A curriculum organized around habits of mind tries to close the gap between what
the users and makers of mathematics do and what they say. Such a curriculum lets
students in on the process of creating,inventing,conjecturing,and experimenting;
it lets them experience what goes on behind the study door before new results are
polished and presented. It is a curriculum that encourages false starts,calculations,
experiments,and special cases. Students develop the habit of reducing things to
lemmas for which they have no proofs,suspending work on these lemmas and on
other details until they see if assuming the lemmas will help. It helps students look
for logical and heuristic connections between new ideas and old ones. A habits of
mind curriculum is devoted to giving students a genuine research experience.
Of course,studying a style of work involves working on something,but we should
construct our curricula and syllabi in a way that values how a particular piece
of mathematics typifies an important research technique as much as it values the
importance of the result itself. This may mean studying difference equations instead
of differential equations,it may mean less emphasis on calculus and more on linear
algebra,and it certainly means the inclusion of elementary number theory and
combinatorics.