Learning Mathematics in a Post COVID-19 World: Data, Kindness, and Curiosity.
Data Science and Data Visualization already had momentum for years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that is sure to take all of 2020 to recover from. The onset of this world health crisis just gave the torch to this branch of knowledge to lead the reconstruction of K to 12 math curriculum in at least North America — if not the entire world.
If you haven’t seen the TEDx Talk by David McCandless on “The Beauty of Data Visualization”, I would encourage you start there. One, it show the depth and beauty of presenting data that is both factual and aesthetically pleasing. Two, it reinforces the idea that the clarion call for this branch of knowledge started more than five years ago.
As almost all schools in North America and several parts of the world are closed, there has been a natural and rapid movement towards learning and communicating online. So many companies and individuals are donating their time and efforts to help students, parents, and teachers cope with the new realities. This generosity and kindness, which is the engine for so many online initiatives, is precisely what will be needed when education reemerges from this challenging, if not somewhat frightening period in our history.
It is not only what kind of knowledge needs to be delivered that will have high stakes, but how it is delivered will also have a critical currency attached to it.
The National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics were supposed to have their Annual Conference in Chicago in a few weeks. It’s cancellation was absolutely necessary, but with it, the math education community lost some powerful voices and words to catapult the emergent humanity of learning mathematics deep into this decade. One of the workshops that was going to be delivered that is explicitly related to the how/why we need to deliver mathematics was going to be given by Mary Kemper.
What you see above is the side that most people see. It’s a pretty impressive side. The picture below is even more impressive.
In 2019, I visited Mary Kemper and her district while I was working for the company Buzzmath(I now work with Amplify and Mathigon). We were about to get a tour of one of her schools in her district. Just two minutes in, she stops and sat down with a student to see what he was doing. Long story short. Our 1 hour tour of the school last more than 2 hours because it was spliced in by many moments like this. Mary talked to everyone who was within 6 feet of her — no, I did not accidentally use that distance. Social distancing is what is needed now. Social encroachment is what will be needed in the future.
Even though she lost the opportunity to present in Chicago, she wrote a beautiful blog, Leading with Kindness, that would have spoken to the salient points of her workshop.
Being isolated from another also should hopefully make us realize how valuable human contact is and how even more fragile life is — every minute of our lives has value to ourselves and to others. So, it should be of little surprise to all of you, especially if you have read even a fraction of my over 100 articles on math/math education, that the mathematics that I was doing for myself and with my kids intersected in simple awe and wonder. It wasn’t about practicing fraction, percents, and decimals. No memory of that will be kept with my kids when I am gone. I have, like all of us, finite time with my kids. I am 55 and my kids just began their teenage years. So, I probably, statistically speaking, might have less of it than many of you.
The mathematics I choose to do with my children will be imaginative and buoyant — and delivered with those qualities.
My go to place for such mathematics has always been Numberphile. Each of the videos on Numberphile adds not only a nugget of mathematical knowledge to my treasure chest, but does so in a manner that warrants the name “Numberphile” — full of communal love and laughter at the sometimes daunting and mysterious world of mathematics.
I came across this video about Merten’s Conjecture, given by Dr. Holly Krieger. It was about prime numbers, so I knew my daughter Raya(11) would be interested, especially since the math involved to understand was definitely in her wheelhouse — assign values of -1, +1, or 0 depending on the prime factors each number has.
What is fascinating is that the conjecture blows up at a number that can’t even be written down because of its enormity. It is in that moment, that Holly Krieger is laughing at the absurdity of this breaking point, laughing at the failure of this conjecture at a mathematical point that can’t even be shown…!
The mathematics that we teach our children should be told with the alacrity and disarming charm of Holly Krieger. The mathematics that we teach our children should be taught with the kindness that Mary Kemper asks from all of us. The mathematics that we teach our children should invoke curiosity and wonder, tiny sparks of mathematical delight that should burn brighter into a future we might not see, but our children should surely must.
After this pandemic subsides, whenever that may be, the vision of mathematics education should have pillars rooted in not just high levels of literacy, but also high levels of aesthetic appreciation. The intertwining of these two cannot and will not occur without teaching mathematics with a humanity rooted in our own kindness and sobering fragility.
Give time to mathematics. Give time to each other.
