1. Donations. I made a few small adjustments last year: When others have offered to compensate me in some way, I have shifted from outright refusal to asking that they donate the amount that they believe is appropriate; the most recent three times that I have done this, I have pointed others to Found in Translation, which I hope the reader will check out. When this last occurred, it was after assisting a former colleague’s child with their non-routine Calculus homework; that is to say, I successfully converted assistance on an antiderivative to money that can help sustain a program designed for low-income women. Similarly, when I was asked to give a talk on justice in mathematics education during the stressful month of October 2020, I asked whether there was an honorarium; transparently, the NSF sponsored conference offered 1100 USD for a Zoom hour. So, I agreed to write and deliver the talk, and I gave the honorarium to six different Senate races. In other words, I successfully converted NSF math education funds into money that helped Democrats compete in the Senate. Lastly, I am of the belief that restrictions on stimulus checks (“stimmies”) should err on the side of Too Generous, and that those who receive these extra moneys while in the privileged position of not seeing a significant interruption in income should consider giving the money away. I gave my first stimulus check to a double-matching campaign organized around cash bail; I gave my second stimulus check to a local food bank. This is not to guilt the reader or flex on anybody; and, I think that if you are at a real loss for how you can engage in direct action, then donating money to trusted organizations is a good choice.

2. Math Education. I have been contributing to the Global Math Department newsletters while also managing the GMD twitter account; this involves a fair amount of highlighting others’ powerful work, and has also – for those paying attention – involved a lot of proactive posts about elections (POTUS/VP in Nov 2020 and then Georgia in Jan 2021). Sometimes this means amplifying calls for action (e.g. from MoMath, which has yet to respond) and other times it means proactively thinking about boycotting ICM 2022 in Russia, or asking questions about ICME 2020 (now hybrid in 2021) in China as relates to ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang (thread). It also means that I am actively trying to incorporate Teaching Tolerance anti-bias standards into an Algebra 2 course, and that I am preparing to shift a junior/senior elective math course towards projects on, among other topics, Social Justice Math Trails. (Here are a subset of references compiled by a student who worked with me on a senior project last May around this topic; pull-quotes are in blue and her writing is in red.) There is plenty more to say here; off top, a shout out to the three people who reached out to me proactively over the winter break to Zoom around contemporary happenings (e.g. antiracist pushes in math education), as well as a separate shout out to Winger and Harris for their excellent book.

3. School-based Organization. This is the one area in which I will avoid detailing specifics; suffice to say that Rochelle Gutiérrez’s paper Strategies for Creative Insubordination in Mathematics Teaching is a must-read. Other than that, I have continued in my capacity as one of the two faculty members taking part in our high school’s social justice club, and I volunteered my time during Fall 2020 to participate in an Anti-Racist Committee that consisted of various stakeholders (faculty; staff; admin; students; alums; families; trustees). This was at a time in which the outgoing prez* was using BDV to weaponize her position as EdSec in policing language (like “white privilege” or talking about race, gender) used by private universities; I have no doubt that, were the racist-in-chief to have been reelected, we would have seen this tactic pushed out further (e.g. targeting public schools directly and threatening non-profit status for independent schools). I plan to push our collective AR recommendations hard in this calendar year, and one of my 2021 goals is to stop recreating mission statements and guidelines.

4. Political Candidates. The four areas here are not mutually disjoint, and/but I have grown tired of the superhuman rhetoric around Stacey Abrams. To be clear, Abrams’ work is transformative and extraordinary; yet, she is fully human – not “super”human – and, as she would tell you, there are many whose collective work went into “Georgia’s evolution.” Therefore, to those of you who are looking at organizing and potential political candidates for 2022, I strongly urge you to learn more about Danielle Allen as she looks into running for Governor of Massachusetts. Watch this video (2m18s) and check out her site. There is a republican gov in MA now, and here we have a Democrat Black woman with two doctorates (Cambridge University, Harvard University) who worked with a transdisciplinary team on a Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience produced through the Safra Center for Ethics of which she is the director. I have read through two of Allen’s books: one containing original research on the Declaration of Independence and another about her firsthand experiences with the criminal in/justice system and her incarcerated cousin (Adichie calls it “unbearably moving”). A supporter of RCV and MacArthur Fellow; an organized thinker who can govern based on institutional experience as well as lived experience; I hope that you will learn more and consider signing up under the site’s Take Action tab.

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