A Brilliant Article about a Mathematician. Really.

The August 28 issue of The New Yorker contains one of the best articles I’ve read in a long time. It’s about a juicy topic, but it lacks a lot of the political bias that permeates many New Yorker pieces. It features a reclusive, dare I say Roark-ian protagonist, a Lear-like authority figure concerned about betrayal by his protégés and recognition of his pre-eminence in his field, and an undercurrent of suspense that keeps your reading until its denouement. And it is, of course, about math. The only thing The New Yorker gets a poor grade on is its artwork, as the illustration of Grigory Perelman looks nothing like the photo that appeared in The New York Times in last Sunday’s Week in Review.

What I like most about the article is the way its authors, Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber, simplified such a complex subject. In good writing, there is no substitute for knowledge. Nasar and Gruber know mathematics as well as they know their reader; as a result, I was actually interested in a story about Poincare’s Conjecture.

Here’s the story: Perelman, a Russian opera aficionado who did his post-graduate work in the United States, solved a mathematics problem – the Poincare Conjecture – that had a million dollar bounty on its head. His style in solving it – a 68 page paper, as opposed to the many hundred page explications of Perelman’s assertions penned by other influential mathematicians – is emblematic of his style of living. He lacks the competitive fire characteristic of many academics. That he solves this long-standing problem and then retires to the balcony of a St. Petersburg opera house to listen to music reminds me of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus in terms of an egoless duty to the task. (I suppose I can’t really sustain a “Roark-ian” description of Perelman if I later characterize him as egoless.) By contrast, Shing-Tung Yau, the patriarch in this drama, seems to need recognition related to any discovery or new idea set forth by those he has mentored. Yet Yau is an intriguing character. Nasar and Gruber allow him to be at times worthy of sympathy, and at others worthy of scolding.

The story has the magnitude necessary for drama. One institute has offered a million dollar prize for the scholar who could prove the conjecture. The leading international mathematics body wants to give Perelman its highest honor, the Fields Medal, for the outstanding mathematician under age 40. Perelman’s achievement has on the one hand the potential to shine a spotlight on many others who have a facility for finding spotlights (in sports, they’re called bandwagon fans), and on the other hand the potential to shut down an entire field of mathematics which has been dedicated to Poincare’s Conjecture.

There’s more I could say, but it’s past my bedtime. Read the article. It’s better than very good.

After reading Grand Theft Education from the Sept. 2006 Harper’s

Among the many verses from U2 songs that resonate with me, here’s one from the song Yahweh:

Take this mouth, so quick to criticize,
Take this mouth, give it a kiss.

So here I am with my guard up again, unwilling or unable to work a new idea into my schema. I need to ask why I am so resistant to what I read in this roundtable discussion. Is it my own inability to ever master video games that raises my defenses? Is it the usually dormant curmudgeon in me, impatiently waiting for an age when curmudgeonliness is more seemly, that makes me dismissive of things I hadn’t already been thinking about? Is it just my deeply rooted cynicism? I couldn’t help but feel that I was being led to believe that there is a crisis related to video games and/or their relationship to literacy, and I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that. I’m not exactly thrilled with my impulse to criticism, but this article has tapped into that impulse in a few ways.

First, I couldn’t help but recall my experience in media relations, in trying to get clients into such roundtable discussions where the client’s product is in the vanguard of the inexorable march of technology in this particular direction. I just got the sense that the discussion was carefully cast and choreographed. Each participant wanted to validate the other participants’ ideas, and be validated himself or herself. There was little skepticism, little alternate frame of reference regarding whether or not there was any added value in using video games instead of any other popular activity as a basis for literacy instruction. It was a little too much of a love-in for me.

Speaking of other activities, the intro of the article made me think of offering a Mad Libs type of substitution to see if the premise about video games was unique. Did you know that many pre-teens and teenagers have spent as many as two hours a day, up to fifteen hours a week, playing sports? Or skateboarding? Or listening to Led Zeppelin albums? But if you were to assemble a team of “experts” to talk about the grammatical rules of basketball, of the narrative structure of beginning-middle-end of every game and every season, of the characterization inherent in team roles, of the thesis-based arguments that can be developed around strategy decisions or roster moves, you’d be accused of advocating something less than educationally sound. But every kid who sits in the library checking his fantasy football results on the internet is engaged in the very thinking that the panelists describe. I think we can force any metaphor to suit any particular purpose; the fact that you can do something certainly doesn’t mean that you should do it.

I was also bothered by the sense of duplicity in the instructional approaches discussed in the article. If you assume that you have to trick students into learning, that you have to make them think they’re doing one thing when they’re really doing another, then you don’t have a whole heckuva lot of faith in your students. And if you think that you have to make learning fun instead of engaging, then you don’t have a whole lot of faith in yourself or your material. I couldn’t help but wonder if students love the Grammar Mistress game as much as the teacher thinks they do. If you believe that grammar should be taught in context, then you don’t need to put it in a costume so students can’t recognize what you’re trying to show them.

There may be a crisis in literacy instruction – at the very least, there is an ongoing struggle – and teachers need to be able to recognize and use students’ individual interests, whether sports or video games or ballet or crocheting, to help them connect with the curriculum. To suggest that video gaming holds the key for igniting progress in reading and writing seems reductive and irresponsible.

To me, a more worthwhile solution is for teachers to cultivate in themselves and in their students a habit of careful observation. The more we know about our students and their interests, the better we’ll be able to serve them.