## Math is Democracy I: The Citizen and the Gerrymander Friday, Oct 20 2017

I am intending a series of my typically long, elaborate blog posts entitled Math is Democracy. The ideas have been brewing for years although they have been rapidly expanding and taking on new urgency since January. I alluded to this intention previously.

I wasn’t ready to start it yet, but I feel I must. I was reading the oral arguments in Gill v Whitford, the Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case currently before the Supreme Court. I had to stop and have a moment when I read this:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Mr. Smith, I’m going to follow an example of one of my colleagues and lay out for you as concisely as I can what — what is the main problem for me and give you an opportunity to address it.

I would think if these — if the claim is allowed to proceed, there will naturally be a lot of these claims raised around the country. Politics is a very important driving force and those claims will be raised.

And every one of them will come here for a decision on the merits. These cases are not within our discretionary jurisdiction. They’re the mandatory jurisdiction. We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board.

And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the Court issues a decision, and let’s say, okay, the Democrats win, and that person will say: “Well, why did the Democrats win?” And the answer is going to be because EG was greater than 7 percent, where EG is the sigma of party X wasted votes minus the sigma of party Y wasted votes over the sigma of party X votes plus party Y votes.

And the intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney. It must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state.

And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.

Now, there’s a lot here one could react to.[1] But the main thing I reacted to was this:

The Chief Justice of the highest court in the land thinks Americans don’t feel empowered to judge an argument on the merits if there’s math involved.

You know what? He’s probably right about that.

But this situation is very, very wrong.

Math is being used increasingly to make decisions governing our lives, for good or ill. Increasingly sophisticated math.[2] The instance most familiar to readers of this blog is probably teacher value-added scores, but the many various uses share this: they are not accountable to the public.

One reason the Wisconsin case is so hot is because the process that led to the map currently being challenged included a lot of fancy mathematical modeling intended to make the Republican legislative majority as bomb-proof as possible — an effort that appears to have worked really well. That the map was drawn with this goal and these tools is not a controversial point in the case. This was a use of math by legislators aimed at becoming less accountable to the public.

What I’m getting at: math is a species of power, and it’s a species that multiple antidemocratic forces are using, very effectively. And it’s a kind of power that citizens, by and large, totally lack.

So, the game is unfair. We the People are supposed to be able to participate in public decision-making. That’s the heart of democracy. But math is increasingly becoming a kind of secret key to power that, if the Chief Justice is right, We the People mostly don’t have. As soon as there’s math involved, we can’t even participate in debates about the very consequential choices that are being made. In which case, nobody who wants to use the power of math (for good or ill!) needs to be accountable to us.

I mean, this was true before the explosion of data-science driven business and governmental practices Cathy writes about, or the computer-assisted 2010-11 legislative redistricting.[3] But now it is more intensely true than ever.

What this leaves me with is that doing our jobs well as math educators is completely urgent for democracy. Every kid we leave traumatized and alienated from formulas and data analysis is a citizen that doesn’t have a voice.

Don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t matter.

Notes:

[1] For example: This author at ThinkProgress thinks Roberts has a lot of nerve claiming to be concerned with the perception that the court is partisan when he has so consistently voted along partisan lines in landmark cases. This author at WaPo thinks it’s not legitimate for the Court to be considering its public perception in the first place. I am personally inclined to believe that Roberts is earnestly concerned about the court’s reputation and that his question was earnest (mostly because of his surprising and apparently similarly-motivated vote in NFIB v Sebelius), although I do think that the fact that he doesn’t appear to be equally concerned with the perception of partisanship if the court does not “allow the claim to proceed” reflects a rather striking partisan limitation in his image of the “intelligent man on the street.” I know plenty of intelligent men, and women, who would be inclined to conclude that he himself is a partisan hack on the basis of the above quotation alone.

[2] Shout out to Cathy O’Neil.

[3] This seems like a good moment to acknowledge the deep debt of my thinking here to Bob Moses, who has been on this tip for a long time. Also, there is some relationship to the work of math educators in the Freirean tradition such as Marilyn Frankenstein and Rico Gutstein, though I can’t take the time now to figure out exactly what it is.

