“So what you’re saying is that the statement at the top of this paper is for me to prove using these equations?”

I nod.

“OK, but I don’t get what f and g actually do. That’s making like no sense.”

[scribbles a bunch of notes on a board and, over the course of five minutes, gets to why mathematicians decided to write “f of g” with a dot but not explain how it actually works]

“OK, that was really good.”

“Was it?”

After all these years of taking time after school to show my former students – now high schoolers – what their teacher meant, I turned to the work I need to do from 8am – 2:20pm: my current students. I’ve had hundreds of students come back either in person or through video chats to concretize the math they’re learning outside of my schools. Each session, I’m taking a few minutes of free time and then imploring them to talk privately with their current math teachers. Some come out with more confidence in advocating for themselves. Others say their teacher won’t slow down for them. Others still say their teacher is not me.

In all cases, I’m thanking them, but they really should run along and mend those relationships with the adults.

What people fail to understand is that math attitudes are often a reflection of the school culture. We’ve done a serious disservice to this thing we call math teaching. We’re confusing fake theatrics for actual intellectual sparks. For instance, we keep saying rigor, but we just like hearing that students must struggle and suffer while learning something difficult. It’s not to say that struggling and working through a problem doesn’t have its benefits. It is to say that difficulty isn’t the core of math; comprehension and comprehensiveness is.

The difference is that we’re stuck in making students catch up and zip by them, thereby pruning those who are “with it” and those who aren’t.

Secondly, it’s that we’re still stuck in arguments about results. Because math is numbers and results are numbers, then math is results and results are the only determinant for math proficiency. As Jesse Hagopian recently said, “High expectations for some means high test results and that’s not what we need.” There’s a huge difference between making math a core principle of the work you’re doing for schooling and quite another to use dehumanizing methods to assure that the testing numbers come out in the school’s favor.

This isn’t just a charter schools argument; this is an argument against any and all schools that dehumanize students to keep their doors open, their coffers filled, their names unsullied in the eyes of superintendents and newspapers alike.

Third, math shouldn’t be about the individual teacher who sparks their interest or makes them feel powerful in the math they’re learning. It’s unreasonable and inequitable. The easy thing to say is to force every teacher to visit [insert favorite math teacher here], but too much of what we consider “good” is steeped in personal privileges, biases, and agendas, implicit or otherwise. The teachers who get labeled a “favorite” by students, parents, and administrators feel like few and far between. Simultaneously, we’re so rife with results and myopia that we never investigate what makes the math teacher “good” or “bad” so we can either bring those practices to scale or discard the practices altogether.

Speaking of which, deficit thinking still reigns. We’re still caught up in saying “these students don’t know how to [insert all four operations and fractions].” That’s great, but two things. If students already knew everything when they walked in, we wouldn’t have jobs. Also, the conversation is never about what they do know. None of our kids come with nothing into the classroom. Aside from their full humanities, stories, families, and genetics, they come with knowledges we should try to tap into whenever we get the opportunity. How do math teachers – or any teacher – expect students to open themselves to new horizons when we’ve already shut down the curiosity they brought with them?

I fear that, in NYC, we assign the title of genius to people who’ve achieved heightened test scores regardless of how unimaginative and uninspiring their rendition of math is. We have opportunities to see and do math better. We refuse to reorient our understanding of math to meet the students’ needs. We prefer to keep teaching math in a way that keeps the winners winning.

Math is already everybody’s. When our city – and our country – starts to match that belief with that word, we’ll be on the path towards getting it.