Creativity: An Essential Element in Your Mathematics Classroom

We have known for some years now…that most children’s mathematical journeys are in vain because they never arrive anywhere, and what is perhaps worse is that they do not even enjoy the journey. (Whitcombe, 1988)

As a classroom teacher I often wondered why my students did not share my enjoyment of mathematics. For me, mathematics was both challenging and intellectually stimulating and I wanted my students to share the pleasure I found in tackling a tough problem. I became increasingly frustrated, not only by my students lack of interest, but also the discovery that many of my fellow teachers and most parents shared the view that math was hard and something to endure, rather than to explore and enjoy. Most shared the view Whitcombe captured in the opening quote to this article.

Literature is filled with references to the beauty and the creativity that is the foundation of mathematics. The vision of an ideal mathematics classroom is one where “students confidently engage in complex mathematical tasks…draw on knowledge from a wide variety of mathematical topics, sometimes approaching the same problem from different mathematical perspectives or representing the mathematics in different ways until they find methods that enable them to make progress” (NCTM, 2000, p. 3). Yet, many students find their time filled watching as mathematical methods are demonstrated and committing to memory facts and algorithms (Pehkonen, 1997). These students often develop the conception of mathematics as a discipline where knowledge is complete and the mastery of mathematics is simply a digestive process, not a creative one (Dreyfus and Eisenberg, 1996). Allowing creativity back into our classrooms is essential to rekindle an interest in mathematics.

Ginsburg (1996) saw the essence of mathematics not as producing the correct answers, but thinking creatively. Yes, accuracy is important as the students’ responses must fit the context of the problem and be mathematically correct, but strict emphasis on accuracy discourages students from taking risks and creating their own contextual understanding of mathematics. All too often I hear both teachers and employers comment about the inability of our students to use mathematics productively, yet how often do we provide such opportunities in our classrooms?

Most of the mathematical concepts we routinely teach in our classrooms were born in controversy, often debated for long periods of time by the mathematicians of earlier eras. Yet we expect our students to memorize and accept without question the rules and algorithms that were the product of those debates. One such debate was the concept of negative numbers. In the 19th century, Busset attributed the introduction of negative numbers as the reason for failures in the teaching of mathematics in France (Boye, n.d.). It was often common practice to ignore negative answers as meaningless. Our students today still struggle with negative numbers and may revisit the same debate. Rather than distill the concept to a set of rules, and in doing so imply that mathematics is all about the application of rules, why not let our students know that their questions are the same as those that puzzled mathematicians for centuries?