## Hidden Figures: Visibility / Invisibility of Brown Brilliance, Part I Sunday, Jan 22 2017

Has everybody seen Hidden Figures yet?

It’s delightful: a tight, well-acted, gripping drama, based on a true story about an exciting chapter in national history. You can just go to have a good time. You don’t need to feel like you are going to some kind of Important Movie About Race or whatever. It is totally kid friendly, and as long as they know the most basic facts about the history of racial discrimination, it doesn’t force you to have any kind of conversation you aren’t up for / have every day and don’t need another… / etc. Just go and enjoy yourself.

THAT SAID.

Everybody, parents especially, and white parents especially, please go see this film and take your kids.

I was actually fighting back tears inside of 5 minutes.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am strongly critical of the widespread notion of innate mathematical talent. I’ve written about this before, and plan on doing a great deal more of this writing in the future. The TL;DR version is that I think our cultural consensus, only recently beginning to be challenged, that the capacity for mathematical accomplishment is predestined, is both factually false and toxic. My views on the subject can make me a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the representation of mathematical achievement in film – the Hollywood formula for communicating to the audience that “this one is a special one” usually feels to me like it’s feeding the monster, and that can get between me and an otherwise totally lovely film experience.

In spite of all of this, when Hidden Figures opened by giving the full Hollywood math genius treatment to little Katherine Johnson (nee Coleman), kicking a stone through the woods while she counted “fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, prime, eighteen, prime, twenty, twenty-one, …,” I choked up. I had never seen this before. The full Good Will Hunting / Little Man Tate / Beautiful Mind / Searching for Bobby Fischer / Imitation Game / etc. child-genius set of signifiers, except for a black girl!

What hit me so hard was that it hit me so hard. For all the brilliant minds we as a society have imagined over the years, how could we never have imagined this one before now? And she’s not even imaginary, she’s real! And not only real, but has been real for ninety-eight years! And yet this is something that, as measured by mainstream film, we haven’t even been able to imagine.

You’ll do with this what you will, but for me it’s an object-lesson in the depth and power of our racial cultural programming, as well as a step toward the light. I am a white person who has had intellectually powerful black women around me, whom I greatly admired, my whole life, starting with my preschool and kindergarten teachers, and including close friends and members of my own family, as well of course as many of my students. And yet the type of representation that opened Hidden Figures is something that only fairly recently did it begin to dawn on me how starkly it was missing.

So, go see this movie! Take your kids to see it! Let them grow up easily imagining something that the American collective consciousness has hidden from itself for so long.

## The History of Calculus / Honor Your Dissatisfaction Saturday, May 21 2016

I was just rereading an email exchange with a friend (actually the O of this post), and found that I had summarized the history of calculus from the 17th to 20th centuries, up through and including Abraham Robinson’s invention of nonstandard analysis, in the form of a short play! I’m sharing it with you.

Mainly this is for fun, but it’s also part of my ongoing campaign promoting the value of honoring your dissatisfaction. The dialectic between honoring our impulse to invent ideas to understand the world better and honoring our dissatisfaction with these ideas is where mathematics comes from.

Here’s the play!

# The History of Calculus, in 4 Extremely Short Acts

Featuring a lot of oversimplification and a certain amount of harmless cursing

Act I

Late 17th century

Leibniz, Newton: Look everybody, we can calculate instantaeous speed!

Everybody: How??

Leibniz: well, you consider the distance traveled during an infinitesimal interval of time, and you divide distance/time.

Everybody: Leibniz, what do you mean, “infinitesimal”? Like, a millisecond?

Leibniz: No, way smaller than that.

Everybody: A nanosecond?

Leibniz: Nah, dude, you’re missing the point. Smaller than any finite amount.

Everybody: So, zero time?

Leibniz: No, bigger than that.

Some people: Oh, cool! Look we can use this idea to accurately calculate planetary motion and stuff!

