Mathematics Education Failed Me: It Turned Out To Be The Most Important Gift In My Life
My kids are my greatest gifts ever. After that, my failures are…
September, 1998. First day of school. I arrived early at Riverdale Collegiate. My new school. The previous year, I was at Western Tech Collegiate — my first year teaching high school. While I graduated from Teacher’s College in 1992, I didn’t land a high school teaching job until 1997(I had worked part-time at a local community college.
The person I was replacing, a physics teacher, had committed suicide.
My first year teaching high school was beyond my dreams. I taught a senior, gifted physics course and Finite mathematics. I helped coach girls softball and boys hockey.
I was also on the Equity committee. The school, Western Tech and Commercial Institute, was beautiful. It was used to film the early days of chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the Queen’s Gambit.
Our school had 50% population of adult students. Some of them were in my class, often holding as many as three jobs while attending school. They added life and perspective that my younger students and I fully appreciated.
That’s why when the Provincial government cut the funding for adult education, resulting in the biggest strike ever in North America — over 100 000 teachers were on strike for two weeks.
Our school lost 40 teachers. Of course, they started from the bottom in terms of seniority.
I was the first one let go. The irony is that getting the job, the school rightfully examined my entire resume/experiences. Losing it was simply based on a seniority number.
From that day on, I hated the teacher’s union and their role in education.
On the picket line, I had a great idea that would not only end the strike, but would be a great way to raise money for The United Way. I suggested that the last day of our strike we go back in the classroom — and every teacher donate their pay to The United Way.
I think I calculated something like $14 million could be donated. We would still have made our point and the goodwill that teachers — especially their union would engender would be powerful. From a pure marketing point of view, it seemed like a genius idea.
My picket captain scoffed at the idea, giving me a response that seemed proportional to my seniority number.
It was at that point that I hated my teacher’s union. I had lost my job — and wouldn’t have if I didn’t belong to such an archaic hiring/firing system.
So another new school it was. I landed here because the person I was replacing — also a physics teacher — was dying of cancer.
Death defined how my high school teaching was born…
That first day in the new school I went to collect my mail in the staff room — an area that is always narrow, and not meant to have long, lingering conversations.
But, that’s exactly what happened, as another new math teacher — Peter Harrison — got an unsolicited earful about the state of mathematics education. I didn’t know who he was — which was a celebrated mathematics teacher in the Province. I just unloaded. Being fresh off of being let go from an amazing school just months before definitely aided my ranting.
In a nutshell. The only thing that made my teaching career bearable was him and all the students I taught — especially those “misfit/slacker” ones that most teachers didn’t want to teach.
The mathematics curriculum that I taught — except for a few courses like Geometry and Discrete and Calculus(before it got ruined) — would eventually be my undoing. I was never going to last. Traditional mathematics education was setting me up for failure to be a classroom teacher — quitting in 2013 was, looking back, an inevitability.
After quitting teaching, a series of failed ideas followed me. I was kicked out a business partnership involving an after-school learning centre — which went on to be very successful. If I told you details, you wouldn’t believe me.
I then had my Right Angle business — going to be the first math store/school in Canada — burn down two weeks before grand opening.
That’s a few lifetimes of setbacks to enter your 50’s. A time when most people are contemplating retirement, I was returning back home to live with my parents. Oh, I was also divorced, so my kids stayed with me there for several years.
My kids and me being back at my parents was one of the first “unsuspecting gifts” that I saw in my life. I got to spend these extra years being with them, and both my kids love for my mother’s cooking was born there.
Soon after, I realized that being given an impoverished lens — one that was scratched up significantly with mathematics education being an unmitigated failure in my books — was a rare gift I was given.
It’s that gift which the universe is now giving in less abstract terms.
The universe has given me the opportunity to help co-organize — become a co-founder — of a mathematics conference that is everything that mathematics education was rarely for me.
The first quote I imediately thought of for anchoring the mission of GMS was one that I have used countless times in my workshops and presentations.
Obsolescence. That’s my goal. Traditional mathematics education is rooted in unchecked anxiety/alienation/trauma. It is rooted in a benign and bland bouillabaisse of topics.
Topics which build curriculum that has no past, present, or future — as there is zero thematic narrative that richly surfs the history of mathematics.
It might as well have been thrown by aliens in a test tube and landed on an uninhabited beach 100 years ago — that’s how much humanizing life is currently in it. Don’t ask me. Ask the students — and it would be a first in mathematics education to ask them anything about the mathematics they are served on a daily basis.
My daughter Raya — 16 — recently wrote an essay that reflected upon that. Here is an excerpt.
My daughter’s experience is the rule, not the exception. But, at least she knows what is missing. The other students don’t. They believe this to be the world of mathematics — cold and competitive, filled with tedium and testing.
Mathematics education is so out of touch with everything. There is no reference to the general state of education — exhaustion from testing, chronic absenteeism, and the resulting toll on mental health.
Mathematics education lives in a hermetically sealed vacuum, purposefully and intentionally impervious to the bleak realities facing students and teachers.
In 2025, it’s reached a nadir by deemphasizing mathematics and prioritizing overbaked pedagogy to peddle the cold gruel.
There’s no math history. There’s no number, graph, or game theory. There’s little attention to student-facing curiosity about beautiful patterns and sacred geometric connections.
The Global Math Summit in Sardinia is a gathering of educators from all over the world with various experiences/intersections with mathematics.
My personal goal for the Summit is to return mathematics back to the Age of the Renaissance, when it was woven with other subjects, interests, and pleasures to illuminate it as subject of interdisciplinary interest, wonder, and fascination.
I want this to be an experience for all students and teachers. I want the GMS to be an equitable, accessible, and scalable gathering that must bring the richest mathematics to the most marginalized people — just like when Italian mathematician Pietro Cataldi, teaching and writing exclusively in Italian(Latin was the academic norm of the time), and disseminating his books freely through monasteries to the poor.
The first Global Math Summit will be in Italy. To honour the legacy of Cataldi as a mathematician — he discovered the sixth and seventh perfect numbers by hand — and as a humanitarian is something that will be tattooed to its mission forever…
It’s time to truly humanize mathematics.
Thank you, iMARK and Sardinia for helping make this happen:)
