Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Wonder, Plan, Run, Reflect: Action Research in the Math Classroom

Presented by Theresa Hickey

Being a responsive educator means getting to know your learners, leveraging their strengths, and tailoring your approaches so that the highest level of learning can take place. To do this, you need to try new things. But how will you know if your adjustments are making a difference?…. Action research! Join us for some great tips on designing and running this research in your own classroom!
 

To register for this webinar, click here.

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our new YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

#GMDWrites

Why do I write for the Global Math Department Newsletter? When I’m stuck in life and unsure of the next right thing I turn to the children, who never fail to lead the way even as they are continually failed by us.
 
Bean leads me daily and I marvel at the decisions she makes, the ways she engages with this world, and her resolve to be a part of the good this life has to offer. As I write this, she is leading me in a graduate-level seminar on writing (she knows I’m only half listening); selecting a font that captures her mood and sets the context for her story, authentically representing the essence of the characters and their lives, and illuminating the harsh and beautiful truths of the world we live in.
 
“Do you ever write to share information or convince others of an important idea?”, I ask.
Her response is precise, “I want my writing to reflect the person I am.” She continues generously, “My stories remind you that people who do bad things aren’t bad people. My characters and I, we’re not afraid to do things to help people.  The system is garbage sometimes. (It’s important for my writing to bring that to light.)”
 
So here I am, sharing with you a story that is true in mathematics councils and associations across the continent. I am tired of being the only. In this story, folx rigorously defend the superiority of mathematics over people while performing a charade of “wokeness”. I tell you the people “leading” the work have not done the work and have no interest in the work beyond maintaining their status and power as leaders in mathematics. They have not studied Black scholars nor invested time and energy into authentic relationships with racialized folx whose demands for humane experiences in the teaching and learning of mathematics are largely ignored. They merely apply thick layers of whiteness onto calls for liberation and abolition and parrot quotations from Dr. Dena Simmons that we can’t let SEL turn into “White Supremacy with a hug”. They continue to center the curriculum (standards in America) rooted in settler colonialism and anti-Blackness and promote resources (curriculum in America) that are not created by Indigenous, Black, and racialized (PoC in America) folx. These are not bad people. They just do incredibly bad things. 

The characters in this story, of whom I am one, are not afraid to name the mathematical processes of gatekeeping in mathematics education. Processes that stop short at representation and continue to silence voices that seek justice for entire generations and communities of children underserved and disempowered in mathematics classrooms. These are the folx who would argue with me about whether Rochelle Gutierrez is actually Dr. Gutiérrez rather than read her work to understand how mathematics education in its current form is dehumanizing. The ones who flinch at the suggestion of using the seminal works of a Black scholar.  Help me understand, an article from 2009 by a Black scholar is “outdated” but a mathematical trajectory from thirty years ago is “timeless”? I’m kidding, I don’t care to understand your racism.
 
Systems of mathematics education are garbage most times and especially so during a pandemic that mocks your repeated attempts at “academic integrity”, “abolition of streaming”, and all the other things that keep you from doing the real work of loving kids. But off you go to prepare your Slides, activities, and cool Bitmoji classrooms, the trappings of an ‘anti-racist’ mathematics education that hasn’t liberated you or the kids.
 
I’ll tell you this folx, I’ll be back in 2021 to continue this story of we who believe in freedom.
 

 
Two tweets caught my attention this week (images are linked): 

Inspired by these tweets and a few other thoughts I’ve been sitting with for a while, I wanted to process some wonderings through six panels.
 
Thanks for reading the GMD in 2020. See you next year.
 
@melvinmperalta

Online Professional Development Sessions

No Webinar this Week!

Next Tuesday 12/15

Wonder, Plan, Run, Reflect: Action Research in the Math Classroom

Presented by Theresa Hickey

Being a responsive educator means getting to know your learners, leveraging their strengths, and tailoring your approaches so that the highest level of learning can take place. To do this, you need to try new things. But how will you know if your adjustments are making a difference?…. Action research! Join us for some great tips on designing and running this research in your own classroom!
 

