Now that I finished my second book, let me tell you a story that won’t make it into the manuscript:
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting a high school focused on transformative learning experiences for students of various backgrounds. (Yes, they know who they are.) At some point, student volunteers took us around the building to check out some classes. I witnessed students taking initiative in their learning experiences with strong structures and caring adults across the board. A teacher I’ve been meaning to visit for years invited me to hang out in their classroom to watch their students develop original board games.
The unit was addressing probability, so I said I can probably make that.
The teacher asked me to ask students about their various projects. With my limited time, I passed by one group. This group demurred when it came to the game they developed. Of course, I asked them random math questions (“So, with or without replacement?”). They did a solid job in their responses. But then I noticed a beautiful drawing on their game board. “Who did this?” The artist said, “Um, me?” I said, “Was this your only role?”
“Yeah because I’m not really a mathematician.” You know I got cookin’ in two seconds. “The thing is, you had an idea, you used geometry up and down this model to get your ideas out of your head onto this paper, and you scaled it to the proportions necessary to make it visible to the viewer. Look at these semi-circles and angles on this!” “You know what, Mister? You might be right.” I didn’t correct him and say “Doctor. Please.”
But in that moment, I was reminded why the teacher and I so loved the work we do. Some people, including fellow teachers, quip about the nerdiness of math teachers. Yes, we’re people, too. But more importantly, a significant subset of us care deeply about the connections students make with the content and the lives they lead. We may call that pedagogy.
It matters that students find themselves in this content area that, for too long, has felt dismembered from us. Sociology as a study of collective human behavior helps us understand that, even though we can’t necessarily pinpoint who started the separation between us and math, we have overwhelming evidence of this dynamic. We’ve been lied to for far too long. If anything, every civilization, since time immemorial, has had some math.
Therefore, the math has always been within us, whether our spaces for learning have attended to it or not.
At the same time, I’ve held a nagging thought about the status of math teachers. On the one end, polling tells us that Americans trust local teachers more than most other professions, including politicians. On the other hand, I’ve witnessed how people typically pin their worst math experiences on the teacher who taught them in their more formative years. They’d say they were doing well with math until a class made them feel like they didn’t have it. By it, I mean ownership.
I’m a big believer in teachers having deep content knowledge and the plethora of tools to accompany that, like critical thinking and mental flexibility. I also think pedagogy includes the temperament and resolve to help students make connections beyond ourselves to what’s already theirs.
As I wrote the manuscript, I started to see how, as much as this book is for teachers, it’s also for people who believe in education, a broader group to be sure. I wrote it in the language of everyday folks trying to understand what their children are doing. (Yes, the “their” is loose.) For math teachers who teach with connection in mind, I’ve written what I hope is a testament to the divergence and awe of what we aspire to do.
But for everyone else, I wrote this to liberate ourselves from titles like “math people.” This title does the work of those who wish us to be unintelligent for them. For years, people in the math education community have had strong opinions about ideas of belonging within the community, whatever we call that collection of people. Yet, if people who’ve typically gotten at least a bachelor’s degree in STEM education have doubts about their inclusion in such a community, where does that leave people who aren’t?
I think back to the student I met at the high school. I reminisce about so many of my former students, many of them showing up in my social media feeds in caps and gowns. Some also found divergent paths that worked for them … or didn’t. For me, math isn’t a badge we receive for greater exclusion from our communities. It’s a set of skills to help us pull more of us in.
If you’ve ever seen a student see the math within themselves, you’d say the same thing, too.