I was sure the hardest day before the strike would be Friday, but I was wrong. Friday was one class after another of sleepy, worried faces. “Who’s feeling stressed right now?” Every hand went up. Together, we negotiated our approach to the day’s work.
The radiator in my classroom — which can’t be fully turned off — was blasting at its only setting, so all the windows were open. At one point, a bee flew into the room, leading to what will surely be remembered as The Great Bumblebee Freakout of 2026. Students screeched and flapped and jumped around and antagonized the poor creature until we turned off all the lights, and the room became quiet again. Ultimately, the bee flew toward the open windows, crashed into a window pane, knocked himself unconscious, and tumbled to the ground like Wile E. Coyote.
Relatable.
What kind of monster must I be to strike for a cost-of-living increase and reasonable health care coverage?
In fact, the hardest days proved to be the long block days on Wednesday and Thursday, perhaps because we were functioning in every 90-minute class like a well-oiled machine.
I love the way the second and sixth blocks throw themselves into hard problem sets.
Invariably, somebody gets stuck, and there is a minor meltdown. They’ve forgotten how to organize and access their learning. As one of my Zen teachers used to say, “You already know — you just have to improve your knowing.”
Some students forget they know things about 30-60-90 right triangles and about right triangles in general. The metacognitive task now is the skill of fishing out knowledge from long-term memory so they can free up working memory for harder, new tasks.
Other students vaguely remember that there are mental keys, and those keys would unlock doors to all kinds of other knowledge they have — if they could just remember where they put them.
Relatable.
But these teenagers are still children, and they’re still growing. Sometimes they seem to have lost all object permanence as well as their sense of direction. That’s a normal bump in the road, and it’s when they crave connection with their human teacher, not with a phony, pantomimed emotional connection from A.I. Most children’s learning is extremely relational. What they need — what they require — is a wise, compassionate, trusted adult who understands at a deep psychological level that they’re doing their best, and they need encouragement to get them across the chasm they’re afraid to jump across.
A student comes over during the working section of class and plants herself next to my desk.
“I’m stuck on number 11.”
We look at her notebook together, and I ask the tiniest possible question, which is always the best possible hint. “What do you notice about this triangle?”
“It’s a 30-60-90 right triangle.”
“Is it? How do you know?”
She squinches her forehead. “I can see it’s a right triangle.”
I nod. “How many side lengths do you know?”
She squints. “Two …?”
I take that as an answer. “What tools do you have for that situation?”
My student stares into the middle distance, searching her memory banks for her tools. Searching … searching … searching. …
I don’t want her to get lost, so I offer something. “It starts with a ‘P’.”
No response. We play Hangman.
“P-Y-”
My student jumps up. “Pythagorean Theorem!” She grabs her notebook and dashes back to her desk. “Don’t tell me anything more!”
She just needed a hint to break through her fog of entirely normal frustration.
A few minutes later, another student comes up to my desk and plops himself onto the stool by my desk. “I’m lost,” he announces cheerfully and lays his notebook on the desk.
I ask, “Do you recognize this situation?” He frowns and shakes his head, but he stays in the game.
“Do we have a right triangle?” He nods.
“Do we have an altitude to the hypothesis?” He frowns harder and nods without certainty.
I repeat my question. “Is this an altitude-to-the-hypotenuse situation?”
His face lights up. “Yes! So that means we can use. …” He gets stuck again. His smile falls. “I forget the names of the two rules.”
“O.K., let’s draw the situation on the side and write these ideas down so you can add them to your reference sheet. Do you remember the Altitude Rule?”
Over and over and over. Just a nudge to tap them back into their inherent intelligent functioning, which has been frustrated out of them by a wasted lifetime of Boaler-driven ideas that refused to teach them what human beings know and can teach about how to activate prior memory and shift it into working memory.
I’m not happy about going on strike now because this is the most fun time of the learning year — the season when my students are pulsing with the aliveness of the mind. They are stretching themselves to master the framework of cognitive load theory. They are learning how to push themselves until they spot their own zone of proximal development — that magical inflection point where they’re as close as they can get to something they know is precious but is just out of reach on that next highest shelf. They are exquisitely primed to the smallest, most finely tuned hints that help them reactivate their authentic mathematical knowing.
This is the time of year when they have finally tapped into that wellspring of academic courage that starts in their feet and anchors them to the earth, and I’m annoyed as hell that the district is interrupting their mathematical flow.
This is the time of year when they are finally experiencing that direct connection to the collective unconscious of which we are each just a tiny manifestation.
They are so close to that moment when they realize they can use their incredible human minds to do math or anything else they can imagine.
They are ready to become the fire horses of this next Lunar New Year — burning with the joy of losing themselves in the flow state within their amazing human minds.
Are they doing the math or is the math doing them?
It doesn’t really matter and I don’t actually care.
What I care about intensely is guiding them to this moment of ecstasy in mastering the art of attention that is better than any other form of exhilaration. It’s a joining with our deepest shared human ancestry — with all the thinkers and doers who have come before us for thousands of years — discovering that we can use our minds to make fire out of nothing, to build wheels and use them to move across mountains, to harvest electricity out of sunlight and use physics, and chemistry and music and dance to change the world.
And that’s why I’m so annoyed with the district that I have no other choice but to use this moment to go on strike.
I don’t want to have to do it, but I can’t keep living this close to the edge.
What kind of monster must I be to strike for a cost-of-living increase and reasonable health care coverage?
The kind who fights her way back to teaching her students.
Elizabeth Statmore teaches math at Lowell High School and was the 2024 San Francisco Democratic Party Educator of the Year.