.  Both people who loved high school math and hated high school math always remind me how they either loved it or hated it because "there's only ONE right answer!"  (or at least there are often a finite set of answers).  At the high school level, this is mostly true IF all you care about is the final answer.  But how many times have I seen a kid get the right answer while making multiple errors along the way that somehow cancelled each other out?  Or kids that guess the right answer?  Or on the flip side, how many kids have I seen who clearly have a deep understanding of the concept the entire way, but make one calculation error and find themselves with the wrong answer?  I'm not one of those people who advocate that the right answer isn't important, but I am sure that HOW you arrive at the right answer is JUST as important.  And like I said, there's usually more than ONE right way to arrive there.

One of the things I truly regret as a public school teacher is that we are expected to teach so many skills, that I rarely have time to do things like explore all the ways kids can solve a single problem.  So many times, when I go over homework on the board kids will say things like, "I got the right answer, but I did it differently."  Ideally, that would be the moment where I say, "Come up and show us."  But I must guiltily admit, that I usually look at the clock and say, "Oh, well as long as your steps seem okay, it's probably correct too," and then I move on.

Anyways, my point was, creativity and math are not mutually exclusive.  I suppose the idea that they are comes from classrooms (including my own) where kids are only taught to plug-and-chug.  My challenge as a teacher, how to get rid of that misconception...