Other people: WTF are you talking about Leibniz? That makes no effing sense.

Act II

18th century

Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, and everybody else: Whee, look at everything we can calculate with Newton and Leibniz’s crazy infinitesimals! This is awesome!

Bishop George Berkeley: But nobody answered the question of WTF they are even talking about. “What are these [infinitesimals]? May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?”

Lagrange: Hold on, let me try to rebuild this theory from scratch, I will make no mention of spooky infinitesimals, and will do the whole thing using the algebra of power series.

Everybody: Cool, good luck with that.

Act III

19th century

Cauchy: Lagrange, homie, it’s not gonna work. $e^{-1/x^2}$ doesn’t match its power series at zero.

Lagrange: Sh*t.

Everybody: I think we don’t actually understand this as well as we thought we did.

Ghost of departed Bishop Berkeley: OMG I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU THIS.

Cauchy: How about we forget the whole “infinitesimal” thing and just say that the average speeds are approaching a certain limit to whatever desired degree of accuracy. As long as we can identify the limit and prove that it gets as close as we want it to, we can call that limit the “instantaneous speed” without ever trying to divide some spooky infinitesimals by each other.

Everybody: Awesome.

Weierstrass: I have an even better idea. Let’s formalize Cauchy’s thinking into some tight symbols and quantifiers. “Let us say that the limit of a function $f(x)$ at $c$ is a number $L$ if for every $\varepsilon > 0$ there exists a $\delta > 0$ such that whenever $0 <|x-c|<\delta$, it follows that $|f(x)-L|<\varepsilon$…”

All the mathematicians: AWESOME. Down with spooky infinitesimals! Calculus can be built soundly on the firm footing of “for any $\varepsilon>0$ there exists a $\delta>0$ such that…” and you never have to talk about any spooky sh*t!

All the mathematicians, in private: … but thinking about infinitesimals sure streamlines some of these calculations…

[Meanwhile all the physicists and engineers miss this whole episode and continue blithely using infinitesimals.]

Act IV

20th century

Scene i

Mathematicians: Infinitesimals are satanic voodoo!

Mathematicians: Whatever dude, don’t you know about Weierstrass and $\varepsilon$ and $\delta$?

Physicists and engineers: Um, no, and I don’t care either! What’s the point when everything already works fine?

Mathematicians, in public: No, dude, there are all these tricky convergence issues and you will F*CK UP EVERYTHING IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL!

Mathematicians, in private: … but those infinitesimals are indispensible as a heuristic guide…

Scene ii

Abraham Robinson: Um, whatever happened to infinitesimals?

Mathematicians: I mean we rejected them as satanic voodoo because nobody was ever able to tell us WTF THEY ARE.

Robinson: I have a proposal. How about we consider them to be [fancy-*ss definition based on formal logic and other fancy sh*t]. Would you say that constitutes an answer to “wtf they are?”

Mathematicians: … why, yes!

Some mathematicians: omg awesome I can now RESPECTABLY use infinitesimals in calculations, I don’t have to hide anymore!

Other mathematicians: Whatever, I have no need to do the work to master this fancy sh*t. It doesn’t do anything good ole’ Weierstrass $\varepsilon$ and $\delta$ couldn’t do.

Physicists and engineers: wow, you guys are way over-concerned with the little stuff. Literally.

# End

(Long-time readers of this blog will recognize the bit of dialogue with Leibniz from something I shared long ago.)

The point is that the whole episode is driven by uncertainty about what is even being discussed. The early developers of calculus shared the conviction that there was something there when they talked about “infinitesimals”, but none of them (not even Euler) gave a definition that was satisfying to everybody at the time (let alone to a modern audience). But this encounter, between the intuition that there’s something there and the insistence of the world to honor its dissatisfaction until a really satisfying account was given, was a generative encounter, resulting in several hundred years’ worth of powerful math progress.