To register for this webinar, click here.

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our new YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

#GMDWrites

Swimming in Water: Carceral Pedagogy in the Math Classroom 
 
By: Lauren Baucom and Sara Rezvi

Poetry has a way of cutting to truth, of separating waves from the shorelines all the while observing both simultaneously.  In his powerful poem, Guante notes that ‘white supremacy is not the shark, it is the water’. We swim in it, we are surrounded by it – these heady waters, this deep throbbing silence. Because of its constant presence, for many, it goes unnoticed, the water set as an unquestionable background. So, too, is the everpressing presence of carceral pedagogy in educational spaces. As writers of GMD, we refuse to participate in this silence. We mourn loudly. We bear witness deeply. We grieve. And we demand that these ideologies have no place within the mathematics classroom.
 
What is carceral pedagogy? How does it intersect with the mathematics classroom? What does it look, sound and feel like? Like the words of Guante, will we ever know it exists if we do not take time to recognize the waters in which we are constantly surrounded?
 
In a recent #Slowchat, Dr. Ilana Horn (@Ilana_horn) defined carcerality as “the physical domination and confinement of bodies in institutions, especially when they reinstate white supremacy.” Elsewhere, Dr. Bettina Love (@BLoveSoulPower), has discussed carcerality as systemic domination imposed by laws and enforced by incarceration. For the purpose of this piece, we define carceral pedagogy in the mathematics classroom to be the physical, mental, and social domination presented by the systems of white supremacy through laws, written and unwritten, that confine students’ bodies, minds, and spirits in the dehumanizing experiences  of their mathematics education. 
 
 In this moment of virtual teaching when teachers have a voyeuristic ability to track, watch, and mandate policies through their surveillance apparatus of choice (ClassDojo, Zoom, Google Meets, etc), we’ve experienced how EduTwitter has taken the purpose of education as a source of liberation and used this time and space to incarcerate students’ minds and bodies through a system of compliance and oppression. Children are subjected to the ever-present disciplinary gaze of the carceral teacher. Some examples include: (1) when they can’t visit the bathroom in their own homes, (2) being forced to turn on cameras to be counted as present, and (3) being told not to eat in class when their caregiver offers them a snack. We must name these efforts of carcerality as they have quickly seeped into this new world of online learning during a pandemic. Rather than offering grace, compassion, and boundless love, carceral teachers have led the charge in creating spaces that invade privacy and invalidate the need to attend to growing bodies.
 
Simultaneously, we must revisit the mathematics classroom space of face-to-face teaching to understand how carcerality has been used in the past to oppress the bodies and minds of students. 
 
In many classrooms, we have been sold the myth that students from low income areas require carceral style classroom pedagogy in order to succeed, and that without this type of oppression, they aren’t capable of doing the work. This kind of ideology is rooted in systems of white supremacy and dehumanization. We reject the narrative that the carceral teacher (who often is white) alone knows what is best for families and children of color. It is not the children that are lacking, but the carceral teacher. 
 
There has been much research to show how students of color, specifically Black girls, have been denied their right  to joyfully belong in math spaces. Using the ocrdata.ed.gov site, we can find countless examples of the literal barriers that imprison students to classes that are unworthy of their brilliance. How is it possible that in a district where almost 4 out of 10 of the students enrolled are Black, that less than half are allowed entry into Calculus classrooms? What unwritten laws govern the body language of students who appear “deep in mathematical thought” versus those who are “lazy, unproductive, and unmotivated”, physically barring them from mathematical spaces? We find it interesting that these narratives begin for students of color at young ages and continue onward into adolescence, almost as if these ideas are baked into our societal consciousness – as if we are all swimming in it.

