Several years ago, for a teacher-led conference on flavors of mathematical teaching, I was asked to give a talk about how I conceptualize my style of teaching and learning.
At this kind of professional development conference, you could be forgiven for expecting every session to address some version of the same age-old arguments about whether there are math people and nonmath people, about whether it is better to have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset, whether it is better to use direct instruction or inquiry learning, or about whether mathematics is the most beautiful of all the subjects we teach in public school.
Which is probably why I felt so hesitant to confess my dirty little secret: namely, that in my classroom, I teach mathematics as one of the humanities.
Lots of heads swiveled around at that announcement.
But as I explained what I meant, what I had to say seemed to resonate with a lot of other teachers in the room. I think this is because deep down, all math teachers believe in our bones that math is a fundamentally human activity.
If you are human, you can do math.
You also cannot escape it.
As I’ve gotten older, one of the things I have come to cherish most about my work of teaching and learning math in public school is that math class is still one of the most essential and alchemical ways in which we share, discover, and cocreate our beliefs, values, and culture.
Teaching and learning math is at once one of the most ancient of all organized human activities, and also one of the most modern.
And the longer I do it, the more I appreciate the preciousness and profundity of that continuity of human connection. Some of the values we explore include openness to other points of view, respect, communication, empathy, understanding, persuasion, civil disagreement, persistence, deep listening, reassessing our entrenched ideas, and the ability to change our minds about things we thought were settled fact. Math class gives me an opportunity to share all of these aspects of being human and thinking together in community.
So at the start of each school year, here is what I tell my students, both in the introduction to my course syllabus and repeatedly from the very first day of instruction. I do this not just to communicate some of the things about which I feel most strongly, but also those that I believe are the most powerful and beneficial things for my public school students to reflect on over the unfolding of the coming academic learning year.
This is a course about thinking.
You are here to learn how to think better than you can think now and to use your thinking to accomplish things in the world.
Because you are going to be thinking for the rest of your lives, you are going to need to make sense of things you don’t initially understand. And then you’re going to have to persuade other people that your thinking is right.
The essence of thinking is sense-making. To make sense of things, you have to understand them, which means you have to want to understand them. One of our mottos in this class is, You gotta wanna. This is as important in mathematics as in everything else.
So everything in this class is about making sense of things. In mathematics — as in life — much of what we make sense of is problems. If you do not yet know that life is a steady stream of problems to be solved, you will soon.
In this class, we happen to use mathematics as a training ground for our thinking, so I will tell you a secret up front: I don’t actually care if you ever “use” this stuff ever again. So please — don’t even bother asking me that question. It is a boring and senseless question. What I care about passionately is that you learn how to think and communicate at a more advanced level than you are capable of right now.
And so that is what we are going to work on together this year.
Thinking better is a set of skills you can actually learn and use at this school. It is the appropriate focus of math class.
Because you are going to be thinking for the rest of your lives, you are going to need to make sense of things you don’t initially understand. And then you’re going to have to persuade other people that your thinking is right. So your goal in this course should be to grow as an active sense-maker who is skilled in using these tools of thinking.
You should also learn to treat your thinking with respect. The mind is a muscle, and this school is a place where we work to strengthen our thinking muscles. That means we need to develop strength, flexibility, and endurance in our thinking — in other words, you need to become a strong thinker, a flexible thinker, and a persistent thinker. You also need to become a good collaborator, which means you need to become a better listener.
While there are no guarantees, I can promise you that if you put down your phone and push yourself to focus on these goals each day here, you will do well both in math and in math class. And these skills will carry you very far in your life.