## Math is like… Saturday, Oct 25 2014

Math is like an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength. – Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong

## Hard Problems and Hints Friday, Jul 11 2014

I have a friend O with a very mathematically engaged son J, who semi-often corresponds with me about his and J’s mathematical experiences together. We had a recent exchange and what I was saying to him I found myself wanting to say to everybody. So, without further ado, here is his email and my reply (my take on Aunt Pythia) –

Dear Ben,

J’s class is learning about volume in math. They’ll be working with cubes, rectangular prisms and possibly cylinders, but that’s all. He asked his teacher if he could work on a “challenge” that has been on his mind, which is to find a formula for the volume of one of his favorite shapes, the dodecahedron. He build a few of these out of paper earlier in the year and really was/is fascinated with them. I think he began this quest to find the volume thinking that it would be pretty much impossible, but he has stuck with it for almost a week now. I am pleased to see that he’s not only sticking with it, but also that he has made a few pretty interesting observations along the way, including coming up with an approach to solving it that involves, as he put it, “breaking it up into equal pieces of some simpler shape and then putting them together.” After trying a few ways to break/slice up the dodecahedron and finding that none of them seemed to make matters simpler, he had an “ah ha” moment in the car and decided that the way to do would be to break it up into 12 “pentagonal pyramids” (that’s what he calls them) that fit together, meeting at the center of rotation of the whole shape. If we can find the volume of one of those things, we’re all set. A few days later, he told me that he realized that “not every pentagonal pyramid could combine to make a dodecahedron” so maybe there was something special about the ones that do, i.e., maybe there is a special relationship between the length of the side of the pentagon and the length of the edge of the pyramid that could be used to form a dodecahedron.

He is still sticking with it, and seems to be having a grand time, so I am definitely going to encourage him and puzzle through it with him if he wants.

But here’s my question for you…

I sneaked a peak on google to see what the formula actually is, and found (as you might know) that it’s pretty complicated. The formula for the volume of the pentagonal pyramid involves $\tan 54$ (or something horrible like that) and the formula for the volume of a dodecahedron involves $15 + 7\sqrt{5}$ or something evil like that. In short, I am doubtful that he will actually be able to solve this problem he’s puzzling through. What does a good teacher do in such a situation? You have a student who is really interested in this problem, but you know that it’s far more likely that he will hit a wall (or many walls) that he really doesn’t have the tools to work through. On the other hand, you really want him to find satisfaction in the process and not measure the joy or the value of the process by whether he ultimately solves it.

I certainly don’t care whether he solves it or not. But I want to help him get value out of hitting the wall. How do you strike a balance so that the challenge is the right level of frustrating? When is it good to “give a hint” (you’ve done that for me a few times in what felt like a good way… not too much, but just enough so that the task was possible).

In this case, he’s at least trying to answer a question that has an answer. I suppose you could find a student working on a problem that you know has NO known answer, or that has been proven to be unsolvable. Although there, at least, after the student throws up his hands after giving it a good go, you can comfort her by saying, “guess what… you’re in good company!” But here, I’d like to help give him some of the tools he might use to actually make some headway, without giving away the store.

I think he’s off to a really good start — learning a lot along the way – getting a lot of out the process, the approach. I can already tell that many of the “ah ha” moments have applicability in all sorts of problems, so that’s wonderful.

Best, O

Dear O,

Wow, okay first of all, I love that you asked me this and it makes me really appreciate your role in this journey J is on, in other words I wish every child had an adult present in their mathematical journey who recognizes the value in their self-driven exploration and is interested in being the guardian of the child’s understanding of that value.

Second: no matter what happens, you have access to the “guess what… you’re in good company” response, because the experience of hitting walls as you try to find your way through the maze of the truth is literally the experience of all research mathematicians, nearly all of the time. If by any chance J ends up being a research mathematician, he will spend literally 99% or more of his working life in this state.