Carceral pedagogy is often thought of to be discipline-based classroom practice, but it is also curricular. With the constant reminder from textbooks that mathematics was created in Europe by White males and no one else, the lack of representation confines students’ minds and social identities. Texts such as Francis Su’s (@mathyawp)  ‘Mathematics for Human Flourishing’ and Talithia Williams’ ‘Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics’ eloquently work to decenter this notion that mathematics has only ever been a Eurocentric endeavor rather than a Human one. Elsewhere, I (Sara) along with my co-authors, have argued that mathematics, just like literacy, needs to have its own set of windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors.  
 
Another example of carcerality that appears in the mathematics curriculum occurs when a teacher requires a particular method of solving, rather than being open to the expansive, liberatory solving process that mathematics encourages. 
 
Carceral classrooms are about control; when we try to control students’ thinking we create a low/no-trust environment with students that entraps their minds and eliminates the need for creativity, ingenuity, and authentic, original thought. 

How is it that this meme can be so readily found when we describe math classrooms? That this concept of illegality in alternative thinking is synonymous with math classrooms, rather than the liberatory experience we know mathematics to be?
 
In closing, we reflect on the immediacy and urgency of Arundathi Roy’s quote. The pandemic is a portal. How we swim through it or whether we drown in it, is up to us. Where it leads to is up to us. We engage deliberately in the practice of freedom dreaming, of imagining a world beyond the violence enacted upon children in mathematics classrooms. 
 
We are swimming in rough waters these days, full of murky sediment, glimpsing blearily into the unknown void. We have named here the silence, the complicity of holding onto dysfunctional systems that dehumanize children in the name of carcerality, of disciplinary productivity that seeks to mandate how we engage in mathematics (and beyond) as human beings.  We ask the reader to consider the following – If we are more aware of the water, is that enough? Is our awareness enough? Do we keep swimming? Or do we change the scope of our navigations?

Online Professional Development Sessions

Webinar Tonight! — December 1st, 2020

Bringing the Math Back: Lessons in Educational Recovery from Around the World

We’ve been told repeatedly that we are teaching in unprecedented times, but in fact this is not the first round of education recovery post-natural disaster in modern times. We will look at lessons from around the world and how various nations reshaped their mathematics classrooms after interruptions due to disease, war, and weather-related phenomena. In these stories of resilience and innovation, we will imagine how our own classrooms may be reimagined in the wake of Covid-19.

Presented by: Brianna Kurtz

To register for this webinar, click here.

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our new YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

#GMDWrites

I have been grappling with the idea of “smart” this year. Who do we consider “smart”? What fields of study do we consider the realm of “smart” people? (Mathematics is high on that list.) How are “smartness” and school success and fulfillment in life related?

I don’t have answers yet, but I came across a definition by Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) that has shifted my thinking:
 

 
I love Tressie’s definition and until something better comes along, this is the definition I’m working with. Mostly, I appreciate the recognition of “smart” being relational, as opposed to some kind of Platonic ideal. Smart as a construct of correspondence also fits nicely in the constellation of ideas that have been helping me grow as a math educator: (1) rehumanizing mathematics (Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez, @RG1gal); (2) unlearning deficit frameworks, particularly “current conceptions” (Dr. Maria Zavala @mdrzavala); and (3) redefining who is a math person (Howie Hua, @howie_hua).

Behind all of these ideas is the understanding that we are constructing mathematics, and we are constructing our measures of success (smartness). And therein lies our power: In accepting that these are things we make, we can decide to make something different. If we value different abilities (persistence over speed), and create different environments (collaboration over competition), we will produce different definitions of smart. The power is in knowing that our current definitions of both smart and mathematics are the result of decisions made by humans, and that we can make new decisions.
 
Two last things about this sentence: “I am smart in the right way, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.”

1. I appreciate the humility in this definition. We could all use a bit of humility when thinking about our smarts.
2. Acknowledging our moment in history feels like a call to action. How many “smart” people are we losing to the wrong side of all manner of structural violences?

Big, challenging questions, but I believe in our ability to figure them out together – we are a smart bunch.

by Idil Abdulkadir (@idil_a_)

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Idil for being this week’s guest writer! Have an interest in writing for the Global Math Department Newsletter? Check out the invitation at the end of this Newsletter.
 

