When I co-wrote Math Recess several years back with Dr. Chris Brownell, I naively envisioned an idyllic math education world where the actual quality of the mathematics would be celebrated and championed. Some fantasy world like Valinor in Lord of The Things that I was sailing towards.

I purposely chose an image for the blog thumbnail that celebrates the very best of the mathematical and educational mind of my friend, Jo Boaler. It’s from her visit to the Senpaq’cin School, a First Nation school in Canada, to work with teachers and students. I also chose it for…

Yes. It’s a long title. But, it also completely encapsulates a problem of an insidious vector change in math education over 25 years ago — focusing less and less on mathematics — that made this intellectual collapse sadly inevitable. Mathematics is dead. Its interlaced connection to history, philosophy, music, the…

I have been in the space of math education for over 30 years. I have taught in tough, urban schools and an IB School in Switzerland. I have been going to math conferences for 20 years. While sometimes these conferences have had words “joy” in their conference themes, the word…

The cult of pedagogy which has consumed math education the last few years has only made the arrival of something like ChatGPT more topical and alluring. Why wouldn’t it be? …

When my mentor, Peter Harrison, retired twenty years ago, he remarked to me that “mathematics was dead”. …

I am 59. I stopped listening to radio for music when a Toronto station called Q107 pulled the plug on its highly popular Psychedelic Sundays with the DJ Andy Frost on May 27, 2018, my 54th birthday. While naturally a whole day of listening to the best music of 1965…

When I quit teaching 10 years ago, I was married and owned a house. Today, I sleep on a basement couch of a rental home, divorced, coparenting our two teenage kids. I have done that for six years now. But, I am infinitely more happy today than that time. The…

On August 1, I visited Osborne Juvenile Center, which is located in San Jose, California. I was invited by Bernadette Salgarino, who is a mathematics coordinator for Santa Clara County. She is also President-Elect for California Math Council. In early 2023, she invited me to give a keynote at Silicon…