In fact, I would want to tweak the message a bit; I find the “guess what… you’re in good company” a tad consolation-prize-y (as also expressed by the fact that you described it as a “comfort”). It implies that there was an underlying defeat whose pain this message is designed to ameliorate. I want to encourage you and J both to see this situation as one in which a defeat is not even possible, because the goal is to deepen understanding, and that is definitely happening, regardless of the outcome. The specific question (“what’s the volume of a dodecahedron?”) is a tool that’s being used to give the mind focus and drive in exploring the jungle of mathematical reality, but the real value is the journey, not the answer to the question. The question is just a tool to help the mind focus.

In fairness, questing for a goal such as finding the answer to a question and then not meeting the goal is always a little disappointing, and I’m not trying to act like that disappointment can be escaped through some sort of mental jiu-jitsu. What I am trying to say is that it is possible to experience this disappointment as superficial, because the goal-quest is an exciting and focusing activity that expresses your curiosity, but the goal is not the container of the quest’s value.

So, that’s what you tell the kid. Way before they hit any walls. More than that, that’s how you should see it, and encourage them to see it that way by modeling.

Third. A hard thing about being in J’s position in life (speaking from experience) is that the excitement generated in adults by his mathematical interests and corresponding “advancement” is exciting and heady, but can have the negative impact of encouraging him to see the value of what he’s doing in terms of it making him awesome rather than the exploration itself being the awesome thing, and this puts him in the position where it is possible for an unsuccessful mathematical expedition to be very ego-challenging. This is something that’s been behind a lot of the conversations we’ve had, but I want to highlight it here, to connect the dots in the concrete situation we’re discussing. To the extent that there are adults invested in J’s mathematical precociousness per se, and to the extent that J may experience an unsuccessful quest as a major defeat, these two things are connected.

Fourth, to respond to your request for concrete advice regarding when it is a good idea to give a hint. Well, there is an art to this, but here are some basic principles:

* Hints that are minimally obtrusive allow the learner to preserve their sense of ownership over the final result. The big dangers with a hint are (a) that you steal the opportunity to learn by removing a part of the task that would have been important to the learning experience, and (b) that you steal the experience of success because the learner doesn’t feel like they really did it. These dangers are related but distinct.

* How do you give a minimally obtrusive hint?

(a) Hints that direct the learner’s attention to a potentially fruitful avenue of thought are superior to hints that are designed to give the learner a new tool.

(b) Hints that are designed to facilitate movement in the direction of thought the learner already has going on are generally better than hints that attempt to steer the learner in a completely new direction.

* If the learner does need a new tool, this should be addressed explicitly. It’s kind of disingenuous to think of it as a “hint” – looking up “hint” in the dictionary just now, I’m seeing words like “indirect / suggestion / covert indication”. If the learner is missing a key tool, they need something direct. The best scenario is if they can actually ask for what they need:

Learner: If I only had a way to find the length of this side using this angle…
Teacher: oh yes, there’s a whole body of techniques for that, it’s called trigonometry.

This is rare but that’s okay because it’s not necessary. If the teacher sees that the learner is up against the lack of a certain tool, they can also elicit the need for it from the learner:

Teacher: It seems like you’re stuck because you know this angle but you don’t know this side.
Learner: Yeah.
Teacher: What if I told you there was a whole body of techniques for that?

Okay, those are my four cents. Keep me posted on this journey, it sounds like a really rich learning experience for J.

All the best, Ben

## Sue’s Book Is Ready for Press and Needs Crowdfunding! Friday, Jun 20 2014

Hey y’all, I am incredibly excited about Sue’s book, Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers. If you have been around the math education blogosphere for more than a short time, you probably are too.

It needs crowdfunding to cover publication costs. I am about to help out and I invite you to do so too!

## New Math Learning Site on StackExchange.com Needs You Sunday, Mar 2 2014

Hey y’all.

There’s a new proposal at stackexchange.com for a Q&A site on Mathematics Learning, Studying, and Education.

Of course the entire mathtwitterblogosphere is a massive Q&A site on Mathematics Learning, Studying, and Education. But based on my experience of the incredible usefulness of the StackExchange sites Math StackExchange and MathOverflow, I think this site could become a great resource.