Focusing on the Positive

“It’s human nature to focus on the negative, but often a lot more is going right in your classroom than is going wrong.”

2020 has been a tough year to say the least, but good things are happening in 2020—we just might need a shift in perspective to help us see them. Simply learning how to look at a situation from a different point of view can change our negative interpretations to more positive ones.

With this in mind, I want to share this 2018 article by Patricia Jennings and MindShift (@MindShiftKQED) called “Changing How Educators See Negative Experiences in the Classroom.”

I invite you to give a read. And then take a look around you. What are some good things that are happening this year? How can we look at 2020 with a positive perspective?

by Amber Thienel (@amberthienel)

Thorn, Rose, Rosebuds
 

For this week’s entry in the Global Math Department newsletter, I’m keeping it simple by adhering to the “thorn, rose, rosebud” framework: one thing that’s no good; one thing that’s good and happened; and two things that are good and on the horizon.

Thorn 
Ellie Murray (below), Dave Kung (tweet) and others (e.g.) drew attention to a print ad from AT&T in the NYTimes. It is nice that the response to “thorny” ads like these is swift, but there were surely numerous points from brainstorming to publishing during which this could have been interrupted. I’m all for the call out, and/but: If you find yourself somewhere in the pipeline with the opportunity to disrupt before materials like these appear, be the one who speaks up!

Rose
As mentioned in a past newsletter, the Fields Institute planned and held its LGBTQ+ Math Day!

You can read more about the event in the AMS Inclusion/Exclusion blog post or on the event page (site hosted by Anthony Bonato). Relatedly, check out the sequence of tweets from Laurie Rubel here.
 
Rosebuds
Marian Dingle is giving a talk this Friday! It is entitled “Opening the Mathematical Gates: Moving Toward Inclusivity and Belonging,” and if past talks are any indication, it will most surely be worth your time. You can visit the talk page or find it in the tweet below (note the timing: Friday, December 4th, at 8PM EST):

Finally, the United States is at an exciting turning point such that a weaponized Department of Education, headed by unqualified republican megadonor / “shoot the grizzly bears” betsy devos, is transitioning to an incoming administration that will have a First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, who holds a doctorate in education! The new administration has a “Join Us” website, and so I am personally urging YOU as a reader of the Global Math Department newsletter, if eligible to work in the United States, to consider submitting your CV/resume for consideration. A government, like any organization, is only as strong as its people; perhaps nothing will come from it, but I believe that an influx of applications by GMD readers would be a step in the right direction:

by Benjamin Dickman [@benjamindickman]

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

Click Here to participate in this study

Get Involved with the Newsletter

Our team of writers and curators is committed to produce content that is reflective of our Statement of Solidarity and with the goal of moving these words into action.

With this in mind we are calling for new volunteers to expand our perspectives and raise our collective voices to move this publication forward. If you are interested in becoming a regular contributor or would like the opportunity to contribute as a guest writer, please fill out this form.

Online Professional Development Sessions

No Session This Week.

Next Week, 12/1 at 9:00 PM ET.

Bringing the Math Back: Lessons in Educational Recovery from Around the World

We’ve been told repeatedly that we are teaching in unprecedented times, but in fact this is not the first round of education recovery post-natural disaster in modern times. We will look at lessons from around the world and how various nations reshaped their mathematics classrooms after interruptions due to disease, war, and weather-related phenomena. In these stories of resilience and innovation, we will imagine how our own classrooms may be reimagined in the wake of Covid-19.

Presented by: Brianna Kurtz

To register for this webinar, click here.

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our new YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

#GMDWrites

Numbers and Sense
 

Last week in Washington, D.C., I overheard a conversation on the train between two strangers:
 
A: I just don’t believe COVID is real.
 
B: But the news is reporting that cases in the U.S. are rising. How could you ignore that?
 
A: Where are the infected people? The news is just reporting numbers. Numbers aren’t the facts! Numbers aren’t the infection. The people have the infection! Show me the people!
 
