Book review: Math-ish and Math Mind

Are kids learning math, or are they getting the "think system"?

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The storyline of my favorite Broadway musical, The Music Man, goes something like this: traveling salesman Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa, ready to make some money. Taking the townspeople for a bunch of country rubes, Hill goes door to door explaining he’s a famous band leader and wants to sell families instruments for a “boys band” he’s going to put together. Keep young men out of trouble, he tells them, and point them toward the wholesome and the good: learn to play music in an American band. 

The problem is that none of the boys know how to play the instruments. Don’t worry, Hill assures families—they don’t have to actually learn music. He’s come up with a brilliant innovation, a new way of learning music, the “think system,” where all you have to do is think the “Minuet in G,” or the “Moonlight Sonata.” No need to mess with learning scales or notes, or learning to read the music—just thinking about great music will have the boys playing well in no time at all. 

The comedy, of course, comes from the fact that everyone in the audience knows Hill is dead wrong about how people learn to play music. You can’t become a great musician by thinking music, you have to learn the basics of the scales and the notes, you have to know how to position your fingers, you have to be fast and accurate with the notes and practice a lot of songs to become a real musician. 

Being a good musician is less of an attitude that you take, and more a set of skills that you possess. 

The reason I bring up the “think system” is because it was on my mind this week as I read two bestselling, relatively new books about math, Math-ish: Finding Creativity, Diversity and Meaning in Mathematics, by Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler, and Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, by online learning platform Zearn founder Shalinee Sharma. I found myself wondering if both books, written by intelligent, compassionate people who clearly care about kids and math learning, are essentially arguing for a math version of the “think system.”