cutesyness & killing the circle

A similar problem occurs when teachers or textbooks succumb to "cutesyness." This is where, in an attempt to combat so-called "math anxiety" (one of the panoply of diseases which are actually caused by school), math is made to seem "friendly." To help your students memorize formulas for the area and circumference of a circle, for example, you might invent this whole story about "Mr. C," who drives around "Mrs. A" and tells her how nice his "two pies are" (C = 2πr) and how her "pies are square" (A = πr2) or some such nonsense. But what about the real story? The one about mankind’s struggle with the problem of measuring curves; about Eudoxus and Archimedes and the method of exhaustion; about the transcendence of pi? Which is more interesting—measuring the rough dimensions of a circular piece of graph paper, using a formula that someone handed you without explanation (and made you memorize and practice over and over) or hearing the story of one of the most beautiful, fascinating problems, and one of the most brilliant and powerful ideas in human history? We're killing people's interest in circles for god's sake!

Lockhart's Lament