I’ve been thinking about that conversation. I’ve been thinking about numbers and about how we process and react to them. I’ve been thinking about tweets like these:

And about podcast episodes like Dispatch 1: Numbers from Radiolab, which talks about the numbers connected to COVID. 
 
With the pandemic came a national conversation largely spoken in the language of mathematics. Education scholar Bill Barton describes mathematics as any system for dealing with the quantitative, relational, and spatial aspects of human experience. How are people dealing with the quantities, relationships, and spatial life of COVID?  What are people doing or not doing with this knowledge?
 
We teach students how to do all kinds of things to quantities, relationships, and space. They learn how to represent them as objects, cut these objects up and piece them back together, and reconfigure them into increasingly abstract forms. But often, quantities, relationships, and space are not abstract. They point to things that touch our lives such as whether COVID cases are low enough that schools can remain open or how district borders affect racial segregation in schools.

How often are teachers helping students process the quantities, relationships, and spaces in their lives? In a literature class, students talk about their personal reactions to a Toni Morrison novel. In an art class, students talk about the meanings and intentions behind their work. But in a traditional math class, it’s like students learn how to cook without ever being asked what they think about the food. 
 
To be fair, not every mathematical concept needs to be tied to a “real-world” context. But numbers can matter, and numbers don’t speak for themselves. Numbers can make us feel. They can make us act. They can change how we see ourselves and one another. How this happens is not automatic. Like everything else, our relationship to numbers is a learned phenomena.
 
The Slow Reveal Graphs by Jenna Laib (@jennalaib) is one way we can promote quantitative and spatial literacy while also giving students space to talk about how certain numbers and graphs impact them and why. This instructional routine does a nice job promoting “number sense” by giving equal weight to “number” and “sense”. The slow reveal graphs take a rigorous approach to data analysis. But at the same time, there is nothing inherently objective about numbers. Numbers are always accompanied by a regime of perception that makes some things “make sense” and other things unrecognizable. For instance, consider how a “1% fatality rate” can make the world look a certain way depending on how you think about it while also hiding information about issues such as race and class. The slow reveal graph routine invites students to think deeply about this connection between numbers and perception.

Maybe the numbers aren’t the facts. But we can’t avoid our responsibility to engage with numbers and ask where they come from, how they make us feel, and when they lead us to act. Mathematical sense making is not a purely technical affair. Instead, it’s a practice also concerned with ethics and responsibility and a willingness to challenge what even constitutes “common sense”. This is the essence of mathematical sense making, which gives students the agency and hope to decide what is sensible beyond the boundaries of what society already tries to impose on them.

@melvinmperalta

Why Don’t You Care?
 

Please answer this question for yourself.

This will be evaluated on the Final Examination.

@HKhodai

Learning to be a Teacher in a Pandemic

 
Virtual teaching is tough → biggest understatement of the year. But what about learning to be a teacher amidst a pandemic?

My name is Jess Moses, and I am a senior at Vanderbilt University, in the elementary education program. My teacher education has been upheaved by the pandemic. My student teaching placement got cancelled. In the semester where I expected to have the opportunity to teach more than I ever have, I haven’t worked with a single group of students.,  The secondary students in our program have been able to work with mentor teachers, so I was curious about what they are learning. I spoke with Maria Aguilera, also a senior at Vanderbilt, in the secondary education math program. We work together as research assistants on Project SIGMa (Supporting Instructional Growth in Mathematics), and we wanted to unpack some of her learnings from a semester in the online classroom. We sat down for a chat, and these are some of the key things we noticed.

Maria shared her experience applying her learning thus far about teaching in these unexpected times. Across our conversation, a theme emerged of pedagogical shift— transformation of all of her abstract knowledge about what an engaging, caring, conceptually-oriented mathematical classroom looks like.

