Humanization In The Abyss
Around the Fall of 2019, I put together the chapter outlines of my next book. A few of them go tweaked along the way. Some got reshuffled. But, most of the chapters got inked to commitment around that time. And, as you can see, I have completed roughly a quarter of the book. Which puts me on the timeline for a Fall 2021 release.
If I am going to adhere to the order of the chapters, then the next chapter that needs completion is Chapter 3…
When I came up with that title about 6 months ago, it meant finding some kind of road/bridge to carry our students/teachers across this massive chasm between how mathematics is currently taught/valued and to how it should be taught/valued. Generally speaking, it is currently taught in an atmosphere of performance, and checking off hundreds of discrete boxes of such performance. No surprise that anxiety and alienation have been the chief byproducts of this kind of learning. But, if we are going to be specific, alienation comes before anxiety. Many children fail to connect to mathematics. It doesn’t resonate with the minds or hearts. They drift. They become alienated. They stop paying attention. They miss crucial details. Soon, they don’t understand. Anxiety sets in. This is how Peter Taylor of Queens University sees the historical negative trajectory of children and mathematics.
That was my thinking 6 months ago. Then COVID-19 hit the world in 2020. In the smaller world of math education, there is a frantic rush to move everything online. While the intentions have been good — they generally are always good — the magnitude of how the virus has changed/changing our lives needs to temper how/why we teach mathematics.
Actually, temper is a bad word. It’s too weak. The virus needs to destroy how we have been teaching mathematics. The Abyss now contains the fragility of life. The Abyss now houses an uneasy spotlight to the glaring inequities of the poor and the marginalized. The Abyss is filled with shifting priorities and a much, much higher currency of human contact/connection.
Both my middle school kids will be given a buffet of online learning opportunities. Some will be organized by their teachers/school. Even before the Coronavirus, all of this was information, passively received and actively rejected. My kids were already bored by school. With the anxiety of world pandemic, more information through the generally sterile delivery of the internet is not what I want my children doing. Their childhoods have already suffered erosion due to lack of play.
In this Abyss, the only thing that will save us is finding our humanity. Nothing else will bridge the gap between what we did in the 20th century to what we now need to for the rest of the 21st century. As such, when we are teaching mathematics, when we are talking about mathematics, and when we are doing mathematics, let’s be wonderfully human. Let’s smile. Let’s laugh. Let’s do all that with our shortcomings of understanding many of math’s enigmas and mysteries. What I am saying is that mere transmission of knowledge is not good enough. We need to transmit our humanness with our mathematics. We need to transmit warmth, assurance, and kindness with the math.
In 1964, fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase The Medium is the Message. He theorized that the medium of transmission of information should be the primary focus of study. In the Age of the Internet, this discussion must come up again. And, it needs to perhaps be reevaluated with the global health crisis. What is the most important thing for the world after this pandemic is over? Do we go back to business as usual? Was the virus just a pause button on being busy with dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s?
I for one certainly hope not, especially how we go forward with math education.
I am starting to watch one of the greatest television series ever, LOST, again. I think I missed some key elements which prevented me from truly understanding some of the subtle themes of the show. However, its biggest theme was not lost on me. The producers of the show were fairly explicit to ensure that this theme survived all the mysteries, enigmas, conflicts, and complexities of the show. That life is about love and connection, when drilled down to the basic needs of all of us.
Mathematics is about love and connection. That also needs to be the terminus of our reconstruction of its value and purpose for society.
Now back to writing it all down…somewhere else:)