Possibly also a great forum for some much-needed productive dialogue between the K-12 and collegiate levels. For that to happen, though, it needs you. The bulk of the folks currently signed up for the beta of the new site are active on Math StackExchange and MathOverflow, which are dominated by college-and-up level math. The conversation is going to be so much richer with serious K-12 representation! Go sign up!

If you haven’t heard of the StackExchange sites before, they are a very thoughtfully constructed Q&A structure. It all started with StackOverflow, which was for working programmers to ask and answer practical coding questions. MathOverflow copied this idea for working research mathematicians. Math StackExchange is in principle for Q&A about math at any level, although as I mentioned, in practice it’s usually (though not always) about college and graduate level. Now there are also StackExchange sites on cooking, gaming, English language learning, and a million other things. The design of the software, and the culture of the sites, do an impressive job keeping the Q&A productive and on topic.

In the case of the math sites, the culture can also feel a little normatively intense (as in, there’s a “way we do things” that can be pretty strongly policed) and not always welcoming. Denizens of the sites will tell you that this is how they keep the conversation so productive and on-topic. But imho, it also stems from the deep ambivalence that the academic math world has about whether it wants to

(A) Share all its goodies and invite everyone into its kingdom, or
(B) Bull-guard the considerable stash of privilege that accrues from its high intellectual status.

(More on this in future posts.) The incredible usefulness of the sites makes it worth it; but also, this is part of why I want you guys to go populate the new Math Education site. You are clear in your hearts that math is for everybody. This is our chance to go talk with some folks who represent a culture that is working through that for itself. Meanwhile, we get to benefit from their perspectives, which have seen very different parts of the mathematical kingdom in their travels.

Disclaimer: I think lots and lots of individuals on Math.SE and MO think math is for everybody. I am not trying to stereotype the sites or mathematicians more generally. And I think it’s likely that the people from Math.SE and MO who gravitate to the new Math Learning/Education site are going to be skewed toward the folks who think that math is for everybody. What I am trying to do is to name some notes that I hear in the cultural soundscape of academic math as a whole, and Math StackExchange and MathOverflow in particular; but I’m not trying to identify those notes with any individuals.

## I Don’t Get It vs. I Don’t Buy It Wednesday, Jul 24 2013

I was having a conversation a few weeks ago with a computer programmer and math enthusiast whom I’ll call Dorian. He was arguing very passionately that talking about a square root of $-1$ was the wrong way to introduce complex numbers. He recounted this moment in his own schooling: 16 year old Dorian, told by his teacher “we introduce a new number $i$ whose square is $-1$…,” asking, “but I can prove that the square of any number is positive, what about that?!” His teacher wasn’t able to satisfy his objection and made him feel that it wasn’t valid. He left the experience feeling angry and frustrated and that his question had been treated as a failure to understand.

Dorian later learned that complex numbers can be visualized as a plane containing the real line; that addition of points in this plane is just vector addition; and that multiplication is done by multiplying the distances from the origin and adding the angles from the positive real axis (see here for a brief explanation if desired). Here was a concrete model for the complex numbers, with concrete geometrical interpretations of the operations $+$ and $\times$. And it was clear to him that in this model, there is a point, in fact two points, whose squares correspond to the point $-1$ on the real axis. But philosophically, this fact is a consequence of the concrete geometrical description of the operations in the plane, rather than an ontologically dubious starting point for the whole project.

Dorian concluded that actually this model, via the geometry of addition and multiplication in the complex plane, is a pedagogically superior introduction to the complex numbers. His argument is that it presents no ontological quandary. Nobody will object to a plane. Nobody will object, at least on philosophical grounds, to these new definitions of $+$ and $\times$, as long as you can prove they have nice properties and coincide with the old definitions on the real line. You’re not saying anything so wildly speculative as “postulate a square root of $-1$…”

I am not writing this post to get into the question of whether Dorian is right about this. I see lots to say on both sides. What I am writing this to say is that there is a lesson in Dorian’s story much deeper than the question of how to introduce the complex numbers. That is not the real question here as far as I am concerned.