Her first instinct when faced with the question of virtual teaching was to think about the different pedagogies she had been learning through her program and how to translate them exactly into virtual teaching. However, she soon realized that, instead of attempting to fit in-person teaching into this virtual space, she could embrace virtual teaching as something new. This was the first pedagogical shift. There would be some overlap, but this was an opportunity for all teachers, whether new or veteran, to be learners and collaboratively experiment with different pedagogies to discover what is effective, and when, in a virtual classroom.

So far this semester, Maria has felt supported by her professors, undergraduate cohort, and mentor teacher. Her mentor teacher has been a thought partner as they learn to navigate virtual learning together. Maria says that creativity is her strongest asset right now, as there is a lack of information about effective technologies and pedagogies for the virtual math classroom. With the resources that do exist, the overarching question about efficacy still applies: “effective for whom?” It can be easy to forget about all the non-content elements that make up teaching when you stare into a black screen every day talking to students’ floating profile pictures.

Building classroom community when you have never heard students’ voices or seen their faces requires another fundamental pedagogical shift regarding what community is and how it may be constructed. Maria has been thinking about the fact that her students still don’t know much about their classmates; some of them haven’t even seen their school yet or walked the hallways. She wonders what the impact of this is for the overall classroom community and what the transition to in-person teaching will mean for the community of learners. Will the students know their classmates? Will they want to engage in non-content related activities such as clubs or sports? 

A third pedagogical shift is around our notion of student engagement, which is being pushed beyond previous conceptions and understandings. Previously, student engagement was often gauged through physical and verbal cues, which inform the teacher of a student’s understanding, or lack thereof. Maria expressed that, in her program, she had been taught to use these visual and behavioral cues for confirmation of student engagement. However, now, she’s had to think beyond what she can see to understand student engagement; a task that requires creativity and courage. To her, student engagement now looks like student responses in the chat or sharing random memes/gifs to convey how they are feeling. Student engagement can also mean logging into the school online portal or joining the class call at 7:05 a.m., when class starts.

Even though so much is uncertain, including when schools in Nashville will return to in-person teaching, there are many lessons that Maria, as a pre-service teacher, is learning from this experience. For example, she mentioned learning how to incorporate technology and using it fluidly during live class sessions. It has also been remarkable how students have adapted to the new technologies her mentor teacher introduced at the beginning of the year, such as Peardeck and Desmos, and how these specific technologies allow her to provide more students with immediate, intentional feedback to an extent that was impossible during in-person teaching.

She is hopeful that some of the things we are attending to now will continue to be foregrounded when we return to in-person teaching. Maria has noticed a higher emphasis on social emotional learning and is considering how best to bring this attentiveness back into her secondary  math classroom, which can tend to be more content-focused. Maria and her mentor teacher begin classes with a daily check in where students pick a “would you rather” or drag an icon to an emoji to let them know how they are feeling at the start of class. These check-ins happen at the beginning and end of class, which is new. Maria and her mentor teacher ask students to give them a “temperature check” about their confidence about their understanding of a given topic. Our students are human beings first, and we are all given the opportunity to attend to this humanity, especially as we reflect on our own needs as humans.
 
Written by Maria Aguilera (@aguileramf) and Jess Moses (@Jess_Moses1)

The Global Math Department and researchers at North Carolina State University are undertaking a study to learn about teachers’ learning experiences from participation in the GMD. You can participate in this study if you have participated in the GMD as a presenter, attendee of a GMD conference, or reader of the GMD newsletter. 

We invite you to click the link to join the study as a participant and to learn more!

Click Here to participate in this study

Online Professional Development Sessions

Tongiht!

PCMI in the Time of Pandemic

Presented by Monica Tienda and Barbara Lynch
 

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) is an intensive 3-week residential conference that’s been around in some form or another for 30+ years. The Teacher Leadership Program of PCMI offers a phenomenal professional opportunity for classroom teachers unlike anything else around. The global pandemic may have interfered with 2020, but come see what’s up for PCMI 2021!
 

To register for this webinar, click here.

