Traditional 9th grade geometry sucks.

The more I hear about classroom flipping and the more I read about celebrity tutors, the more I worry about math getting stuck in a downward cycle of lecture, copy, memorize, repeat.

I mean, MAYBE there are people that learn that way. And I certainly know a large, large number of math teachers who think that's just the way math is. It's just that I DON'T, and I'm also a math teacher.



Math done that way is, well, boring. Or, to pull a quote fragment from Paul Lockhart infamous essay, math is becoming "senseless and soulcrushing".

Yet, there are lots of interesting teachers out there doing really really good thinking about math education that has nothing to do with lectures or technology. In fact, most of the time it's focused on (oddly) math and (even more strangely) students.
I was taught by some truly amazing people (jo boaler, kathy humphries, marlo kitch, and paul jorgens among others) and inspired by some brilliant problem creators (richard rusczyk and rachel chou). All of these folks have worked so hard and given so much of their lives to the task of making math class interesting and worthwhile. It's time for me to try to help with that task.
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My Gripe?  

Traditional 9th grade geometry is painful and boring, but it doesn't have to be.

Geometric situations are the most interesting and wonderful context for 9th graders to being mathematical thinking and problem solving. In particular,

• The situations are visual and accessible to a wide variety of learning styles.
• They provide fertile ground for using algebra as a tool, not a topic of study. . . which both reinforces what was learned in 8th grade and makes it more meaningful 
• Every topic can "make sense" because the proofs are simple and accessible, IFF the format and language isn't allowed to overwhelm the thinking. No one has to memorize ANYTHING. 

My proposition?

Make geometry about:

1. Dialog and the art of rhetoric and 
2. Elegant problem solving. 

AND . . . Leave out any memorization of theorems or vocabulary, and redefine how we communicate a proof so that it doesn't get in the way of 9th grade thinking.

Now, let's see what happens.