The real question is this: when you’ve picked your approach and gone with it, how will you deal with the students it doesn’t work for?

Now you can always obsess about how to introduce a topic, and I believe there is basically always value in thinking and talking about the pedagogical consequences of different ways of looking at things. And I think some models for ideas are legitimately better than others. But no model will speak to every student. This point is so important, and was so lost on me as a young teacher, and is lost on so many (especially young) teachers that I have spoken with, so excited that they are about the way they have thought of to present negative numbers or whatever, as though miraculously everyone in the room will get it this time, that I need to repeat it:

There is no model that is the right model for each and every student, each and every time.

No matter how awesome your idea for how to think about XYZ concept is, there will be somebody in your class who will have no idea what you are talking about. To me, the big question here is, what are you going to do about it?

More specifically, how are you going to treat their thinking?

Now, I like to think that nobody reading this blog would be so callous as to intentionally make a student feel stupid for asking an honest question. But there are far subtler ways to do it. The one I most want to warn you against is the sin I know I’m guilty of: being so wrapped up in the awesomeness of your presentation that the kid who doesn’t get it does not compute to you. You say whatever you say out loud but in your mind you’re like, “wait – you don’t understand? Huh?” Or, you’re like, “oh my goodness can’t you just see it as I do?”

Regardless of what you say out loud, having such a response in the back of your mind invalidates whatever obstacle the student is facing. I want to suggest an alternative:

Take the case that any earnest failure of a student to see your point of view is actually coming from a legitimate mathematical objection.

This is how you treat dissatisfaction with honor.

I don’t care what the kid’s IEP says. Mathematical convention does not require us to check somebody’s Wechsler results before they are allowed to raise an objection. If they don’t buy it, they don’t buy it. Now it’s your turn to understand their objection and answer it.

“I don’t get it.” “I don’t buy it.”

A student I’ll call Manny, whom I had in my 2003-4 AP Calculus class, came to me around March and said something like, “this entire class is based on a paradox.” He objected to my (retrospectively totally hand-wavy) discussion of limits. It never gets there, so how can you talk about what happens if it were to get there?

I tried to answer Manny’s objections; I spent some time with him on it; but he left the conversation unsatisfied. Retrospectively it is clear to me that this is because (a) I didn’t get what the problem was, and (b) to my shame I didn’t consider the possibility that there was really much to it. Then, less than a year later, I read The Calculus Gallery, whereupon I learned that actually Manny’s objection was more or less exactly Bishop Berkeley’s famous objection that in due time forced mathematicians to invent real analysis. For a sense of the importance of this development, let me mention that I have read, though I don’t recall where right now, that the development of real analysis was really the event that led to the birth of modern mathematical rigor.

So, yes, I am on record as having treated as essentially invalid an objection that actually led to the creation of modern rigor. Don’t let that be you.

If they don’t get it, take the case that there’s a legitimate mathematical objection behind that. Treat their “I don’t get it” as “I don’t buy it.” Now getting them to buy it is your job.

## Sh*t I F*cking Love (Wherein I Am Moved to Profanity by Enthusiasm) Friday, Apr 5 2013

Shawn Cornally doing his thing.

My new favorite blog, chronicling an adventure in striving to keep math class true to your deepest commitments. (Thanks to Work in Pencil for the recommendation.)

Paul Salomon’s “imbalance problems”. You know how I love a thought-provoking picture.

Math Munch. If you haven’t yet checked out this joint project of Paul, Anna and Justin yet, you should get on that.

## Notes from the Learning Lab: How to Dull My Curiosity Friday, Dec 14 2012

I know I say this kind of thing a lot but I’m sitting here studying for a final, and this truth is just glaring and throbbing at me:

If you want to dull my curiosity, tell me what the answer is supposed to be.

If you want to make my curiosity vanish completely, do that and then add in a little time pressure.

There is nothing as lethal to my sense of wonder as that alchemical combination of already knowing how things are going to turn out (without knowing why), and feeling the clock tick.

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