Check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

You can also visit our new YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

#GMDWrites

Centering #BlackMathWeek
 
Highlighted By: Sara Rezvi (@arsinoepi)

This month’s contribution to GMD seeks to highlight the grace, vulnerability, brilliance, and joy of #BlackInMathWeek. 
 
With permission from the organizers, I write here on why it matters to highlight and uplift these stories (especially as a non-Black person of color), and the importance of centering and standing in solidarity with Black mathematicians, math educators, and math ed scholars. 
 
Dr. Noelle Sawyer shares the following about #BlackInMathWeek and why it was created: 
 
Black in Math Week was November 8th – 13th, 2020! It was a week on Twitter to celebrate community among and uplift Black mathematicians. Black in Math Week is a part of a series of “Black in X” Weeks. They started with Black Birders Week after a white woman called the police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. You can find the page at @BlackInMath on Twitter. Throughout the week, the twitter page highlighted profiles of Black mathematicians, Black Mathematicians in the media, advice to aspiring mathematicians, a focus on Black math educators, and all culminated on a movie night on Friday November 13th with the Netflix Movie: Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. A few of the organizers for the week were Marissa Loving (@MarissaKawehi), Candice Price (@916ice), Noelle Sawyer (@blkmathmagic), and Dwight Anderson Williams II (@mathdwight). If you’re interested in checking out what happened during Black In Math Week, search the tag #BlackInMathWeek for general posts, #BlackInMathRollCall to find Black mathematicians on twitter, #BlackInMathMedia to find appearances of Black mathematicians in the media, and #MyBlackMathJourney to see the stories that Black mathematicians shared about how they’ve gotten to where they are today.
 

Here are some must-read threads to check out:
 

Anna Gifty’s (@itsafronomics) powerful thread on representation and the microaggressions that occur in schooling and childhood connects to how racism and exclusion in math is reproduced. 
 
This tweet from @BlackInMath highlighting Dr. Candice Price’s (@916ice) work in mathematics by meeting a mathematician virtually. In the vieo Dr. Price talks about protein folding, topology, and network theory in environmental studies along with her WHY for becoming a mathematician.  #BlackInMathMedia
 
LaShonda Mackey (@msmackeymath) writes here on the importance of being seen mathematically by teachers and the impact of being challenged above and beyond a standard curriculum.
 
This thread from Dr. Brook Alemayehu (@bta77) on challenges, pushing through, intellectual humility, and finding a passion for teaching mathematics. 

Some ways you can center #BlackInMathWeek: 
 

1. Have students read Dr. Candice Price’s Favorite Theorem Blog post on Scientific American and give students the opportunity to reflect on favorite theorems or math observations of their own! This can be done for any age. Alternatively, there is a podcast. Check out: My Favorite Theorem Podcast ft John Urschel! 
2. Read through #MyBlackMathJourney. The hashtag offers insights on the realities of learning mathematics as a Black person.
   1. What are some common themes reflected here? Why does that matter?
   2. How can non-Black people show solidarity and push back against Black peers, colleagues and classmates being silenced, belittled, or harmed in math spaces? 
   3. How should mathematicians openly discuss the realities of racism in mathematics (and beyond)? What internal work and self-interrogation needs to be done? 
3. Listen to Black Math Ed Scholars and check out #BlackInMathEd. Create a watch party with other teachers at your school and have a conversation about the insights brought forth here by the scholars linked below: 
   • Dr. Nicole Joseph and her research on Black girlhood and mathematics
   • Dr. Danny Martin on the brilliance of Black children
   • Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings on Building Culturally Relevant Schools Post-Pandemic
   • Dr. Zaretta Hammond on Taking the Distance Out of The Learning

The election and its aftermath are a mirror – one in which white people in particular, and NBPOC need to look at our reflections. We live in a country that is built on stolen land and stolen people, on genocide, enslavement, and the torture of Black people and of this country’s continued inability to reckon with that truth. The erasure, fragility, and defensiveness that ensues from this fact is why there were alt-right, white supremacist parties marching in the nation’s capital this weekend. 
 
How do these realities impact how you are interacting with Black students? What do they see when you say nothing in your math spaces? Math is and always has been political in the United States. The right to study fully, to equal access to education, to qualified teachers that see the full humanity and brilliance of Black children has remained out of reach both historically and in the present day. 
 
What are some ways that you can do better for Black people? Today? Tomorrow? Daily? Without gain for self? Without centering you? Without co-optation or commodification? 
 
How can you approach this work with humility, grace, and a genuine desire to do better (even if you might mess up)? None of us can do this alone, but it is incumbent upon us to NOT leave our current realities alone either.  

One of our Own
 

Last Saturday, on November 7th, the majority of news outlets following the election polls called the 2020 election for Joe Biden as the 46th elected President of the United States of America. And while educators may have been divided over the outcome of the election, there seemed to be a common chorus coming from teacher groups across the nation.

Betsy Devos, who served as the Secretary of Education, was consistently ranked as President Trump’s most unpopular Cabinet Secretary. Unfortunately, she was also one of the few who never got fired, making her tenure as SoE one of the longest. Her goal of dismantling public education through the use of corporate capitalism was met with constant resistance from educators across the system.

One of the reasons Betsy came under constant scrutiny from the education field was because of her lack of experience in a school setting. Devos was never a teacher, never worked in a school position, and visited very few schools in her time as SoE. In the last year of the pandemic, Devos used her political agenda to pressure schools to open full time, and then used the resistance from that decision to push for school choice options that allow federal, public funds to be used in charter and private schools, without accountability.

On November 7th, for the first time in a long time, educators heard an encouraging message involving public schools. President-Elect Joe Biden said, “Jill’s a military mom, an educator. She’s dedicated her life to education, but teaching isn’t just what she does. It’s who she is. For American educators, this is a great day for you all. You are going to have one of your own in the White House.” [emphasis added]
 
Whether Dr. Biden will have as much influence on education policy as has been anticipated will remain in question. But I can’t help but think of the relationship I have with my own spouse, and hope. My husband works in another social sector of agriculture. Our jobs are very different, and yet, over the course of our marriage we have found many common threads. 
 
After long days of teaching, I would come home and share my heart with him for my students; sometimes joyful, sometimes in sorrow. He has laughed with me at the jokes my students have told, and held my hand as I cried for the students that I lost. He listened as I told him how frustrated I was with the systemic injustices found in education, and vowed to help me find a way to help. Through those many conversations, he noticed how his work changed, how he began to humanize the people he was working with, to open doors for more people, to disrupt injustices head on. 
 
I’ll never forget the time we were with some friends who were championing school choice being open to all students because of the positive experiences they had with their own children. We listened quietly as several people advocated for the lack of accountability in school funding. During that conversation, he caught my eye, gave me a side smirk, and a wink. He knew I was ready to dismantle that entire conversation. And when the pause in conversation came, I didn’t hear my voice first. I heard his. “Well, actually…”
 
And then, I listened to the spouse of an educator speak to the alternative side of school choice with facts, statistics, and known injustices as if he had spent years studying. And in fact, he had. He not only listened to me, watched series with me like “America To Me”, but he took to researching so he was knowledgeable on his own. 
 
I remember riding home that night and asking him how he knew all that stuff about education. His response was, “Well, I guess when you’re married to an educator, you realize how important education really is, and it moves you.” 
 
This is my prayer for President-Elect Joe Biden. I hope that Biden himself has been moved by Dr. Jill Biden, simply by listening to her stories about teaching, to her frustrations with the system, and to her heart as an educator. I hope he goes home after hard days to hear her stories, and to remember why he needs to fight hard for teachers, students, and public schools. I hope he remembers he has someone who has done the work in the White House with him. And I hope that Biden’s administration and work in education policy show a direct link back to his being married to an educator, that he would see just how important education really is. 
 
She doesn’t have to be the next Secretary of Education for that hope to exist. She can simply be Dr. Jill Biden, married to Joe Biden, President-Elect of the United States of America.

Lauren Baucom
@Lbmathemagician